The road from Kenya

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This is the final program of The Johns Hopkins University television series. In it, Dr. George Carter, geography professor at Hopkins, notes that Louis S.B. Leakey found evidence of the earliest primitive man and his tools in Kenya. He then displays revised maps of the world that reveal different land masses during glacial periods, thus allowing the Kenyan man to explore new lands and form colonies over a period of 100,000 years until the glaciers receded and the oceans returned. Dr. Carter discusses the transformation of Kenyan man from an isolated pygmy into modern man with regional or racial characteristics, such as the cave dwelling "Sinanthropus pekinesis" in northern China and the Swanscombe man in England. Glacial periods also created a land bridge near the Bering Strait, allowing animals and man to cross from Asia into North America. Tools found in the Americas plus the physical characteristics of early American Indians offer proof of waves of Asian migrations. Survivors of early man include the australoids, europids, and mongoloids. At the conclusion of the program, host Lynn Poole thanks members of the studio, university, and network for their hard work and dedication. John McClay, general manager of station WJZ-TV, expresses his gratitude to Johns Hopkins University and Lynn Poole especially. University president Milton S. Eisenhower thanks everyone responsible for the shows and announces reluctantly that "File 7" will not be on the air next season. He says that the "business of producing, creating, and presenting a weekly program has become increasingly burdensome," and because of the University's other commitments, it is unable to produce shows of the high quality expected of Johns Hopkins. Furthermore, Dr. Eisenhower hopes that this "will be only an interruption and not a permanent termination" of Hopkins educational television. Thirteen "File 7" reruns will be shown during the summer of 1960, but it will not be continued thereafter.

Elephants are where you find them

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Dr. George Carter, professor of geography at the Johns Hopkins University, discusses elephant drawings as the key to the controversy of whether or not the American Indian civilization was influenced by European and Asian civilizations. Examples of elephant drawings made between 1500 B.C. and 500 A.D. in such diverse places as England, Ceylon, China, and Siam are often stylized or abstract whether the animal is native to the country or not. Similarly, a Greek coin displays an elephant likeness. However, during this period in Central America, Mayan statues, carvings, and writings and Aztec art and rituals distinctly show elephants even though there were none to copy nor anyone to describe them. Thus Dr. Carter maintains that Asian peoples must have brought drawings or statues of elephants to Central America over 2,000 years ago. The proof he offers for this theory is the Thor Heyerdahl transpacific raft voyage (proving such a trip could be made in a primitive vessel), identical temples 12,000 miles apart in Mexico and Cambodia, identical Sumatran and Mexican folding bark religious books, identical fishhooks from Easter Island and California, physical attributes of Central American and Asian Indians (photos show one of each, both playing nose flutes), and plants appearing in lands too far from original sources to have blown there. In closing, Lynn Poole shows additional examples of elephant artwork found in the United States.

Mystery of the Rongorongo

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Dr. George Carter, geology professor at Johns Hopkins University, shows a "talking board" discovered in 1868 on Easter Island and discusses previous attempts to decipher its symbols, called rongorongo, as writing or decoration. A film clip of Byrd's expedition party visiting the stone statues on Easter Island sets the scene. Bishop Tepano Jaussen of Tahiti was the first person to investigate this mystery, and he ultimately published a dictionary of identified glyphs in 1898. He was followed by Thomas Crafts, who concluded that the symbols were just decorations; William J. Thomson, who attempted unsuccessfully to have a story board translated; Bishop Claessens, who reported that figures on an island in the Seychelles were similar to the rongorongo; Lacouperie, who discovered seals in south India similar to the Easter Island symbols; and, William Hevesy, who pointed out the similarities of seals excavated in the Indus Valley to forms on Easter Island.

Man in America

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Lynn Poole shows a chart of epochs and notes that man didn't appear until the Pleistocene period. Dr. George Carter, department chair and professor of geography at Johns Hopkins University, discusses the possibility of a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska across the Bering Strait, based on human tools found with mastodon remains. Likewise, zoologist R.G. Gilmore has discovered that animals crisscrossed the Bering Strait between ice periods. In describing the history of the study of pre-history, Dr. Carter names W.H. Holmes and Ales Hrdlicka as men who led the opposition to the previously generally accepted belief in the existence of a glacial age man in America. With Willard F. Libby's 1951 discovery that all living things contain radioactive carbon, remains could be dated, challenging previous beliefs. From evidence such as stone tools, Dr. Carter speculates that man entered America about 40,000 years ago. He creates a timeline based on the degree of skill in making tools, the degree of weathering on tools, and the date of the existence of the lake where the tools were found. Dr. Carter also discusses physical geography and carbon-14 dating of tools along the southern California coast. Using charts and photos, he shows how reading California river valley records also yields data about sea level, climate, and glaciers. In the controversial Texas Street site in San Diego, Dr. Carter claims he has discovered hearths, crude stone tools, and dart points corresponding to the last interglacial period.

Who was here first?

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Dr. George Carter, a human geographer at Johns Hopkins University, studies man's relationship with the physical world and how civilizations developed. He explains the differences between independent inventionists, researchers who believe in indigenous cultures that developed independently, and diffusionists, scholars who maintain that there was early contact between civilizations. Pre-1492 contacts between the old world and the new appear impossible, but evidence shows similarities in games, instruments, tools, math, religion, etc. in both Asia and the Americas. The existence of domestic plants, such as the sweet potato, in both places and with the same name, seems proof that man crossed the oceans during pre-Columbian times. Evidence in art may support the diffusionists too, according to Dr. Gordon Ekholm, curator of archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History. He points to similar Mayan and Cambodian temples and parallel sculptural details such as trefoil arches in Mexico and in Asia.