FIRST FOLSOM POINT DISCOVERED BY COWBOY IN NEW MEXICO GULLY
 

A negro cowboy was riding a jaded pony up a deep gully in northern New Mexico, one spring day in 1926. He was looking strayed cattle, but whitened bones protruding from the cut bank attracted his attention. They were twenty feet below the surface - too deep to be cow or horse bones, perhaps too deep even for buffalo skeletons to be buried.

He dismounted and pecked at the remains with his knife. To his surprise he uncovered a piece of flint, then another and another. Obviously, they had been worked by the hand of man, but they were different from any arrowheads he had ever seen before. These weren't notched, and they had shallow channels running up the middle on either side. And the bones among which he found these flints weren't familiar either. They were huge and chalklike.

Word of the discovery eventually got to Dr. J.D. Figgins, of the Colorado Museum of Natural History, in Denver. He and other skeptical, but very much interested scientists, hurried to the site. They discovered that the bones were made of the "Taylor's" straight-horned bison, animals that had not lived for 10,000 years!

What has happened since Dr. Figgins' expedition to the arroyo near Folsom, New Mexico, has caused anthropologists to rewrite the story of man in the New World. It is fascinatingly told in "The Lost Americans," by Dr. Frank C. Hibben, of the University of New Mexico. Now it is reasonably well established that man came to North American from Asia, perhaps twenty or more thousand years ago, furtively hunting the animals that lived on the lush vegetation growing on the melting side of retreating glaciers. Gradually he moved south, diverted from the coast by rugged country to a route east of the Rocky Mountains.

The Folsom man was not the first of the waves of migration that crossed the Bering Straits. Today only fifty-six miles of water separate Asia from Alaska there; in ancient times it was much less. There may even have been a complete land bridge in the early post-glacial period. If the ice of the Antarctic glacial cap were distributed evenly over the planet, it would be 120 feet thick. It is conceivable, therefore, that with much of the world's moisture heaped up as ice in glacial times, the oceans would have been shallower than at present.

Evidence has been found in New Mexico of the so-called Sandia man, who was an earlier immigrant to North America than the Johnny-come-lately Mr. Folsom. There may have been others, for the testimony is not complete. Anthropologists are slowly but steadily piecing together the story.

Dr. Hibben led an expedition to Alaska which discovered one "missing link" in the form of a Folsom point. Others have been reported down the eastern side of the Rockies, which has led one observer to report that the Alcan Highway, built across Canada to Alaska during the war, followed the oldest travelled route on the continent. The discovery of a Folsom point in the Black Hills is another fragment of evidence that fits into the puzzle.