So Much for the Land Bridge Theory

History is written by landsmen.

When a landsman encounters a body of water, he sees an obstacle which must be bridged.

To a seaman, a body of water is a highway and a cornucopia.

It isn't surprising that the landsmen who write our history have insisted that the first Americans must have walked across a land bridge from Asia. They know when it must have happened: during a very brief geological period when the sea level was low and there was an ice-free path available.

Since we know when it must have happened, archaeologists searching for human artifacts and remains wouldn't dig below a certain level, marked by weapon points in the style called Clovis. This was known with certainty (it was thought), even though aborigines reached Australia 60,000 years ago, and there was never a land bridge.

Now archaeologists have found man made tools on the Island of Crete that seem to have been there more than 130,000 years. See yesterday's New York Times article, "On Crete, New Evidence of Very Ancient Mariners." Crete has been an island separated from the nearest land by about two hundred miles for more than five million years.

As Will Rogers pointed out, "it isn't what you don't know that will give you trouble, it's what we know that ain't so...."

I hope American archaeologists have resumed digging.