The date of Folsom man is uncertain. Some believe he lived during the last years of the Great Ice Age. Some place him a little later than the melting of the glaciers. The earliest radiocarbon date yet determined for Folsom is from the Lindenmeier site, where bits of charcoal provided a date of 10,780 ± 375 years.[18] It took about 700 man-hours of tedious and painstaking work to locate and recover this charcoal. Elsewhere, at such Texas sites as Blackwater Draw, Lubbock, and Scharbauer, direct or indirect dates indicate a survival of the Folsom culture until about 9,000 years ago.
One thing is certain: the Folsom point won the battle for early man in the Americas because it proved that he or his predecessors had hunted extinct bison, camels, mammoths, peccaries, and horses. Hitherto every find of human artifacts with fossils had been thrown out of court on the argument that the artifacts might be intrusive. That charge could not be leveled at two of these unique Folsom points because they were found in a unique and decisive position—one between the ribs of an animal and the other penetrating the channel of the spinal cord.
Some of the opponents of early man were not convinced. They shifted the argument. Man was early, the Hrdličkas admitted, but not so very early, because the bison and the elephant were late. More of that in a later chapter. Meantime, it is worth noting that a humble invertebrate, a mollusk, found in the Clovis dig, suggests that the Folsom-bearing deposits were glacial.[19]
[Illustration: BURIALS IN THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW
_Disposal of the dead by exposure, as practiced among hunting tribes. (After Sollas, 1911.)_]
You may ask why we have not found Folsom man himself. Howard has pointed out that early man, as a migrant hunter, would probably have followed much the same customs as our Plains Indians in the disposal of his dead. He would have left the bodies exposed on scaffolds or in trees, or he would have cremated them. “Under such circumstances,” Howard writes, “it would be the merest chance to come across a skeleton of Folsom man anywhere in the enormous area of our Great Plains country. It would be even more remarkable to recognize him as such, unless he had a Folsom point in his hand or was holding an elephant by the tail.”[20]