The countryside around Folsom, New Mexico, is possessed of an air of primeval antiquity. Ragged hills and mesas rise wild to the west and north. Eastward lies a sloping, undulating plain, its contours engraved in hardened lava from prehistoric eruptions. Southward lies Mount Capulin, the mortal remains of a volcano. Outcroppings of lava rock, splashed with varicolored lichens and crowned with evergreens, lend an eerie texture to the grassy valleys.

But for the village and a few roads and isolated houses, this might be some landscape from the dawn of time. It seems fitting, then, that such a setting should have yielded the first evidence of the earliest human presence in North America—and the first evidence of the origins of herding and ranching as outgrowths of hunting.

The big discovery occurred outside the provinces of formal, academic science, which was typically slow on the uptake once alerted.

The discoverer was George McJunken, a former slave who had lived in Amarillo, central city of the Texas Panhandle, before he became foreman of the XYZ Ranch, west of Folsom. Self-educated and adventurous, McJunken made a pastime of collecting unusual mineral formations, Indian artifacts and fossils.

In 1895, McJunken found a huge number of massive bones, buried deep in an arroyo eight miles west of Folsom. For years, McJunken tried to persuade learnéd men to visit the site—to no avail.

McJunken died a quarter-century later, unfulfilled in his quest for scientific validation but certain that, someday, someone would pick up where he had left off. In 1925, a settler at Raton, New Mexico, named Carl Schwachheim, rediscovered the Folsom bones. Swachheim informed Dr. Jesse D. Figgins, chief curator of the Colorado Museum of Natural History. Figgins brought an excavation crew from Denver the following year.

Lying at depths ranging from four to thirteen feet were the skeletons of twenty-three gigantic bison, of a species extinct for thousands of years.

But a tinier revelation from the dig proved the most telling: Early in the excavation, two fragments of flint—corresponding with flint from the Alibates Quarries north of Amarillo—had been found in the dirt. A third such piece was found in hard clay next to a bison’s rib-cage. A block from this section was taken intact to Denver, where it was found that one chip fitted another fragment to form a spear-point. The chance discovery offered irrefutable evidence of mankind’s presence in Ice Age America.

Now, the greater body of scientific opinion had solidified around the thesis that man did not appear upon this continent until less than 3,000 years ago. The savants were loath to depart from this dogma, and never mind the weight of evidence. The key difference between the set-in-their ways majority of academics and such adventurous, maverick civilians as George McJunken is closely akin to the difference between the professionals who built R.M.S. Titanic and the amateurs who built the Ark. But we digress. In any event, the Scientific Establishment long insisted that the association of human artifacts and extinct beasts resulted from materials of widely separated origins becoming mixed through erosion and natural settlement of the earth.

A second year of the investigation at Folsom would shake the bedrock of Conventional Wisdom. From his influential base of operations at Denver, Dr. Figgins pressed colleagues to visit the site. Three such men found additional imbedded flint-points and announced their support of the emerging theory.

The large number of skeletons indicates that the first humans in North America also were the first ranchers—or more to the point, hunters who developed the practice of herding as a means of trapping and slaughtering en masse. The first livestock, in turn, would have been the mighty herds of bison, to say nothing of the primitive elephants that had roamed the region.

The site proved to have served as a prehistoric corral, which doubled as a slaughterhouse in the paleo-IndiansÂ’ efficient prototype for a roundup.

A large number of hunters had surrounded the animals in a small gulch. The tailbones were missing—an indication that the bison had been flayed, if not filéted. The nineteen flint-points that eventually came to light at Folsom proved distinctive, unlike any known previously and differing even more strikingly from those produced by any tribal cultures of times more recent.

The Folsom Points, as they have come to be known, are somewhat leaf-shaped. The widest portion occurs at the midsection, rather than at the base. The edges are delicately retouched by pressure-flaking or grinding. Most are fluted by long channels on each face; these run almost the length of the point and give it a hollow-ground effect. The purpose of the flutes may have been to facilitate hafting, or to lighten the weight, or to serve as blood-gutters—or perhaps just to display craftsmanship. The bases are concave.

Well after the McJunken discovery but shortly before the Folsom breakthrough, an even more spectacular find of Folsom-type materials was made in 1924 by a family named Coffin on the Lindenmeier Ranch near Fort Collins, Colorado. For ten years, despite the scientific attention being paid to Folsom, the Coffins were unable to interest scientists in this discovery. The location finally received an inspection from Frank H.H. Roberts, Jr., of the Bureau of American Ethnology, who recognized its value. In five years of excavation, thousands of stone implements and carved bone tools were found in association with the remains of prehistoric livestock—camels, bison, and elephants. Most of what we know about Folsom Man was learned from this valley, which contained both campsites and herding-and-slaughter sites in a striking anticipation of ranch-style efficiency.

Folsom artifacts have continued all along to turn up in many parts of the continent, as far north as Montana and as far south as Uvalde County in Texas. Most of the important finds are, however, in the High Plains region. The first to be carbon-dated for age were at Yellow House Draw, near Lubbock. They revealed an age of 9,883 years, plus-or-minus three hundred-fifty—apparently an average date for the Folsom Culture.

Stone artifacts pre-dating the Folsoms by perhaps twenty centuries were found in 1932 at Blackwater Draw, near Portales, New Mexico. This once-marshy region had known a heavy population of big-game animals. The spear-points were less delicately made than the Folsoms, with only a slight fluting. They lay in association with the bones of prehistoric elephants—mammoths, that is—and other long-vanished beasts. This culture bears the name of Clovis and also is known as Llano, or Plains. It apparently centered upon New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Texas (many of the points are of Alibates flint) and is generally believed the oldest human culture yet discovered in North America. There are rivals for the distinction, however.

Another pre-Folsom hunter-and-herder was Sandia Man, whose artifacts have been found in limestone caverns in the Sandia and Manzano Mountains, northeast of Albuquerque. The society may have ranged into Texas—as suggested by a skeleton found in 1953 on a ranch near Midland. Some scientists believe the skull, a markedly narrow one resembling that of a modern-day Indian, is that of a contemporary of Clovis Man; others have questioned its authenticity.

Discoveries continue apace, and much more is known about the Ice Age hunters than might be supposed. A vivid picture emerges of life among the earliest hunters who defined the basic concepts of ranching.

It is all but certain that the first Americans came from Asia. They were not ape-like or subhuman in any way, but were human—fully the physical equal of the modern-day inhabitants of this continent. In order to have survived in a world hostile to all but the hardiest forms of life, they must have possessed a high degree of intelligence, agility, craft, strength, and daring.

Most scientists believe these early settlers were of a Mongolian strain from Eastern Asia and that their lineage endures in many of todayÂ’s American Indians. Others theorize that the first Americans may have been of the Ainu, the hairy people who inhabited the Japanese Archipelago.

Whatever their origins, they may have arrived all of 30,000 years ago. The most ancient North American cultures now known are less than 12,000 years old, but in Mexico the earth has yielded evidence of men who may have lived there twice as long ago. If the migration theory is correct, then the ancients of Mexico must have passed through North America—centuries, if not eons, earlier.

The crossing from Asia probably was made via a land bridge at the Bering Strait. During the last Ice Age, beginning about a million years ago and lasting until geologically recent times, much of the earth was covered by glaciers. So much of the sea was locked in ice during glacial periods that ocean levels were perhaps three hundred feet lower than they are now. The Bering Strait effectively joined Siberia with Alaska for ages. (Today, the Bering Strait can be crossed on waters scarcely deeper than twenty-five fathoms—about one hundred-fifty feet.)

And there are bound to have been many migrations over a great span of time, probably involving many human types. The immigrants may have been impelled by overpopulation, by the wandering tendencies of the game herds—or by curiosity, that short fuse that triggers every exploration. Or even by the search for freedom from oppressive rule, which of course tends to follow along.

There may have been other points of crossing, as well, during various periods. Modern-day American Indians, though similar in many respects, exhibit considerable variety in physical appearance.

Not all of North America lay under the ice. Glacial movement was separated by wide corridors of ice-free land, leading into the interior. Many generations must have remained near the sea in what is now Alaska, but small groups moved southward, probably down a passageway just east of the Rocky Mountains.

Survival must have been incredibly difficult, but the urge to explore defies even the deadliest barriers. The glaciers were gradually creeping back northward—leaving comparatively temperate regions in what is now the American Southwest. Only in these regions did the nomads leave traces sufficient to allow interpretation by modern-day scientists.

One of the most striking of prehistoric scenarios is the image of Clovis herder-hunters trapping a mammoth, a gigantic relative of the elephant. Another Asian-African immigrant, the mammoth had long adapted to life in this part of the world. Some stood fourteen feet at the shoulder, with tusks as long as sixteen feet.

By comparison with such creatures, Clovis Man might seem puny at best—until the factors of human intelligence and determination are weighed in the balance. Man survived the bitter cold by appropriating the protective fur with which other animals were born. Lacking the claws and fangs that would naturally support a carnivorous appetite, man invented the necessary weapons and tools. Requiring means of entrapment and corralling, man learned to maneuver the local livestock into marshes, pits, and box canyons.

And as the trial-and-error techniques of prehistoric ranching evolved, so did the livestock. By the time of the Folsom Culture, the mammoth had become largely extinct. By now, it was the bison to which mankind looked for sustenance.

In many cases, an individual bison may have been singled out from a herd and hounded until brought to bay. But just as often, a small herd might be driven into a cul-de-sac and slaughtered on the spot. Another method, which prevailed even into historic times, was to stampede a herd over a cliff—wasteful, but effective. Such a site was unearthed in 1945 at Running Water Draw, near Plainview between Amarillo and Lubbock, where the remains of about one hundred bison were found alongside flint points of a type known as Plainview or Yuma. In addition to such points, researchers have found bolas weights (for slinging from thongs) and throwing-sticks or atlatls (for launching javelins and darts). The atlatl is the ancestor of the bow-and-arrow.

The origins of ranch-life practices also can be seen in other implements found at the Clovis-Folsom sites. These include meat-butchering devices, such as knives and scrapers, along with tools fashioned from bones. Fire was well known to the paleo-Indians, and in the traces of many great bonfires there have been found masses of charred bones. The hunters were almost entirely carnivorous, many centuries removed from the first farmers of the so-called New World.

The first ranchers, such as they were, were entirely nomadic. The primitive settlers of the region followed the herds and corraled them according to immediate need, rather than establishing permanent bases from which to conduct their expeditions: Life itself was an expedition. The hunting of small game and the gathering of foods gradually replaced the following of the big-game herds. Eventually, simple cultivation became a common practice, and the small groups of roving hunter-herders were gradually replaced with larger, farm-tending communities, holding forth from fixed locations.

Much remains to be learned of the rugged, courageous first settlers of the prehistoric Southwest. There are many inferences that cannot be proved beyond doubt, many doubts that cannot be resolved, many gaps in continuity that cannot be bridged.

What has become certain, all the same, is that the practices of livestock-wrangling and, eventually, formal agriculture originated before humanity had developed any sense of history to record its progress. The earliest ranchers, instead, wrote their history in the weapons and butchered remains that they left behind en route to the next roundup.

—G•E•T & M•H•P