Professor
George Carter
Texas A&M University - College Station- Texas - USA
6-8-1985
Dear
Professor Carter,
Received
your letter of may 11th a couple of days ago on 31st July. It came per surface mail which
accounts for the length of time in transit. Good to hear from you once again.
I wrote to you on the 20th June.
That letter will probably be waiting for you when you return from Maine in
September as well as this one. Answering your May 11th letter. As you mentioned in your article Before
Columbus in the Ellesworth American in these type of studies we have to be
a bit flexible with our thinking and as you mentioned in your letter people can get stuck in academic ruts and react with anger at the people
that grimp out of the ruts.
With
these recent discoveries in North China of chicken bone dated 5000 BC I guess
we will have to jump out the ruts. These bones predate anything previously dug
up by about 1500 years. I have made a contact with a chap at the Institute of
Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing (Peking) China. He
has sent me a copy of the paper of the North China recoveries (photographs of
leg bones etc also). I have made arrangements with a local Chinese medical
doctor here who is going to do the translation for me, probably next week.
This is a very important discovery I feel. Professor Higham of the University
of Otago in New Zealand is in Thailand again doing some digging, some might
get some more information from him later. He promised to send me bones from
the first dig .... there some years back.
I
have almost completed the manuscript for my next treatise in the series
entitled The Gallus species. This will also contain a supplement on the
chicken bone book as a lot more information has come to hand since I published
it last year. You certainly have a busy time coming up between now and
Christmas with your trips to Massachusetts and Utah. Glad your heart surgery
went OK. I have to go to Sydney the week after next to have laser treatment on
my eye. Hopefully it will come good in time. I am only 64 but hope to keep
going awhile yet as I have plenty of writing to do.
Thanks
for the chart at the bottom of your letter on the movement and the interchange
of fruit, animals, plants etc between the continents. Will probably use it
when I get onto the Distribution book. Well, that’s it for the moment.
Always good to hear from you. Take care of yourself.
Sincerely
yours,