What happened a hundred years ago may be considered old by many of us. What happened in 1492 was already considered history by our Founding Fathers in 1800. “Old” is a relative term, it depends on your viewpoint. On the scale of history, however, the entire 500 year span of European discovery and settlement is brand new. If you want old in America you have to look to what we call the Native Americans. Depending on where you went to school you learned either nothing about their origins, when and from where they came, or perhaps you heard of the Alaskan land bridge and tribes from Asia that arrived about 15 thousand years ago on the American continent. If I look at it from this angle I have to admit that all of us who came here after 1492 are newcomers.
It made me feel better when I read a report in the newspaper about humanids (pre-homo sapiens, apparently) that lived in San Diego (or what passed for San Diego then) some 130 thousand years ago. Now that would make even the above mentioned Native Americans newcomers. We may all be fellow newcomers in the end.
Those early people, unfortunately, are now extinct. On the basis of fossils that were excavated, archaeologists speculate that they hunted mastodons, forerunners of the elephants. Those early Americans were sloppy eaters judging by the leftover mastodon bone fragments that were found lying around, together with stone tools used to crack open femurs to suck out the fatty marrow. That they did that is not at all hard to believe because I have seen my own grandfather use his knife to poke around the bones in my mother’s stew for the marrow, a messy affair. And I am sure he was not related to any of those folks in San Diego.
The mastodons are also extinct, by the way. Their descendants are the elephants. Good thing other foodstuffs were invented since then, because if I had to eat a lot of mastodon bone marrow or even grilled elephant trunk, for that matter, I would probably be extinct too before the year is out.
(c)2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman
Picture credit: Ancient Origins