Diggers

Slowly the diggers are piecing together a picture of what America was like in its earliest history. But the more they dig, the more complex the picture seems to look. Once the experts thought that the Basketmakers of the Southwest were the first U.S. inhabitants. But apparently the country was already full of crude, prowling citizens soon after the glaciers melted (about 15,000 B.C.).

A camp site of one of the early tribes has now come to light in Wyoming. In 1939 Jimmy Allen, sheet-metal worker and amateur archeologist of Cody, found an arrowhead near a creek bank. He made a note of the place, but did not return until the summer of last year, when he found an odd-looking bone sticking out of the dry dirt. He confided in Dr. Glenn L. Jepsen, Princeton professor of paleontology, who was deep in some digging of his own at Polecat Bench a few miles away. The professor was delighted: old bones associated with arrowheads are glad tidings for diggers.

This summer, Professor Jepsen went back to Wyoming with a nine-man task force which enthusiastically tore into the site with little awls and whisk brooms. Just below the surface they found a mass of man-mangled buffalo bones with the ends broken off (a handy way to get at the marrow). With the bones were arrowheads and spearheads made by ancient nomads whom diggers call Yuma Man.

Not much is known about Yuma Man, for no Yuma skeleton has yet been found. He may or may not have been an ancestor of modern Indians. He made beautiful and characteristic stone weapons, and seems to have lived not long after the glacial period. But no one knows what his clothes or shelters were like. He was certainly no stickler for public sanitation. Jumbled together on 625 square feet of ground were bones of more than 40 buffalo. Among them were fire sites and stone chips flaked off in making new weapons. Apparently Yuma Man, unmindful of smells and flies, had used the spot as a combination butchering place, kitchen, dining room, workshop and dump.

Jepsen & Co. were surprised to find no buffalo skulls or horns. Their absence may indicate that Yuma Man felt faint stirrings of art. Perhaps he took the skulls and horns to another place for decorative (or religious) purposes.

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