OCR Text |
Show A.X DEALS BLOW TO OUR "CHRTS" Columbus Hard Hit by Its Discovery. . Ethnologists havo always belle$5 that Columbus was only about 200 years behind the first man to reach the Atlantic seaboard. That though the population of the American continent con-tinent started soon after the last Ice age when tribes from the other side of the world crossed Bering strait and filtered slowly southward to Inhabit In-habit a continent the first roaming citizens of the Atlantic seaboard ar rived from the West only a short lead ahead of the man who has credit for finding the New world. But discovery of a primitive stone ax, dug up In Albemarle county, Virginia, Vir-ginia, is serving to upset this theory, in the opinion of officials of the Smithsonian institution, who say that former Ideas of when the .first Inhabitants In-habitants reached the eastern shores of America are unsound. They now believe that man trod Virginia soil something like 2,000 years ago. Students of the races read a running run-ning story In this new ax that Is so old. It was no more than out of the Albemarle county soil that had concealed con-cealed it so long until it began reciting re-citing its tale of age and strange races. Specialists who understand these things say that the primitive ax was chipped out of black disabase rock by some savage American 20 centuries ago and that In time, possibly pos-sibly because of disuse, It became dull and was sharpened again by new and better Informed chipping, possibly some 1,300 years ago. Then it was lost for good so far as the stone ax age was concerned, only to be found by scientists of a new day and age, who knew how to interpret the signs of discoloration and wear and other circumstances to determine age and the part earlier races had to do with the population of this side of the earth. These readers of signs leave no point for layman argument They just move back population history his-tory and we agree that that is that But It does lay a burden on Columbus. Colum-bus. He thought, or may have thought had he lived long enough, that he missed virgin discovery by only 200 years. And we know onJ;he evidence of present-day science that he missed It ten times 200. St Loula Globe-Democrat |