engraved stone at 23 feet that is called the “Flagstaff Stone.” The “Flagstaff Stone” is thought by Goodman to be approximately one hundred thousand years old and according to Goodman, possibly “one of the most important artifacts ever found in the whole world”, citing in the last instance Alexander Marshack of Harvard’s Peabody Museum. 3 [Goodman 1981:214.] The archaeologist Stephen Williams wrote that "Marshack has said that he was badly misquoted by Goodman, and the date is arrived at by extreme extrapolation." In a review of American Genesis by Dennis Stanford, Stanford quotes Marshack as having said that although he saw the grooves as intentional, “Every groove without exception had been deepened and straightened, reworked after it was dug out of the ground . . . thus the stone cannot be used as evidence that early man engraved it.” Some have claimed the stone is a piece of tuff about two and a half inches long which according to Goodman, is 100,000 years old and is Paleo-Indian art. Human origins Goodman is the author of American Genesis: The American Indian and the origins of modern man (1981) in which he claims that homo sapiens originated in North America in California 500,000 years ago and then spread to the rest of the world. His views have been compared to the paleontologist Florentino Ameghino who believed that humanity had originated on the banks of Río de la Plata. Goodman claims that the fossils in North America are "twice as old as the oldest fully modern skull from europe". In his work he attempted to show that the American Indians were not only the first Americans but were the first humans on earth. Goodman allows that hominids did appear in Asia and Africa, though homo sapiens are completely American in origin according to his theory. Goodman's theory has been criticised as his explanation of the relationship between hominids and humans was vaguely discussed. However Goodman in a later book addressed the issue in The Genesis Mystery: the Sudden Appearance of Man (1983) in which he criticised natural selection and advocated a type of spiritual evolution by claiming that archaeological findings verify an unbridgeable gap between modern man and the last "pre-man" creature and advocates spiritual intervention as the explanation for the "sudden appearance" of modern man. According to Michael Anthony Corey: Goodman "appeals to an intervening supernatural force, which would have manifested itself