Wilson’s hand axes and Renaud’s artifacts were attacked in the same manner. W. H. Holmes of the Bureau of American Ethnology had little trouble in convincing the scientific public that Wilson’s array of casually collected material came from quarries and workshops of the Indian and were cores from which he had struck flakes to make points or scrapers. The critics of Renaud’s artifacts pointed to certain similar objects found less plentifully in late camp sites on the Plains, and suggested that Renaud’s artifacts might be merely the blanks and rejects of a relatively recent stone industry.[64] Many of the finds are certainly not finished implements, and the date of the Black’s Fork culture is still problematical; but among Renaud’s material there are hand axes and scrapers that bear comparison with the cruder Chellean and Acheulean work. There are also chopping tools of Asiatic and African pattern, made from edged pebbles that have been deliberately chipped, first from one side, then from the other.
Flints of Abbevillian and Acheulean types—whether true artifacts or rejects—have been recorded by Kirk Bryan at Cerro Pedernal in New Mexico.[65] At Lake Mohave in the Pinto Basin, Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Campbell have found points of a Mousterian shape and scrapers suggestive of the Aurignacian. They are so crude, however, that they seem more like the “elementary ideas” which, as Bastian claimed, could be the product of primitive man anywhere. In Texas, there are many tools so well developed and so close to Acheulean forms that they cannot be turned aside as either “elementary ideas” or blanks and rejects. These are the hand axes which Sayles and other archaeologists have found.[66]
Besides the skull that de Terra found with the fossils of elephants in Mexico, there are artifacts south of the border which reinforce the argument for early man. They are more important than the chance resemblance to a Folsom point which Junius Bird found with sloth bones in a cave in southern Chile, or the Eden-like point which has turned up in Venezuela.[67]
During de Terra’s studies of the dry lake beds of the Valley of Mexico and the glacial moraines on the surrounding mountains—studies which began late in 1945—he discovered stone tools in two culture levels. These levels fall in two pluvial periods just before and just after the end of the Great Ice Age.