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Show four- horned antelope, all animals which have since disappeared from the scene. ( The modern horse was reintroduced in recent times.) Finally also usher in man, a hunter and gatherer of Nature's foods, a relative newcomer to a new world from northern Asia via the Bering Strait route. These probable ancestors of the present- day American Indian began wandering southward through the continent, eventually to emerge in the valleys and on the plateaus of what is now the southwestern United States. While many of these peoples of this and later migrations spread widely over the continent and south across the Isthmus of Panama and throughout South America, some remained in the desert and mountain regions of the Colorado River Basin to become the Southwest's first pioneers. Cochise Culture.- In southeastern Arizona, erosion during the past 50 years by such streams as San Simon Creek, San Pedro River, and others, has exposed deep below the present surface the camp sites of one of Arizona's earliest people, the Cochise Culture. Fortunately, the accumulated natural overburden of clays, silts, sands, and the like, mirror the geological events of bygone millenia and provide the student of past climate with a measure of time. Expert opinion places the age of the oldest tools of Cochise Man, covered by and imbedded in the deposits laid down in a moist period, as older than 10,000 years. These tools consist mainly of milling stones and hand stones, primitive choppers and scrapers, all indicative of a food- gathering economy which exploited native vegetal foods, as contrasted to the use of projectile points and fine- cutting implements associated with the Folsom hunters of the high plains east of the Rocky Mountains. The animals of the time included the mammoth, horse, bison, camel, and a large wolf, all of which have since vanished from the scene. In the same region where the evidences of Cochise Man have been found, occur also traces of a later people, assignable to two successive periods of time on a geological basis. They persisted through the periods when climate was changing from the moister, cooler type towards the climate we have today, and the animals were modern, or those which still inhabit the area. The record of Figure 33.- An Indian ruin on the Verde River- Tuzigoot National Monument, Ariz. 80 |