Red Earth, White Lies by Vine Deloria Jr

Author:Vine Deloria, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
Published: 1997-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

7

Creatures Their Own Size

THE GREAT SCIENTIFIC FALLACY OF “OVERKILL” should have fallen of its own inconsistency decades ago, particularly in view of Arthur Jelinek’s admission that we simply do not, as a rule, find ancient man or his artifacts associated with the fossils of extinct herbivores. There are, of course, some Folsom and Clovis sites which contain mammoth remains, but it is unclear whether the human artifacts that are found there belong with these animal parts in many of the locations. Martin and his colleagues simply avoid any discussion of the fate of some 500,000 mammoths and the hundreds of thousands of crushed and splintered skeletons in Siberia and the Alaskan muck when ruminating on the fate of Pleistocene megafauna.

Another way to explain the extinction of the megafauna does exist, and we have seen that several Indian accounts suggest knowledge of and involvement with mammoths and other Pleistocene megafauna. If we were to simply cite these Indian traditions as evidence that some individual megafauna survived after the Ice Age and lingered on into nearly contemporary times, we would verify scientific interpretations but not add anything new to human knowledge. It would be better if new data could be obtained from the Indian memories.

Scientific knowledge progresses very slowly because people in science are reluctant to change any of their ideas until the evidence for new interpretations of data is so compelling as to make them seem foolish maintaining the outmoded doctrines. The Indian accounts of megafauna, while nebulous in terms of any measurable chronological scheme for dating, do contain considerable information on the environmental conditions that existed when these mammals were seen in North America by human beings. We will now turn to that additional information and try to determine what it tells us.

In chapter 5 I cited James Wright’s report to John Bartram about Bartram’s request that Wright secure bones from the Big Bone Lick in Kentucky. Radiocarbon dates for some of the bones and vegetal material recovered here are measured at 10,600 plus or minus 250 years. It does not seem possible that the bones could be that old. Could they have been lying on or near the surface for that period of time and not have disintegrated long ago? We should conclude, based on common sense, that the bones were reasonably fresh in the1760s.

So let us examine the salient points that can be determined from the Delaware tradition. In order, the information that we can obtain from the Wright report is as follows:

1. Five reasonably complete skeletons, placed in a circle with heads pointing toward a common center.

2. Enormous bones with tusks ten or twelve feet long.

3. No such creatures had ever been seen alive by the Indians.

4. Legend said these creatures were once hunted by men of gigantic stature.

5. These giant men died before the demise of the animals.

6. “God” had destroyed the megafauna to protect the present race of Indians.

7. By implication, the Indians feared these creatures.

The information about past conditions and events contemporaneous with the mammoths that is interesting here

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