As a teenager, he expressed interest in anthropology and began to spend much of his free time at the San Diego Museum of Man.
[2] Immediately after graduating, Carter was hired by the San Diego Museum of Man and began working with his old mentor Malcolm Jennings Rogers.
Aside from the publication issues, Carter and Rogers soon found themselves at odds regarding the approximate dates of human occupation for the Silver Lake area.
[2] Bouncing back from his dismissal, Carter was quickly hired by San Diego State College in 1939 as a part-time teacher before he returned to Berkeley to pursue a PhD in geography.
Summers between the semesters, Carter would return to San Diego to conduct archaeological excavations, seeking to prove that man had inhabited the Americas at a much earlier date than accepted by mainstream scholars.
[3] Critics dismissed much of Carter's claims for early inhabitance, questioning his dating techniques and the possibility that most of the lithic artifacts were actually geofacts.
[1] Much of the information presented had already been published by Carter in the past, but technological advances allowed for a new dating technique called amino acid racemization to be used on ancient human remains.
For example, in Pleistocene Man at San Diego, Carter proposes that the lithic technology found in Southern California was brought there from Asia.
Carter thought that ancient people had reached the New World by boat and spread their technologies and cultures to the Native Americans already living there.
He cites Hannes Lindemann's solo crossing of the Atlantic in a dugout canoe as evidence that humans could in fact have made the same journey in past.
Mainstream archaeology scholars dismissed many of Carter's lithic artifacts to be geofacts, rocks that have a similar appearance to human-worked stone tools due to natural weathering processes.
[5] Similarities between tool shape, size, and manufacturing processes could simply be coincidental, making it impossible to assume relatedness.
[2] Upon retirement, Carter penned a short opinion piece in The Professional Geographer, arguing the AAG should not accept not Marxist and gay geography groups into the discipline.