American Genesis: The American Indian and the Origins of Modern Man by Jeffrey Goodman

Abstract

Reviews 335 In Concerning Western Poetry I sense the emergence of mythic form that is a tacit recognition that the poetry of the West is veering toward even more identifiable forms that will express the western setting. Why not? As shown in CWP, western poetry is the product of free sensibility rather than license. And surely that sensibility will achieve a more identifiable mythic context. As in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the freedom of the imagination will produce the intrinsic forms of the imagination. This is partly borne out in Roethke’s poetry, as is explained in Susan R. Bowers’s article “The Explorer’s Rose: Theodore Roethke’s Mystical Sym­ bol.” “The western rose.” The phrase has charm and freshness — and com­ prises a contribution to mythic tradition. Perhaps, indeed, Roethke “moves outside the confines of the greenhouse to journey from his own geographical and spiritual beginnings to the wild, open edge of his own life and country” as so many other poets in our time should. We may soon learn who the real celebrities of the West are — that they do not produce kitsch, but write seriously, maturely about the human spirit. Lewis is to be congratulated for> CWP and the way it supports and complements due recognition for true celebrities represented in it. CLINTON LARSON, Brigham Young University American Genesis: The American Indian and the Origins of Modern Man. By Jeffrey Goodman. (New York: Summit Books, 1981. 285 pages, $11.95.) This book is a readable and often engrossing account of the prehistoric evolutionary transition from Neanderthal man to Cro-Magnon man, an account that radically differs from the view we were taught in school and which is still the most widely held one. Neanderthal man and Cro-Magnon man (the latter being the first European skeleton find that is indistinguishable from Modern man — ourselves) are physically similar enough to be classed as two subspecies of the same species, Homo sapiens. Neanderthal man lived from about 100,000 years ago until the appearance of Cro-Magnon man around 35,000 years ago. No one knows for sure where Cro-Magnon man came from or what happened to Neanderthal man, but it is thought unlikely that the latter evolved into the former. The generally accepted theory argues, then, that Cro-Magnon man was the first representative of all the human races on earth, and that humans spread out over the globe beginning about 35,000 years ago. At that time, however, it would have been impossible to migrate into North and South America by land, for the Bering “land bridge” would have been covered by 336 Western American Literature water. This “bridge” is the land under the present Bering straits, land that has periodically been uncovered when the sea level has gone down due to water being drawn up and retained in the polar ice-caps. The latest opening of the land bridge occurred around 12,000 years ago, so the current theory is that the Native Americans could only have come to this continent at that time or later. For some time there has been evidence of human habitation in the Americas prior to 12,000 years ago, but this evidence has usually been dis­ missed because it is inconceivable, if Cro-Magnon man only came into being about 35,000 years ago, that people could have been here either before then or between then and 12,000, when the land bridge was closed. On the basis of this evidence, however, plus much new research including his own dig at Flagstaff, Arizona, Jeffrey Goodman suggests that the final step of evolution into modern man took place in the Americas, probably in southern California, sometime between 70,000 and 500,000 years ago, and that bands of these people migrated back into Asia and Europe around 70,000 years ago, another moment when the Bering land bridge was known to be open. This is an exciting hypothesis, and Goodman gives it additional indirect support with many arguments about striking similarities between the tools and the art of both the early Native Americans and the cave artists of early Europe. The book proceeds in a logical way from...