Word: hrdlicka
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...Scattered fossils of individuals-notably the famed "Minnesota Maid" who apparently fell or was thrown into a Glacial Period lake -have been dated as having lived 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. But even this modest antiquity has been denied by the Smithsonian Institution's doughty Ales Hrdlicka. Until recently the earliest known American "culture" was that of mysterious Folsom Man, whose first tools and campsites were encountered near Folsom, N. Mex. No remains of the man himself were found...
Even tougher for Hrdlicka are those mysterious creatures called the Folsom men, whose skeletons have never been found, but whose tools have turned up in abundance. "Folsom points" are weapons shaped like spearheads, with shallow grooves flaked out on each side. First Folsom 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...
...more recently discovered Folsom site in Colorado, the Lindenmeier site, .appeared on geological evidence to be even older. A point was found there actually imbedded in a bison vertebra. Dr. Frank Harold Hanna Roberts Jr., of Dr. Hrdlicka's own Smithsonian Institution, put its age at 20,000 years...
...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...
...Hrdlicka was still not ready to give up. "It's a delusion," exclaimed he. "It does not amount to a scientific demonstration. There are many things that look like [sic] and many things that do not look like, but there is no proof. The geology of the earth is not like writing or even hieroglyphics -it is vague and indecisive. ... I have stopped arguing." He was willing to concede man in North America 7,000 or 8,000 years-perhaps even 10,000-but no more...