The evidence that _Bison antiquus_ moved to Canada is not complete, but it is suggestive. There are accounts of bison horns from Athabasca “nearly twice the length of the Plains’ ones and much straighter.”[19] Ernest Thompson Seton provides the same kind of evidence.[20] The Canadian bison and the Folsom variety seem “suspiciously similar,” says Eiseley. Unfortunately, in 1925, before the bison of Athabasca—the second surviving race, _Bison bison athabascæ_—had been properly measured and observed, _Bison bison_ from the High Plains were brought north to breed with the Canadian variety. Eiseley feels it is a possibility that the Athabascan animals “represented, at least in a mixed form, the last of the Ice Age bison which early man had hunted in the western plains.”[21] If this is true, it means that Folsom man was fully developed in the period before the melting of the glaciers drove his favorite game north to Canada. It means, further, that he or his immediate forebears may have entered the plains 50,000 years ago when a corridor opened through the western ice fields. (See illustration, page 26.)
The Folsom bison may also have gone northeast to the edge of New England. Grasslands extend from the High Plains of the classic Folsom point northeast to Illinois and Indiana, and ancient steppes once ran through Ohio to New York State and probably to New Jersey and southern New England.[22] Antevs suggests that late bands of Folsom men pursued their bison across this area. Certainly they left their cruder form of point in this part of the Middle West and the East.[23] But where, in this area, are the fossils of the extinct bison?
A hundred years ago the French scientist Cuvier, who gave much time to the study of the fossils of extinct mammals, presented the “cataclysmal” explanation of their end. They were destroyed by sudden great geologic changes. To us, perhaps, these changes seem to have ignored certain other animals in a most disquieting way. Cuvier was at a disadvantage, of course, for he was working in a Bible-ridden world which had to accept the Book of Genesis as fact. Even as late as 1887, Henry H. Howorth wrote in _The Mammoth and the Flood_:
These facts ... prove in the first place that a great catastrophe or cataclysm occurred at the close of the Mammoth period, by which that animal, with its companions, were overwhelmed over a very large part of the earth’s surface. Secondly, this cataclysm involved a very wide-spread flood of water, which not only killed the animals but also buried them under continuous beds of loam or gravel. Thirdly, that the same catastrophe was accompanied by a very great and sudden change of climate in Siberia, by which the animals which had previously lived in fairly temperate conditions were frozen in their flesh underground and have remained frozen ever since.[24]