So why should the Americas have escaped this global migration, and this seemingly unstoppable march toward high civilization, until so late? The answer, perhaps, is that the most influential figure in disseminating and enforcing the view that the New World had only recently been populated by humans was a frowning and fearsome anthropologist named Aleš Hrdlička who, in 1903, was selected to head the newly created Division of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.
