Fossils, Bones

A week ago, TIME summarized recent archeological findings in Asia, Africa, Europe. Herewith is given a chronicle of latest diggings in the Americas.

South America. A rich deposit of dinosaur fossils was discovered along the Rio Chico in the Chubut Territory of Patagonia, by a party from the Field Museum, Chicago, under Professor Elmer S. Riggs.

Professor Oliver Farrington, also of the Field Museum, found fossilized bones of a fantastic toadlike creature, probably the extinct megatherium, in the state of Bahia, Brazil. The animal when alive weighed 500 pounds, was twelve feet long and two feet wide, squatted on short thick hind legs and had long, sharp teeth.

Central America. The earliest dates in New World history were definitely determined and the chronology of the Mayan calendar solved by Dr. Herbert J. Spinden, of the Peabody Museum, Harvard. The historical first day of the Mayas was Aug. 6,613 B. C. (by our calendar), from which point a numerical record of elapsed days was kept and astronomical events were recorded accurately. On Dec. 10,580 B. C., the perfected calendar was formally inaugurated and functioned without loss of a single day until the Mayan records were destroyed by the Spanish Inquisition in Yucatan, in 1561 A. D. These dates, positively fixed by inscriptions in the Mayan city of Copan, in western Honduras, were probably set by one man, an unknown mathematical and astronomical genius who was unquestionably one of the greatest scientists of all time. The Mayas set the beginning of the world in 3373 B. C., counting back from their fixed date seven cycles of 144,000 days each. The perfection of the Mayan calendar required the invention of a symbol for zero, figures for whole numbers and place-value notation, by which the position of a figure determines its value on a modified decimal multiple system with a base of 20. Such a system; was unknown to the Greeks and Romans and was not used in Western Europe until introduced by the Arabs in the 12th Century. Dr. Spinden has worked out a day-by-day correlation between Mayan and Gregorian calendars showing that while the Mayas did not interpolate leap-year days in their calendar year of 365 days, they allowed for them, and their calculations were correct, while our present calendar is a day out in about 3300 years.

Continued explorations at Copan and Quirigua in Guatemala and Honduras show that the southern branch of the Maya civilization not only antedated the Yucatan development by more than 1,000 years, but was superior culturally and artistically.

United States. First reports of the great antiquity of human skulls unearthed in the Burton Mound near Santa Barbara, Calif., by Dr. John P. Harrington, ethnologist and language expert of the Smithsonian Institution, have been found to be greatly overestimated. Dr. Harring- ton is not an expert in physical anthropology and geology, and a jury of foremost anthropologists, including Dr. Jesse W. Fewkes, Dr. Ales Hrdlicka and Dr. Clark Wissler, has ascribed the remains to a later period than that of the Neanderthal man (30,000 to 50,000 years ago), which they were first claimed to antedate. It is more likely that they represent a link between the Asiatic tribes which first migrated to North America and later Indian stocks, and are perhaps 10,000 years old. At other spots on the Santa Barbara beach was found the skeleton of a petrified whale, 35 feet long, with vertebrae, teeth, ribs and flapper bones plainly traceable. Fossils of a mastodon and an elephant of a later era were also found.

Other recent American finds

P: A bed of fossil fish including the six-foot head of a Pipanichthys, which attained a length of 30 feet, and is ascribed to the Devonian period, probably 30,000,000 years ago, was found in shale near Cleveland. At that time the interior basin of North America was probably covered by an ocean.

P: A fossil skull of a marsupial in the Cretaceous strata of central Kansas.

P: Skeleton of a prehistoric man in Siskiyou County, Calif.

P: Shell mounds near St. Petersburg, Fla., indicative of prehistoric inhabitants.

P: Bottoms of three dugout Indian canoes perhaps thousands of years old, embedded in peat near Butler, N. J.

P: Five skeletons of remote age were found in sitting position in excavating for a new road near Rochester, N. Y. They are believed to be a race of Eskimo which preceded the Iroquois, who have never before been found buried in such positions.