Word: fossils
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...find was made near Folsom, N. M., in 1926. The weapons were intermingled with the bones of long-extinct bison. Skeptical anthropologists first wrote off this association as accidental. Then Jesse Dade Figgins of Colorado, one of the Folsom pioneers, found two points actually between the ribs of a fossil bison. He left the exhibit undisturbed in the ground, summoned anthropologists to come and look. They did, and this time agreed that the bone-&-weapon association was authentic. The weapons were judged to be 15,000 or more years...
...Europe, Asia and Africa have been found fossil men hundreds of thousands of years old-perhaps even a million years old. But not in North America. It seems likely that the first North Americans were Asiatics who crossed a land bridge which once existed between Siberia and Alaska. Fifteen years ago it was generally believed that this migration occurred very late in the Stone Age, only 4,000 or 5,000 years ago, perhaps even later. Claims of greater antiquity were inexorably demolished, and largely through the efforts of one man-famed, Bohemian-born Ales Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian Institution...
...recent years things have got tougher for Horatius Hrdlicka. In 1931 the University of Minnesota's Dr. Albert Ernest Jenks investigated a human fossil turned up by a roadscraper. After long study he pronounced it to be that of a 15-year-old girl who had fallen or been thrown into a Glacial Age lake; he put her age at 20,000 years. Dr. Hrdlicka said No. He admitted that she had surprisingly big teeth, but could find no significant anthropological difference between her and recent Indians, did not seem to care about the geological evidence...
...Hrdlicka still said No. Commentator Hooton changed his metaphor: "It now begins to appear that the perennial heroism of one Dutch boy at the dyke is likely to prove insufficient to stop the in creasing trickles of fossil man through the geological defenses...
...most ancient fossil humans known are Sinanthropus pekinensis, the old man of China, and Pithecanthropus erectus, the ape man of Java. Their ages have been variously put at 400,000 to 1,000,000 years. First Pithecanthropus relics were found in Java by a Dutchman, Eugene Dubois, in 1892. First good Sinanthropus specimen was discovered in the Choukoutien caves near Peking...