Early American

In 1937 a University of New Mexico student chanced upon some provocative remains in a cave at Sandia, about 15 miles outside Albuquerque. His anthropology professor, Frank Cummings Hibben, examined the cave and got pretty excited himself. On the cave's lowest level, Hibben's party found fragments of the tusk of a Pleistocene mammoth, along with a few ancient flint spearheads.

Hibben thought the remains had been left by an ancient human hunter, who had dragged the beast's carcass into the cave. He christened him Sandia Man. He estimated that Sandia Man was of an even earlier generation than the 10,000-year-old Folsom Man, whose traces were first found in Folsom, N.Mex. in 1925--and, later, on a higher level of Sandia Cave. But other scientists treated the findings with skepticism. There was no proof, they said, that Folsom Man had any ancestors on the American continent.

Last week Hibben got some strong support. At his request, University of Michigan scientists had put the tusk fragments through their new radioactive carbon dating apparatus. This machinery, with the help of a Geiger counter, samples the amount of Carbon 14 in the tested material, assessing its age by the number of counts it makes. Their findings: the tusk is 20,000 years old. By implication, so is Sandia Man.

This is twice as old as the proved age of his next-door neighbor, the primitive man from Folsom. Said Anthropologist Hibben: "This is not geological guesswork. It's an exact, mathematical method of dating. A great many skeptics did not believe man existed in the New World prior to 10,000 years ago. We now have incontrovertible proof."

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