Before nineteenth century science began to talk of glacial man as a possible and provable fact, there was little or no churchly antagonism. The religious had long shown a fondness for what they called antiquarianism. To find ancient things did no violence to the Bible. Adam was still the first man, and any descendant of his who left stone tools about or who carved mysterious signs on rocks was merely “antediluvian”: he had simply missed the boat. In 1690 the Reverend Cotton Mather called the carvings on Dighton Rock in Massachusetts “the wonderful works of God,” and, before those signs were proved to be of sixteenth century origin, more than 600 books and articles had been written about them. To Mather the fossils of extinct mammals proved the validity of the Bible. “There were giants in the earth in those days.” In 1712 he described the “17-foot thighbone” and the four-pound tooth of a mastodon.[1]
In this spirit of sweet reasonableness the pursuit of early man went forward for one hundred and fifty years. When the Dutch traveler Peter Kalm wrote in 1772 of certain curious discoveries in New Jersey, he had no idea that he had come on something which, N. C. Nelson was to declare, “hinted strongly of ‘Quaternary age.’”[2] Though the Mound Builders seemed much more ancient to General Rufus Putnam than they now seem to us, they were still post-Adamites when he mapped the prehistoric earthworks of Marietta, Ohio, in 1788. We doubt that Thomas Jefferson worried one way or the other about biblical sanction when he assumed the role of first archaeologist of America by excavating a Virginia mound in 1784, and reporting on it in his _Notes on Virginia_. Like another deist, Voltaire, he suggested that the origins of the American Indians might be determined by comparing their various languages with the languages of Asiatic peoples.
There was still no conflict between religion and the science of man when word came from Missouri in 1838 of the first linking of the fossils of extinct animals with signs of human activity. “Dr.” A. C. Koch, a German who collected fossils and sold them to museums, dug up the bones of a mastodon. Further, Koch found evidence of fire among the bones, and also numerous stones which seemed to have been carried to the spot and thrown at the unhappy animal as it stood bogged in a swamp. Two years later, in the same state, Koch came upon another mastodon as well as a spear point lying beneath it. From a chain of descriptions of the weapon it may be that Koch found the first of those unique fluted spear points that were to turn up ninety years later among the fossils of extinct bison and mammoths.[3]