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,