Now against a regional and local environmental background, I should like to present in simple narrative the Great Basin chapter of the story of man in the western hemisphere as I conceive it.

There are numerous archeologic stations in the west and in the Plains where deep layers of earth, one upon the other, have yielded collections of considerable age. Man’s tools are found, particularly in the Plains, in some of these layers in direct association with animals now extinct. Taken singly these locations tell very little — they are mere paragraphs in a long chapter — about man's history as the western hemisphere was peopled. In the aggregate, however, the findings from these several sites permit a coherent if sometimes skimpy account to be built up.