In Quest of Glacial Man Reprint and Circular Series of the National Research Council (1931) / Chapter Skim
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A Plan of Cooperation Between Excavators and the Representatives of the Sciences of Man and of the Earth
A Plan of Cooperation Between Excavators and the Representatives of the Sciences of Man and of the Earth
Pages 1-20
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Used by permission of the American Museum of Natural History. over a million years, and so also may the famous fragments of lava Man (Pithecanthropus erectus)
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, during the successive glaciations that swept down in enormous ice sheets from Northwest Canada and from Labrador, or well after the last ice sheet had melted and delivered its roaring waters to such great river channels as the Mississippi system, the Connecticut, and the Susquehanna. Our abundant Indian cultures, as we novv' know them, belong to a much later period.
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the recovery of very remote human remains, on the other hand, it is necessary to relate the occasional fossil or the chipped flint to the geological time from which it came. That is because the date of deposit will usually be recoverable only in terms of succeeding changes in rock formation, in deposition of
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But the geological dating is fundamental; and since the earth is too vast to be scrutinized in detail by men of science, the primary cooperation must be arranged between the geologist and those who extensively excavate for commercial and other purposes. Now it was this urgent demand for an intelligent and generous cooperation that induced the National Research Council to arrange a Conference on the Discovery and Preservation of Pleistocene Man, and to invite to it geologists and other representatives of the sciences of earth and of man, as well as representative engineers, railway executives, and commercial excavators, to serve as a focus of information and execution among those who actually remove rock, sand, gravel and soil.
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Arthur Keith, Chairman, Division of Geology and Geography, National Research Council. GEOLOGICAL HISTORY; THE GREAT ICE SHEETS OF EUROPE AND AMERICA Most of us probably think of the glacial period, or Pleistocene epoch, as a thing of the past, as having ended ten or twenty thousand years ago; yet
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Used by permission of the Onlted States Geologlca1 Survey. there are thousands of monntaln glaciers, the Antarctic is even now shrouded in about i>000,000 square miles of ice, and the ice cap on GreenIap]
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Animals that preceded the Pleistocene have left their remains in abundance in the Bad Lands southeast of the Black Hills of South Dakota. Many investigators have studied these mammalian deposits, have laboriously gathered and patiently prepared their embedded fossils for observation, and have from the beginning cooperated in deciphering and interpreting their marvelous history.
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The widening of a highway resulted in the chance discovery of one of the richest Mousterian rock shelters in all Europe, La Quina with 'its skeletal remains of Neanderthal man. (Compare Figure 5.)
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If all the FIGURE 5. Les Eyzies, Abri du Chateau, where an ancient rock shelter was discovered beneath the ruins of an old chateau, now restored as a branch of the national museum.
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lTossil remains of some sixty species of extinct animals were obtained from the locality and in these caverns. Both the geologic facts and the fossil mammals testify in no uncertain way that this fauna antedates the Mid-Pleistocene and is not later than the Lower Pleistocene.
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In spite of the enormous antiquity of the Peking Man, as measured by the brief span of human life, we must realize that even the men of the Lower Pleistocene times belonged only to an age which was but as yesterday compared to the vast evolutionary history of the human race before it attained human status. In a striking chart, Professor Osborn shows a graphic summary of the history of vertebrate life in the Gobi desert region so far as discovered.
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. Used by permission of the American Museum of Natural History.
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In the crevices there may be, under the loess or the glacial deposits, the remains of man's occupation. Fourth, the caves, caverns and rock shelters along the major drainage lines offer promising places for search.
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The best area to date human remains as of Nebraskan or Kansan age (the oldest and next oldest glacial periods) , if such be found, would be in places in Iowa and adjacent parts of neighboring states, where one or both of the very old tillsheets can be surely identified.
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With regard to plans for further procedure, I should say, after reading one of the reports of the committee on State Archaeological Surveys of the National Research Council, that we already have a sort of model organization upon which to found our work of search for Pleistocene Man.-Paul S Martin, Field Museum of Natural History.
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They direct the work of the contractor. There would be a tremendous army available for the work if you enlisted them; and since this lost primitive man is a rare bird, you will need an especially large army to find him.
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Paul Railway near Rhodes Iowa, showing levels of glacial drift and loess. Courtesy of W
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Paul S Martin Preservation of Indian Cultures in the Middle West.
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Ralph Linton, Professor of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, Madison. George Grant MacCurdy, Curator of Archaeology, Peabody Museum, Yale University; Director, American School of Prehistoric Research in Europe, New Haven.
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Frank G Sheets, Chief Engineer, State Highway Department, Springfield, Illinois.
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