With the Diggers

There follows a summary of discoveries in archeology and paleontology since last recorded in TIME (Dec. 31, Jan. 7).

United States. The greatest sensation of the year in human fossils came to light on the Rancho Cunajo, near Los Angeles, Calif. A construction company, building a sewer, turned up a petrified skull and bone fragments of five human frames in a sand pit 23 feet below the surface. The strata are of the Pleistocene age, antedating the last great ice age, which ended at least 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. Several trained scientists happened to be near, including Dr. John C. Merriam, President of the Carnegie Institution; Dr. Robert T. Hill, geologist; Dr. William A. Bryan, Director of the Los Angeles Museum; Dr. Chester Stock, of the department of paleontology, University of California. Their reports seem to indicate that the remains are not only the oldest of the prehistoric man in America, but that they belong to the "true men," i.e., contemporaries and even more advanced in development than the Cro-Magnon race of Western Europe, 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, whom Henry Fairfield Osborn declares to have been the mental equals of college men of today. The Los Angeles finds, named the Haverty group in honor of the Irish contractor who found them, have brain cases as large as modern men; their last molar ("wisdom") teeth are underdeveloped as in civilized men; their stature was extraordinary, reaching seven feet in height.

It has long been held with fair unanimity among scientists, that the birthplace of genuine man was probably in southeastern Asia, or somewhere on a belt stretching northwest to England. No traces of really ancient humans had been found in America, and the Western Hemisphere was believed to have been uninhabited by men until people from Asia, over the Bering Strait, by Mongoloid stock, ancestors of the Eskimo and Indians. Many supposedly ice-age human remains in the U. S., when closely investigated, have turned out to be comparatively recent Indians. This is true of the skeletons discovered last year on the La Brea ranch, near Santa Barbara, Calif. Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, of the Smithsonian Institution, recently punctured all discoveries hitherto as not more than 5,000 years old. A human deposit of the late glacial period, found near Trenton, N. J., however, is considered genuine by many paleontologists. Dr. Hill and his colleagues are men of excellent standing. The location of the fossils might be due to slides of more recent strata, but Dr. Hill says there is no possibility of such geologic intrusion there, as there was at Santa Barbara. Drs. F. W. Hodge, W. K. Gregory and Clark Wissler, leading anthropologists and paleontologists of New York, are inclined to give credence ito the reports. If, therefore, further investigation confirms them, much of our present knowledge of prehistoric man will have to be rewritten.

P: In Fresno County, Calif., remains of a tribe of Indians were discovered, the shape and condition of whose teeth indicated that they were vegetarians, living on grass and herbs.

P: In the Salmon River country, south of Lewiston, Idaho, a skeleton of a woman more than eight feet in height was discovered in a cliff. This also seemed to belong to an herbivorous race. Scientists are reserved in their judgment until it has been examined by Smithsonian experts.

P: A mastodon tooth in a quarry near Sweetwater, Nevada.

P: An extinct fossil plant perhaps a hundred million years old--the cycad, similar to the non-flowering sage palms --in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

P: Cliff-dwellings dating from 2,000-4,000 B. C., along the San Juan River, N. M. Earl H. Morris and his wife, attached to the Archer M. Huntington Southwest Fund Expedition, brought home several thousand relics from a seven years' search of the dwellings.

Central America. A great city of the first Mayan empire, lying miles inland in the almost impenetrable jungle of British Honduras, has been discovered by an expedition under British auspices, led by Prof. Mitchell Hedges and Dr. Gann, from a base at Belize. The ruins cover hundreds of acres and are inscribed with Mayan hieroglyphics. The buildings, composed of huge monoliths, include a massive pyramid more than 300 feet high. Only meagre second-hand reports have yet been received.

P:Tulane University (New Orleans) established a department of "Middle American Research," and is raising an endowment fund of $500,000 for the Study of Mayan archeology and history. The department will be headed by Dr. William Gates, President of the Maya Society, and Director of Archeology for the Guatemala Government, who is perhaps the best-informed American scholar in this field.

(Next week TIME will chronicle recent archeological progress in the Old World.)