CHAPTER VIII

PRIMITIVE MAN; AND THE HORSE, THE LION, AND THE ELEPHANT

To say that progress goes on and has gone on at unequal speed in

different continents, so far as human society is concerned, is so

self-evident as to be trite. Yet, after all, we hardly visualize even

this fact to ourselves; and we laymen, at least, often either disregard

or else frankly forget the further fact that this statement is equally

true as regards the prehistory of mankind and as regards the

paleontological history of the great beasts with which he has been

associated on the different continents during the last two or three

hundred thousand years. In history, a given century may on one continent

mean what on another continent was meant by a century that came a

thousand years before or a thousand years later. In prehistory and

paleontology there is the same geographical difference as regards the

rapidity of development in time.

The Soudan under the Mahdi at the end of the nineteenth century was in

religious, industrial, and social life, in fact in everything except

mere time, part of the evil Mohammedan world of the seventh century. It

had no relation to the contemporary body politic of humanity except that

of being a plague-spot. The Tasmanians, Bushmen, and Esquimaux of the

eighteenth century had nothing in common with the Europeans of their

day. Their kinship, physical and cultural, was with certain races of

Palæolithic Europeans and Asiatics fifty or a hundred thousand years

back.

In just the same way the fierce wild life of parts of Africa to-day has

nothing in common with what we now see in Europe and the Americas. Yet

in its general aspect, and in many of its most striking details, it

reproduces the life that once was, in Europe and in both the Americas,

in what paleontologists call the Pleistocene age. By Pleistocene is

meant that period--of incalculable length as we speak of historic time,

but a mere moment if we speak of geologic time--which witnessed in

Europe and Asia the slow change of the brute-like and but partly human

predecessors of man into beings who were culturally on a level with the

lower forms of the savages that still exist, and some of whom were

physically, as far as we can see, abreast of the more advanced races of

to-day.

Surely, this phase in the vast epic of life development on this planet

offers a fascinating study. The history of man himself is by far the

most absorbing of all histories, and it cannot be understood without

some knowledge of his prehistory. Moreover, the history of the rest of

the animal world also yields a drama of intense and vivid interest to

all scholars gifted with imagination. The two histories--the prehistory

of humanity and the history of the culminating phase of non-human

mammalian life--were interwoven during the dim ages when man was slowly

groping upward from the bestial to the half-divine.

It was my good fortune throughout one year of my life to roam, rifle in

hand, over the empty, sunlit African wastes, and at night to camp by

palm and thorn-tree on the banks of the African rivers. Day after day I

watched the thronging herds of wild creatures and the sly, furtive human

life of the wilderness. Often and often, as I so watched, my thoughts

went back through measureless time to the ages when the western lands,

where my people now dwell, and the northern lands of the eastern world,

where their remote forefathers once dwelt, were filled with just such a

wild life. In those days these far-back ancestors of ours led the same

lives of suspicion and vigilant cunning among the beasts of the forest

and plain that are now led by the wildest African savages. In that

immemorial past the beasts conditioned the lives of men, as they

conditioned the lives of one another; for the chief factors in man's

existence were then the living things upon which he preyed and the

fearsome creatures which sometimes made prey of him. Ages were to pass

before his mastery grew to such a point that the fanged things he once

had feared, and the hoofed things success in the chase of which had once

meant to him life or death, became negligible factors in his existence.

Some of the naked or half skin-clad savages whom I met and with whom I

hunted were still leading precisely the life of these ages-dead

forebears of ours. More than once I spent days in heavy forests at the

foot of equatorial mountains in company with small parties of 'Ndorobo

hunters. They were men of the deep woods, as stealthy and wary as any of

the woodland creatures. In each case they knew and trusted my

companion--who was in one instance a settler, a famous lion hunter, and

in the other a noted professional elephant hunter. Yet even so their

trust did not extend to letting a stranger like himself see their women

and children, who had retreated into some forest fastness from which we

were kept aloof. The men wore each a small fur cape over the shoulders.

Otherwise they were absolutely naked. Each carried a pouch, and a spear.

The spear head was of iron, obtained from some of the settled tribes.

Except this iron spear head, not one of their few belongings differed

from what it doubtless was long prior to the age of metals. They carried

bows, strung with zebra gut, and arrows of which the wooden tips were

poisoned. In one place Kermit found where a party of them had dwelt in a

cave, evidently for many weeks; there were bones and scraps of skin

without and within; and inside were beds of grass, and fire-sticks, and

a walled-off enclosure of branches in which their dogs had been penned.

Elsewhere we came on one or two camping-places with rude brush shelters.

Each little party consisted of a family, or perhaps temporarily of two

or three families. They did not cultivate the earth; they owned a few

dogs; and they lived on honey and game. They killed monkeys and hyraxes,

occasionally forest hog and bongo--a beautifully striped forest antelope

as big as a Jersey cow--and now and then elephant, rhino, and buffalo,

and, on the open plains at the edge of the forest, zebra. The zebra was

a favorite food; but they could only get at it when it left the open

plains and came among the bushes or to drink at the river. Two of these

wild hunters showed me the bones of an elephant they had killed in a pit

a long time previously; and the head man of those we had with us on

another trip bore the scars of frightful wounds inflicted by an angered

buffalo. Hyenas at times haunted the neighborhood, and after nightfall

might attempt to carry off a child or even a sleeping man. Very rarely

the hunters killed a leopard, and sometimes a leopard pounced on one of

them. The lion they feared greatly, but it did not enter the woods, and

they were in danger from it only if they ventured on the plain. The head

man above mentioned told us that once, when desperate with hunger, his

little tribe, or family group, had found a buffalo killed by a lion, and

had attacked and slain the lion, and then feasted on both it and the

buffalo. But on another occasion a lion had turned the tables and killed

two of their number. The father of one of my guides had been killed by

baboons; he had attacked a young one with a club, and the old males tore

him to pieces with their huge dog teeth. Death to the head of a family

in encounter with an elephant or rhino might mean literal starvation to

the weaker members. They were able to exist at all only because they had

developed their senses and powers to a degree that placed them level

with the creatures they dreaded or preyed upon. They climbed the huge

trees almost as well as the big black-and-white monkey. I had with me

gun-bearers from the hunting tribes of the plains, men accustomed to the

chase, but brought up in villages where there was tillage and where

goats and cattle were raised. These gun-bearers of mine were good

trackers and at home in the ordinary wilderness. But compared to these

true wild men of the forest they might almost as well have been

town-bred. The 'Ndorobo trackers would take me straight to some

particular tree or spot of ground, through miles of dense, steaming

woodland every rood of which looked like every other, returning with

unerring precision to a goal which my gun-bearers would have been as

helpless to find again as I was myself; and they interpreted trails and

signs and footprint-scrapes which we either hardly saw or else misread.

Doubtless the ancestors, or some of the ancestors, of these men had

lived in the land, just as they themselves now did, for untold

generations before the soil-tillers and cattle-owners came into it. They

had shrunk from the advent of the latter, and as a rule were found only

in isolated tracts which were useless for tillage or pasturage, the

dense forest forming their habitual dwelling-place and retreat of

safety. From the best hunting-grounds, those where the great game

teemed, they had been driven; yet these hunting-grounds were often

untenanted by human beings for much of the year, being visited only at

certain seasons by the cattle-owning nomads.

Often these hunting-grounds offered sights of wonder and enchantment.

Day after day I rode across them without seeing, from dawn to sundown, a

human being save the faithful black followers, hawk-eyed and

steel-thewed, who trudged behind me. Sometimes the plains were seas of

wind-rippled grass. Sometimes they were dotted with clumps of low

thorn-trees or broken by barren, boldly outlined hills. Our camp might

be pitched by a muddy pool, with only stunted thorns near by; or on the

edge of a shrunken river, under the dense shade of some great,

brilliantly green fig-tree; or in a grove of huge, flat-topped acacias

with yellow trunks and foliage like the most delicate lace; or where

the long fronds of palms moved with a ceaseless, dry rustle in the

evening breeze. At the drinking-holes, in pond or river, as the

afternoon waned, or occasionally after nightfall when the moon was

bright, I sometimes lay to see the game filing down to drink.

On these rides, I continually passed through, and while lying in ambush

I often saw, a wealth of wild life, in numbers and variety such as the

western world, and the cold-temperate regions of the Old World, have not

seen for many, many thousands of years. How many kinds of beasts there

were! Giraffes stared at us over the tops of the stunted thorn-trees. In

the dawn we saw hyenas shambling homeward after their night's prowl.

Wart-hogs as hideous as nightmares ploughed along with their fore knees

on the ground as they rooted it up. Sleek oryx with horns like rapiers

galloped off with even, gliding gait. Shaggy wildebeests curvetted and

plunged with a ferocity both ludicrous and sinister; elands as heavy as

prize cattle trotted away with shaking dewlaps. Ungainly hartebeests,

and topi whose skins had the sheen of satin, ran with smooth speed. The

lyre-horned waterbucks had the stately port of wapiti bulls. Rhinoceros,

foolish, mighty, and uncouth, stood half asleep in the bright sunlight.

Buffalo sought the shade of the thorn-trees, their bodies black and

their great horn-bosses glinting white. Hippos snorted and gambolled in

the water. Dominant always, wherever we saw them, were the lion and the

elephant; and the favorite prey of the lion was the zebra, the striped

wild horse of the African wastes.

Of course, these many different creatures were not all to be seen at any

one time or in any one place. But again and again there were so many of

them that we felt as if we were passing through a gigantic zoological

garden. Often the line of our burden-bearing carriers had to be shifted

from its point of march, to avoid a rhinoceros which stared at us with

dull and truculent curiosity; while the zebra herds filed off with

barking cries across the sunlit plain, and delicate gazelles, dainty as

wood-sprites, fled like shadows, and hartebeests gazed toward us with

long, homely faces; or we stopped to watch a herd of elephants, cows and

calves, browsing among the thorns, their curling trunks raised now and

then to test the wind, or perhaps one big ear lifted and then slapped

back against the body.

One day at noon, in the Sotik country of East Africa, we stopped to skin

a hyena which I had shot for the Smithsonian. As we skinned it the game

of the neighborhood gathered to look on. The spectators included

wildebeest, hartebeest, gazelle, topi, a zebra, and a rhinoceros--the

hook-lipped kind. Late that afternoon I shot a lioness; the successive

reports of the rifle and the grunting roars of the lioness, put to

flight a mixed herd of zebra and hartebeest which had hitherto been

unconcernedly grazing not far off to one side of the scene of action.

On another day as I journeyed along the valley of the Guaso Nyero--first

at the head of the safari, as it travelled through the green forest of

the river-bed, and then with only my gun-bearers, through the hot,

waterless, sun-scorched country back from the river--I saw rhino,

giraffe, buffalo, eland, oryx, waterbuck, impalla, big gazelle, and

gerenuk or giraffe-gazelle. After camping, toward evening, I walked

up-stream, away from the tents, until I came to a spot where the river

ran through a wild, rugged ravine. On the hither side I found the

carcass--little more than the skeleton--of a zebra which had been killed

by a couple of lions as it came to drink the previous night. It was

evidently a favorite drinking-place, for broad game trails led down to

the river at this point from both banks. As I sat and watched, a herd

of zebra approached cautiously from the opposite side. There were in it

representatives of two species of these gaudily marked wild horses or

wild asses, the common zebra and the much, bigger northern zebra with

longer ears and more numerous and narrower stripes. The herd advanced,

avoiding cover as much as possible, continually halting, once wheeling

and galloping back, ever seeking with eye and nostril some token of the

presence of their maned and tawny foe. At last the leader walked down

through a break in the bank to the river. The others crowded close

behind, jostling one another as they sank their muzzles in the water.

For a moment fear left them, and they satisfied their thirst, and those

that were through first then stood while the rearmost drank greedily.

But as soon as one of them began to move back to the shore the others

became uneasy and followed, and the whole herd broke into a gallop and

tore off for a couple of hundred yards. Looking at them it was easy

enough to bring before one's eyes the tragedy of the preceding night;

the herd nearing the water, wary, but not wary enough, the panic flight

as the lion dashed among them, the struggling and the neighing screams

of the victim before the great teeth found the life they sought. The

herd I watched was not assailed; it cantered off; oryx and waterbuck

came down to drink and also cantered off. The carcass of the murdered

zebra, little but bones and shreds of red sinew and scraps of skin, lay

not far from me. Footprints showed where the lions had drunk after

eating. As the long afternoon lights waned, a hyena, abroad earlier than

usual, began to call somewhere in the distance. The lonely gorge was

rather an eerie place as darkness fell, and I strode toward camp, alone,

keeping a sharp lookout round about; and as I walked and watched in a

present that might be dangerous, my thoughts went back through the

immeasurable ages to a past that was always dangerous; to the days when

our hairy and lowbrowed forefathers, under northern skies, fingered

their stone-headed axes as they lay among the rocks in just such a

ravine as that I had quitted, and gazed with mingled greed and terror as

the cave-lion struck down his prey and scattered the herds of wild

horses for whose flesh they themselves hungered.

Once in East Africa I stalked a hook-lipped rhino, a big bull with good

horns. I wished its skin and skeleton for the Smithsonian. When a

hundred and fifty yards off I stopped for a moment by an ant-hill and

looked around over the wide plain. There were in sight a couple of

giraffes, some solitary old wildebeest bulls, showing black against the

bleached yellow grass, and herds of hartebeest, topi, big and little

gazelle, and zebra. On another occasion, when with Kermit, we inspected

three rhinos at close quarters, came to the conclusion that none of them

would make good specimens, and backed off cautiously a couple of hundred

yards to a big ant-hill. From this point, there were in sight all the

kinds of game mentioned above except the giraffe and little gazelle, and

in addition there were ostrich and wart-hog.

One night when we were camped on the western bank of the upper White

Nile we heard a mighty chorus. Lions roared and elephants trumpeted, and

in the papyrus beds, beneath the low bluff on which our tents stood,

hippopotamus bellowed and blew like the exhaust-pipes of huge

steam-engines. Next day I hunted the giant square-mouth rhinoceros,

killing a cow and a bull, and taking their skins and the skeleton of one

for the Smithsonian. On the walk out, and but a mile or two from camp,

we had passed a small herd of elephants; and on our return we found them

in the same place, still resting, with many white cow-herons perched on

their backs. From where I stood looking at them hartebeest, kob,

waterbuck, and oribi were also all in sight.

I could mention day after day such as these, when we saw myriads of

game, often of many kinds. One afternoon of heat and sunlight on the

parched Kapiti plains, teeming with wild life, I followed a lion, on

horseback. During the gallop he ran for several minutes almost in the

middle of a mixed herd of hartebeest and zebra. When he came to bay, I

walked in on him. In the background the barren hills, "like giants at a

hunting lay." Bands of hartebeests and of showy zebras, joined by

grotesquely capering wildebeests and by lovely, long-horned gazelles,

stood round in a wide, irregular ring, to see their two foes fight to

the death. Another day, at burning noon, in a waste of sparsely

scattered, withered thorn-trees, west of Redjaf on the upper Nile, I

killed a magnificent giant eland bull; and during the hunt I saw

elephant, giraffe, buffalo, straw-colored Nile hartebeest, and roan

antelope, as big as horses, with shining coats which melted in ghostly

fashion into the shimmering heat haze of the dry landscape.

In short, for months my companions and I travelled and hunted in the

Pleistocene. Man and beasts alike were of types our own world knew only

in an incalculably remote past. My gun-bearers were really men such as

those of later Palæolithic times. Now and then I spent days with hunters

whose lives were led under conditions that the people of my race had not

faced for ages; probably not since before, certainly not since

immediately after, the close of the last glacial epoch. The number and

variety of the great game, the terror inspired by some of the beasts of

prey, the bulk and majesty of some of the beasts of the chase, were such

as are unknown in the rest of the modern world; and nothing like them

has been seen in the western and northern world since the Pleistocene.

Many of these great and beautiful beasts were of kinds which either have

developed in Africa itself, and have never wandered to the other

continents, or else had disappeared from these other continents before

man appeared upon the earth. But three of the most characteristic of

these beasts, the lion, the elephant, and the horse, were spread over

almost the whole of this planet at the time when man as man had fairly

begun his hunting. These three beasts then abounded in Europe and in

Asia, in North America, and in South America. In each of these

continents they were among the dominant types of a fauna as rich,

varied, and impressive as only that of Africa is to-day.

When I speak of "elephant," "lion," and "horse" I am speaking of the

beasts themselves, not their names in our vernacular. As regards two of

these three animals, the horse and the big horse-killing cat, we have no

common names to include the various species; whereas in the remaining

case we have such a common name to include the two widely separate

existing species, although we use different names to designate two

well-known fossil species. We speak of both the Indian and the African

proboscidians as elephants, although we style "mammoth" the recently

extinct hairy elephant of the north, which was more closely related to

the Asiatic elephant than the latter is to its African cousin, and

although we use the word "mastodon" to denote a more primitive type of

elephant also recently extinct in America. We have no such common term

either for the various big cats or for the various horses. Yet the

African and Asiatic elephants are far more widely separated from one

another than the lion is from the tiger, or even from the jaguar. They

are far more widely separated than horses, asses, and zebras are from

one another. As regards both the horses and the big cats which have

always preyed so largely on horses, the differences are almost

exclusively in color and in features of purely external anatomy. From

the skull and skeleton it is not possible to determine with certainty

the lion from the tiger, and both come very close to the big spotted

cats; while the skulls of the horse, the ass, and the common zebra are

with difficulty to be discriminated except by size--although the skull

of the big northernmost African zebra is totally distinct.

In consequence, when we speak of extinct horses it is often impossible

to guarantee that they were not asses or zebras; and when we speak of

the great extinct cats of Europe and North America as lions, we know

that it is possible that in life they may have looked more like tigers.

Therefore it must be understood that I use the words horse and lion as

terms of convenience and in a broad sense so as to avoid circumlocution.

I use them in exactly the way in which "elephant" is always used to

include the two totally distinct species now living in India and Africa.

By "lion" I mean any one of the big extinct cats, true cats, which in

their cranial and skeletal characters are almost or quite identical with

living lions and tigers and closely related to living jaguars. By

"horse" I mean any existing species of horse, ass, or zebra, and any

one of the numerous similar extinct species which may have belonged to

any one of these three types, or have been intermediate between any two

of them, or perhaps have been somewhat different from all of them. As

thus used, the words horse, lion, and elephant are scientifically of

nearly equivalent value.

The only region in which these three animals were not found during

Pleistocene times was Australia, which was given over wholly to a

relatively insignificant and undeveloped fauna of marsupials and into

which it is probable that man did not intrude until at a late period.

Everywhere else, from Patagonia to the Cape of Good Hope, including

regions now faunistically as utterly unlike as Peru, California, Alaska,

Siberia, Asia Minor, France, and Algiers, they abounded, many different

and peculiar species being found. The Pleistocene gradually became part

of the Age of Man; but at first it was emphatically the Age of the

Horse, the Lion, and the Elephant, and the two ages overlapped for a

very long period. The lion was primitive man's most deadly foe, as to

this day is the case in parts of Africa. He feared the lion, and avoided

him, and warred upon him, until gradually he got a little the upper

hand of him. The elephant greatly impressed the imagination of this

primitive man, and it still greatly impresses it; as will be seen by any

one who studies the carvings and pictures of our ancestors of the

glacial and postglacial epochs, or who at the present day listens to the

talk of his black gun-bearers round an African camp-fire. The horse was

and is a quarry as eagerly followed by primitive man as by the lion

himself. Ages elapsed before the horse, and finally even "my lord the

elephant" were tamed by man, as man developed something that could

properly be called a culture. The savages who, when England was merely a

peninsula of continental Europe, dwelt by the banks of the mighty rivers

which have since shrunk into the present Rhine and Seine, looked on the

mammoth and the coarse-headed wild horse of their day as furnishing the

flesh their stomachs craved, precisely as the savages of the Nile and

the Zambesi now look on the African elephant and the zebra.

This Age of Primitive Man, this Age of the Horse, the Lion, and the

Elephant, like all other historical or geological "ages," lasted longer

in some places than in others, and, instead of having sharply defined

limits, merged gradually into the preceding and succeeding ages.

Moreover--in exact analogy with other divisions of time, all of which,

however useful, are essentially artificial--we must constantly remember

that the perspective changes utterly with the point of view. All

paleontological terms of time are necessarily terms chiefly of

convenience, which have and express a real intrinsic value, but which

cannot be sharply defined. Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Recent

are such terms. They are arbitrarily chosen bits of terminology to

express successive stages of the world's growth, and therefore

successive and varying faunas. They are not equivalent in time to one

another; the more remote the age from our own the greater is the length

of time we include therein. "Recent" denotes a short period of time

compared to "Pleistocene," and "Pleistocene" a short period compared to

"Pliocene." If there are on this earth intelligent beings at a time in

the future as remote from our day as our day is from the Pliocene, they

will certainly consider "Recent" and "Pleistocene" as one short period.

All the beast faunas and all the human cultures from the eras of the

chinless Heidelberg and Piltdown men to our own time will seem in that

remote perspective practically contemporaneous. Similarly, when we try

to grasp life as lived even in such, geologically, near-by time as any

portion of the Pleistocene, we cannot be sure of the exact

time-parallelism of closely related faunas in different parts of the

world, nor can we, in many cases, tell whether certain species were

really contemporaneous or whether they were successive. Of the general

paleontological facts, of the general aspects of the various faunas in

various parts of the world, during some roughly indicated period of

geologic time, we may be reasonably sure. But when we speak with more

minuteness, we speak doubtfully, and at any moment new discoveries may

unsettle theories by upsetting what we have supposed to be facts.

In considering what is in this chapter set forth these conditions must

be kept in mind. When I speak of what I have myself seen or of the

tools, carvings, and skeletons dug from the ground by competent

observers, I speak of facts; but as yet the explanations of these facts

must be accepted only as hypotheses, at least in part. Just as the

elephant, wild horse, and lion exist in Africa to-day, and have

disappeared from Europe and the two Americas thousands or tens of

thousands of years ago, so it may well be that they had died out in

North America ages before they had disappeared from the other end of

the western hemisphere. Again, in North America, it is as yet quite

impossible to be sure as to the exact succession, or contemporaneity of

all of the many extinct species of horse and elephant. It is with our

present knowledge equally impossible to be sure of the exact time

relations between any given North American fauna and the Eurasiatic

fauna most closely resembling it. Moreover, as yet we have only the

vaguest idea of the duration of even modern geologic time; good

observers vary as to whether a given period covers hundreds of thousands

or only tens of thousands of years.

This does not impair the value of the general picture which we can make

in our minds. It is not essentially different from what is the case in

history. If we speak of the Græco-Roman world from the days of Aristides

to those of Marcus Aurelius, we outline a historical period which has a

real unity, and of which all the parts are bound together by real ties

and real resemblances. Nevertheless, there were sharp differences in the

successive cultures of this period; even the two centuries which

intervened, say, between Miltiades and Demetrius Poliorketes, or between

Marius and Trajan, showed such differences. Dealing roughly with the

period as a whole, it would not be necessary to try to draw all the

distinctions and make all the qualifications that would be essential to

minutely accurate treatment; such treatment would merely mar the

outlines of a general sketch. The same thing is, of course, true of an

outline sketch of what our present knowledge shows of man's most

wide-spread beast associates, when he had begun, in forms not very

different from those of the lower savages to-day, to spread over the

world's surface.

Therefore it is necessary to remember that in dealing even with such a

recent chapter of paleontological discovery as that concerned with early

man and the great four-footed creatures that were his contemporaries,

our general picture can rarely pretend to more than general accuracy. It

is only in prehistoric and protohistoric Europe that the early career of

"homo sapiens" and his immediate predecessors has been worked out in

sufficient detail to give even the roughest idea of its successive

stages, and of the varying groups of great beasts with which at the

different stages man was associated. This is because the record has been

better preserved, and more closely studied in Europe than elsewhere; for

it seems fairly certain that it is in Eurasia, in the palæarctic realm,

that there took place the development of the more or less ape-like

predecessors of man and then of man himself. It is in Eurasia that all

of the remains of man's immediate predecessors have been found--from the

Javan pithecanthropus which can only doubtfully be called human, to the

Piltdown and Heidelberg men, who were undoubtedly human, but who were so

much closer than any existing savage to the beasts that (unless our

present imperfect knowledge proves erroneous) they can hardly be deemed

specifically identical with modern homo sapiens. Even the more modern

Neanderthal men are probably not ancestral to our own stock. It is in

Europe, following on these predecessors of existing man, that we find

the skeletons, the weapons and tools, and the carvings of existing man

in his earliest stages; and mingled with his remains those of the

strange and mighty beasts which dwelt beside him in the land. Probably

these European forefathers of existing man came from a stock which had

previously gone through its early human and prehuman stages in Asia. But

we only know what happened in Europe. There was a slow, halting, and

interrupted but on the whole steady development in physical

type--sometimes the type itself gradually changing, while sometimes it

was displaced by a wholly different type of wholly different blood.

Roughly parallel with this was a corresponding development in cultural

type. Probably from the earliest times, and certainly in late times,

development or change in physical type was often wholly unrelated to

development or change in culture. Sometimes the cultural change was an

autochthonous development. Sometimes it was due to a more or less

complete change in blood, owing to the immigration of a strong alien

type of humanity. Sometimes it was due to the adoption of an alien

culture.

Many good observers nowadays, judging from the facts at present

accessible, are inclined to think that the American Indian stocks were

the first human stocks that peopled the western hemisphere, that they

are by blood nearest of kin to certain race-elements still existing in

northeastern Asia--representing the only inhabitants of northeastern

Asia when man first penetrated from there to northwestern America--and

that more remotely they may be kin to certain late Palæolithic men of

Europe. But much of the American Indian culture was essentially a

Neolithic culture, seemingly from the beginning. In places--Peru,

Maya-land, the Mexican plateau--it at times developed into a

civilization equally extraordinary for its achievements and for its

shortcomings and evanescence; but it never developed a metal epoch

corresponding to, say, the bronze age of the Mediterranean, and although

the small camel, the llama, was tamed in South America, in North

America, the ox, sheep, white goat, and reindeer were never made

servants of man, as befell so many corresponding beasts of Eurasia.

In this last respect the American Indians stayed almost on the level of

the African tribes, whose native civilization was otherwise far less

advanced. The African buffalo is as readily tamed as its Asiatic

brother; the zebra was as susceptible of taming as the early wild horse

and ass; the eland is probably of all big ruminants the one that most

readily lends itself to domestication. But none of them was tamed until

tribes owning animals which had been tamed for ages appeared in Africa;

and then the already-tamed animals were accepted in their stead. The

asses, cattle, sheep, and goats of Asia are now the domestic animals of

the negroes and of the whites in Africa, merely because it is easier,

more profitable, and more convenient to deal with animals already

accustomed for ages to the yoke of domestic servitude than to again go

through the labor incident to changing a wild into a tame beast.

It is probable that during the immense stretch of time which in Europe

covered the growth of the various successive Palæolithic, and finally

Neolithic, cultures--the "old-stone" ages during which man used stone

implements which he merely chipped and flaked, and the "new-stone" age

in which he ground and polished them--there happened time and again what

has happened in the history and prehistory of man in Africa and North

America. One of the incidents in this parallelism is the way in which

the inhabitants accepted animals already trained and brought from

elsewhere rather than attempt to train the similar beasts of their own

forests. Doubtless the reason why the European bison is not a domestic

animal is exactly the same as the reason why the American bison and

African buffalo are not domestic animals. The northern European hunting

savages were displaced or subjugated by, or received a higher culture

from, tribes bringing from Asia or from the Mediterranean lands the

cattle they had already tamed. The same things happened, in Africa south

of the Sahara while it was still shrouded from civilized vision, and in

America since the coming of the European.

These hunting savages existed for ages, for hundreds of thousands of

years, in Europe. During this period of time--immense by historic

standards, yet geologically a mere moment--many different human types

succeeded one another. The climate swung to and from glacial to

subtropical; fauna succeeded fauna. One group of species of big beasts

succeeded another as the climate and plant life changed; and then itself

gave place to a third; and perhaps once more resumed its ancient place

as the physical conditions again became what they once had been. At

certain periods the musk-ox, the reindeer, the woolly rhinoceros, and

the hairy mammoth, together with huge cave-bears, were found; at other

periods southern forms of elephant and rhinoceros, and such tropical

creatures as the hippopotamus, replaced the beasts of the snow land.

Horses of different species were sometimes present in incredible

numbers. There were species of wild cattle, including the European

bison, and the urus or aurochs--spoken of by Cæsar, and kin to, and

doubtless partly ancestral to, the tame ox. The cave-lion, perhaps

indistinguishable from the modern African lion, was the most formidable

beast of prey. I say "perhaps" indistinguishable, for we cannot be quite

certain. Some of the races of cave-dwelling men were good artists, and

carved spirited figures of mammoth, rhinoceros, bison, horse, reindeer,

and bear on ivory, or on the walls of caves. The big lion-like cats

appear only rarely in these pictures.

In most cases the arctic and warm-temperate or near-tropical animals

supplanted one another only incompletely as the waves of life advanced

and receded when the climate changed. This seems a rather puzzling

conjunction. The explanation is twofold. When the climate changes, when

it becomes warmer, for instance, northern creatures that once were at

home in the lowlands draw off into the neighboring highlands, leaving

their old haunts to newcomers from the south, while nevertheless the two

faunas may be only a few miles apart; just as in Montana and Alberta

moose and caribou in certain places were found side by side with the

prongbuck. Moreover, some species possess an adaptability which their

close kin do not, and can thrive under widely different temperature

conditions. A century ago the hippopotamus was found in the temperate

Cape Colony, close to mountain ranges climatically fit for the typical

beasts of north-temperate Eurasia. In Arizona at the present day mammals

and birds of the Canadian fauna live on the mountain tops around the

bases of which flourish animals characteristic of the tropical Mexican

plateau; the former having been left stranded on high mountain islands

when, with the retreat of the glaciers, the climate of the United States

grew warmer and the tide of southern life-forms swept northward over the

lowlands. Under such conditions the same river deposits might show a

combination of utterly different faunas. Moreover, some modern animals

are found from the arctics to the tropics. The American lynx extends, in

closely connected forms, from the torrid deserts of Mexico to arctic

Alaska; so does the mountain-sheep. The tiger flourishes in the steaming

Malay forests and in snowy Manchuria. I have found the cougar breeding

in the frozen, bitter midwinter among the high Rockies, in a country

where snow covered the ground for six months, and where the caribou

would be entirely at home; and again in Brazil under the equator, in the

atmosphere of a hot-house. There were periods, during the ages before

history dawned, but when man had long dwelt in Europe, in which herds of

reindeer may have roamed the French and English uplands within sight of

rivers wherein the hippopotamus dwelt as comfortably as he recently did

at the Cape of Good Hope.

Some of the more recent of these European hunting savages--those who

were perhaps in part our own forefathers, or who perhaps were of

substantially the same ethnic type as the men of the older race strains

in northeastern Asia, and even possibly of the American Indians--and

many of their more remote predecessors were contemporaries of the lion,

the horse, and the elephant. Different species of horse and elephant

succeeded one another. The earlier ones were contemporaries of the

hippopotamus and of not only the lion but the sabretooth. When the hairy

elephant, the mammoth, was present, the fauna also often included the

cave-lion, cave-hyena, cave-bear, wolf, boar, woolly rhinoceros, many

species of deer (including the moose and that huge fallow deer, the

Irish elk), horses, and the bison and the aurochs. The mammoth and

woolly rhinoceros died out so recently that their carcasses are

discovered preserved in the Siberian ice, and the undigested food in

their stomachs shows that they ate northern plants of the kinds now

common, and the twigs of the conifers and other trees which still

flourish in the boreal realm of both hemispheres.

The lion was doubtless the most dreaded foe of the ancient European,

just as he is to this day of certain African tribes. The Palæolithic

hunters slaughtered myriads of wild horses, just as the ebony-hued

hunters of Africa now slaughter the zebra and feast on its oily flesh.

The spirited carvings and sketches of the hairy mammoth by the later

Palæolithic cave-dwellers show that the elephant of the cold northlands

had impressed their imaginations precisely as the hairless elephant of

the hot south now impresses the imaginations of the tribes that dwell

under the vertical African sun. The rhinoceros and wild cattle of the

pine forests played in their lives the part played in the lives of our

contemporaries, the hunting tribes of Africa, by the rhinoceros and the

buffalo--the African wild ox--which dwell among open forests of acacias

and drink from palm-bordered rivers. They saw no animal like that

strange creature, the African giraffe; and several kinds of deer took

the place of the varied species of bovine ruminants which, in popular

parlance, we group together as antelopes.

Substantially the fauna of mighty beasts which furnished the means of

livelihood, and also constantly offered the menace of death, to our

European forefathers--or to the predecessors of our forefathers--was

like that magnificent fauna which we who have travelled among the

savages of present-day Africa count it one of our greatest pleasures to

have seen. During the ages when the successive races of hunter-savages

dwelt in Europe a similar magnificent fauna of huge and strange beasts

flourished on all the continents of the globe except in Australia. In

Europe it vanished in prehistoric times, when man had long dwelt in the

land. In Africa south of the Sahara, and partially in spots of Asia, it

has persisted to this day. In North America it died out before, or

perhaps, as regards the last stragglers, immediately after, the coming

of man; in South America it seems clear that it survived, at least in

places, until he was well established.

The three abundant and conspicuous beasts, all three typical of the

great mammalian fauna which was contemporary with the prehistoric human

hunters, and all three common to all the continents on which this great

mammalian fauna was found, were the lion--using the name to cover

several species of huge horse-killing and man-killing cats; the

elephant, including several totally different species, among them the

mammoth and mastodon; and the horse, including numerous widely different

species. Together with these three universally distributed animals were

many others belonging to types confined to certain of the continents.

Rhinoceros were found in Europe, Asia, and Africa (they had once

flourished in North America but had died out long before man appeared on

the globe). Camels were found in Asia, in South America, and especially

in North America, which was their centre of abundance and the place

where they had developed. Wild oxen were found in all the continents

except South America; deer everywhere except in true Africa,

zoogeographical Africa, Africa south of the Sahara. The pigs of the Old

World were replaced by the entirely different peccaries of the New

World. Sheep, goats, and goat-antelopes lived in Eurasia and North

America. Most of the groups of big ruminants commonly called "antelopes"

are now confined to Africa; but it appears that formerly various

representatives of them reached America. The giraffe through this period

was purely African; the hippopotamus has retreated to Africa, although

in the period we are considering its range extended to Eurasia. In South

America were many extraordinary creatures totally different from one

another, including ground-sloths as big as elephants. Two or three

outlying representatives of the ground-sloths had wandered into North

America; but elsewhere there were no animals in any way resembling

them. The horse, the lion, and the elephant were the three striking

representatives of this vast and varied fauna which were common to all

five continents.

The North American fauna of this type reached its height about the

time--extending over many scores of thousands of years--when successive

ice ages alternated with long stretches of temperate or subtropical

climate throughout the northern hemisphere. During the period when this

great North American fauna flourished hunter-savages of archaic type

lived amid, and partly on, the great game of Europe. But, as far as we

know, men did not come to America until after, or at the very end of,

the time when these huge grass-eaters and twig-eaters, and the huge

flesh-eaters which preyed on them, vanished from the earth, owing to

causes which in most cases we cannot as yet even guess.

Much the most striking and interesting collection of the remains of this

wonderful fauna is to be found near one of our big cities. On the

outskirts of Los Angeles, in southern California, are asphalt deposits

springing from petroleum beds in the shales below. The oil seeping up to

the surface has formed shallow, spread-out pools and, occasionally, deep

pits covered with water. In part of the area these pits and pools of

tar have existed for scores of thousands or hundreds of thousands of

years, since far back in the Pleistocene. They then acted as very

dangerous and efficient mammal traps and bird traps--and now continue so

to act, for the small mammals and the birds of the neighborhood still

wander into them, get caught in the sticky substance, and die, as I have

myself seen. Moreover the tar serves as a preservative of the bones of

the creatures that thus perish. In consequence some of the ancient pits

and pools are filled with immense masses of the well-preserved bones of

the strange creatures that were smothered in them ages ago.

Nowhere else is there any such assemblage of remains giving such a

nearly complete picture of the fauna of a given region at a given time.

A striking peculiarity is that the skeletons of the flesh-eaters far

surpass in number the skeletons of the plant-eaters. This is something

almost unique, for of course predatory animals are of necessity much

less numerous than the animals on which they prey. The reversal in this

case of the usual proportions between the skeletal remains of

herbivorous and carnivorous beasts and birds is due to the character of

the deposits. The tar round the edges of the pools or pits hardens,

becomes covered with dust, and looks like solid earth; and water often

stands in the tar pits after rain, while at night the shallow pools of

fresh tar look like water. Evidently the big grazing or browsing beasts

now and then wandered out on the hard asphalt next the solid ground, and

suddenly became mired in the soft tar beyond. Probably the pits in which

water stood served as traps year after year as the thirsty herds sought

drink. Then each dead or dying animal became itself a lure for all kinds

of flesh-eating beasts and birds, which in their turn were entrapped in

the sticky mass. In similar manner, thirty years ago on the Little

Missouri, I have known a grizzly bear, a couple of timber-wolves, and

several coyotes to be attracted to the carcass of a steer which had

bogged down in the springtime beside an alkali pool.

Another result of the peculiar conditions under which the skeletons

accumulated is that an unusually large number of very old, very young,

and maimed or crippled creatures were entrapped. Doubtless animals in

full vigor were more apt to work themselves free at the moment when they

found they were caught in the tar; and, moreover, a wolf or sabretooth

which was weakened by age or by wounds received in encounter with its

rivals, or with some formidable quarry, and which therefore found its

usual prey difficult to catch, would be apt to hang around places where

carcasses, or living creatures still feebly struggling, offered

themselves to ravenous appetites.

The plant remains in these deposits show that the climate and vegetation

were substantially those of California to-day, although in some respects

indicating northern rather than southern California. There were

cypress-trees of a kind still common farther north, manzanita, juniper,

and oaks. Evidently the region was one of open, grassy plains varied

with timber belts and groves. It has been said that to support such a

fauna the vegetation must have been much more luxuriant than in this

region at present. This is probably an error. The great game regions of

Africa are those of scanty vegetation. Thick forest holds far less big

animal life. Crossing the sunny Athi or Kapiti plains of East Africa,

where the few trees are thorny, stunted acacias and the low grass is

brown and brittle under the drought, the herds of zebra, hartebeest,

wildebeest, and gazelle are a perpetual delight and wonder; and

elephant, rhinoceros, and buffalo abounded on them in the days before

the white man came. On the Guaso Nyero of the north, and in the Sotik,

the country was even drier at the time of my visit, and the character of

the vegetation showed how light the normal rainfall was. The land was

open, grassy plain, or was thinly covered with thorn scrub, with here

and there acacia groves and narrow belts of thicker timber growth along

the watercourses, and in the Sotik gnarled gray olives. Yet the game

swarmed. We watched the teeming masses come down to drink at the

shrunken rivers or at the dwindling ponds beside which our tents were

pitched. As the line of the safari walked forward under the brazen sky,

while we white men rode at the head with our rifles, the herds of

strange and beautiful wild creatures watched us, with ears pricked

forward, or stood heedless in the thin shade of the trees, their tails

switching ceaselessly at the biting flies. In wealth of numbers, in rich

variety and grandeur of species, the magnificent fauna we then saw was

not substantially inferior to that which an age before dwelt on the

California plains.

This Pleistocene California fauna included many beasts which persisted

in the land until our own day. There were cougars, lynxes,

timber-wolves, gray foxes, coyotes, bears, pronghorn antelopes and

black-tail or white-tail deer nearly, or quite, identical with the

modern forms. They were the same animals which I and my fellow ranchmen

hunted when, in the early eighties of the last century, our branded

cattle were first driven to the Little Missouri. They swarmed on the

upper Missouri and the Yellowstone when Lewis and Clark found the bison

and wapiti so tame that they would hardly move out of the way, while the

grizzly bears slept on the open plains and fearlessly attacked the

travellers. But in the Pleistocene, at the time we are considering, the

day of these modern creatures had only begun. The contents of the

tar-pits show that the animals named above were few in number, compared

to the great beasts with which they were associated.

The giant among these Pleistocene giants of California, probably the

largest mammal that ever walked the earth, was the huge imperial

elephant. This mighty beast stood at least two feet higher than the

colossal African elephant of to-day, which itself is bigger than the

mammoth, and as big as any other extinct elephant. The curved tusks of

the imperial elephant reached a length of sixteen feet. A herd of such

mighty beasts must have been an awe-inspiring sight--had there been

human eyes to see it. Nor were they the only representatives of their

family. A much more archaic type of elephant, the mastodon, flourished

beside its gigantic cousin. The mastodon was a relatively squat

creature, standing certainly four feet shorter than the imperial

elephant, with comparatively small and slightly curved tusks and a

flatter head. Enormous numbers of mastodons ranged over what is now the

United States, and the adjacent parts of Canada and Mexico. The

mastodons represented a stage farther back in the evolutionary line than

the true elephants, and in the Old World they died out completely before

the latter disappeared even from Europe and Siberia. But in North

America, for unknown reasons, they outlasted their more highly developed

kinsfolk and rivals, and there is some ground for believing that they

did not completely disappear until after the arrival of man on this

continent.

The elephant stock developed in the Old World, and it is probable that

the true elephants were geologically recent immigrants to America,

coming across the land bridge which then connected Alaska and Siberia.

In California they encountered the big descendants of other big

immigrants, which had reached North America by another temporary land

bridge, but from another continent, South America. These were the

ground-sloths, giant edentates, which reached an extraordinary

development in the southern half of our hemisphere, where distant and

diminutive relatives--tree-sloths, ant-eaters, armadillos--still live.

The most plentiful of these California ground-sloths, the mylodon, was

about the size of a rhinoceros; an unwieldy, slow-moving creature,

feeding on plants, and in appearance utterly unlike anything now living.

Together with these great beasts belonging to stocks that in recent

geologic time had immigrated hither from the Old World and from the

southern half of the New World was another huge beast of remote native

ancestry. This was a giant camel, with a neck almost like that of a

giraffe. Camels--including llamas--developed in North America. Their

evolutionary history certainly stretched through a period of two or

three million--perhaps four or five million--years on this continent,

reaching back to a little Eocene ancestor no bigger than a jack-rabbit.

Yet after living and developing in the land through these untold ages,

over a period inconceivably long to our apprehension, the camels

completely died out on this continent of their birth, although not

until they had sent branches to Asia and South America, where their

descendants still survive.

Two other grass-eating beasts, of large size--although smaller than the

above--were also plentiful. One, a bison, bigger, straighter-horned and

less specialized than our modern bison, represented the cattle, which

were among the animals that passed to America over the Alaskan land

bridge in Pleistocene time.

The other was a big, coarse-headed horse, much larger than any modern

wild horse, and kin to the then existing giant horse of Texas, which was

the size of a percheron. The horses, like the camels, had gone through

their developmental history on this continent, the earliest ancestor,

the little four-toed "dawn horse" of the Eocene, being likewise the size

of a jack-rabbit. Through millions of years, while myriads of

generations followed one another, the two families developed side by

side, increasing in size and seemingly in adaptation to the environment.

Each stock branched into many different species and genera. They spread

into the Old World and into South America. Then, suddenly,--that is,

suddenly in zoologic sense--both completely died out in their ancient

home, and the horses in South America also, whereas half a dozen very

distinct species are still found in Asia and Africa.

All these great creatures wandered in herds to and fro across the grassy

Californian plains and among the reaches of open forest. Preying upon

them were certain carnivores grimmer and more terrible than any now

existing. The most distinctive and seemingly the most plentiful was the

sabretooth. This was a huge, squat, short-tailed, heavily built cat with

upper canines which had developed to an almost walrus-like length; only,

instead of being round and blunt like walrus tusks, they were sharp,

with a thin, cutting edge, so that they really were entitled to be

called sabres or daggers. Whether the creature was colored like a lion

or like a tiger or like neither, we do not know, for it had no

connection with either save its remote kinship with all the cats. The

sabretooth cats, like the true cats, had gone through an immensely long

period of developmental history in North America, although they did not

appear here as early as the little camels and horses. Far back across

the ages, at or just after the close of the Eocene--the "dawn age" of

mammalian life--certain moderate-sized or small cat-like creatures

existed on this continent, doubtless ancestral to the sabretooth, but

so generalized in type that they display close affinities with the true

cats, and even on certain points with the primitive dog creatures of the

time. Age followed age--Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene. The continents

rose and sank and were connected and disconnected. Vast lakes appeared

and disappeared. Mountain chains wore down and other mountain chains

were thrust upward. Periods of heat, during which rich forests

flourished north of the arctic circle, were followed by periods of cold,

when the glacial ice-cap crept down half-way across the present

temperate zone. Slowly, slowly, while the surface of the world thus

changed, and through innumerable reaches of time, the sabretooth cats

and true cats developed along many different lines in both the Old World

and the New. One form of sabretooth was in Europe with the bestial

near-human things who were the immediate predecessors of the first low

but entirely human savages. It was in the two Americas, however, that

the sabretooth line culminated, immediately before its final extinction,

in its largest and most formidable forms. This California sabretooth was

not taller than a big cougar or leopard, but was probably as heavy as a

fair-sized lion. Its skeletal build is such that it cannot have been an

agile creature, apt at the pursuit of light and swift prey. By rugged

strength and by the development of its terrible stabbing and cutting

dagger teeth, that is, by sheer fighting ability, it was fitted for

attack upon and battle with the massive herbivores then so plentiful. It

must indeed have been a fearsome beast in close grapple. Doubtless with

its sharp, retractile claws it hung onto the huge bodies of elephant,

camel, and ground-sloth, of horse and bison, while the sabres were

driven again and again into the mortal parts of the prey and slashed the

flesh as they withdrew. It seems possible that the mouth was opened wide

and stabbing blows delivered, almost as a rattlesnake strikes with

raised fangs. Vast numbers of sabretooth skeletons have been found in

the asphalt; evidently the strange, formidable creature haunted any

region which held attraction for the various kinds of heavy game on

which it preyed.

The only other carnivore as abundant as the sabretooth was a giant wolf.

This was heavier than any existing wolf, with head and teeth still

larger in proportion. The legs were comparatively light. Evidently, like

the sabretooth, this giant wolf had become specialized as a beast of

battle, fitted to attack and master the bulky browsers and grazers, but

not to overtake those that were smaller and swifter. The massive jaws

and teeth could smash heavy bones and tear the toughest hide; and a

hungry pack of these monsters, able to assail in open fight any quarry

no matter how fierce or powerful, must have spread dire havoc and dismay

among all things that could not escape by flight.

There were two still larger predatory species, which were much less

plentiful than either the wolf or the sabretooth. One was a short-faced

cave-bear, far larger than even the huge Alaskan bear of to-day.

Doubtless it took toll of the herds; but bears are omnivorous beasts,

and not purely predatory in the sense that is true of those finished

killers, the wolves and big cats. Unlike the wolves and cats, bears were

geologically recent immigrants to America.

The other was a true cat, a mighty beast; bigger than the African lion

of to-day; indeed, perhaps the biggest and most powerful lion-like or

tiger-like cat that ever existed. Seemingly it was much rarer than the

sabretooth; but it is possible that this seeming rarity was due to its

not lurking in the neighborhood of pools and licks but travelling more

freely over the wastes, being of a build fit not only for combat but for

an active and wandering life. It is usually spoken of as kin to the

African lion, a decidedly smaller beast. It is possible that its real

kinship lies with the tiger. The Manchurian form of the tiger is an

enormous beast, and a careful comparison of the skulls and skeletons may

show that it equals in size the huge western American cat of Pleistocene

times. I have already spoken of the fact that in many cases it is almost

impossible to distinguish the lion and tiger apart by the bones alone;

and it may be that the exact affinities of these recently extinct

species with living forms cannot be definitely determined. But during

historic and prehistoric times the lion has been a beast of western

Eurasia and of Africa. The tiger, on the contrary, is and has been a

beast of eastern Asia, and apparently has been spreading westward and

perhaps southward--that it was not as ancient an inhabitant of

jungle-covered southern India as the elephant and leopard seems probable

from the fact that it is not found in Ceylon, which island in all

likelihood preserves most of the southern Indian fauna that existed

prior to its separation from the mainland. Moreover, the finest form of

tiger exists in cold northeastern Asia. In Pleistocene times this

portion of Asia was connected by a broad land bridge with western

America, where the mighty American cat then roved and preyed on the

herds of huge plant-eating beasts. We know that many Asiatic beasts

crossed over this land bridge--the bears, bison, mountain-sheep, moose,

caribou, and wapiti, which still live both in Asia and North America,

and the mammoth and cave-bears, which have died out on both continents.

It is at least possible--further investigation may or may not show it to

be more than possible--that the huge Pleistocene cat of western America

was the collateral ancestor of the Manchurian tiger. Whether it was

another immigrant from Asia, or a developed form of some big American

Pliocene cat, cannot with our present knowledge be determined.

Surely the thought of this vast and teeming, and utterly vanished wild

life, must strongly appeal to every man of knowledge and love of nature,

who is gifted with the imaginative power to visualize the past and to

feel the keen delight known only to those who care intensely both for

thought and for action, both for the rich experience acquired by toil

and adventure, and for the rich experience obtained through books

recording the studies of others.

Doubtless such capacity of imaginative appreciation is of no practical

help to the hunter of big game to-day, any more than the power to

visualize the long-vanished past in history helps a practical politician

to do his ordinary work in the present workaday world. The governor of

Gibraltar or of Aden, who cares merely to do his own intensely practical

work, need know nothing whatever about any history more ancient than

that of the last generation. But this is not true of the traveller. It

is not even true of the politician who wishes to get full enjoyment out

of life without shirking its duties. He certainly must not become a mere

dreamer, or believe that his dreams will help him in practical action.

But joy, just for joy's sake, has its place too, and need in no way

interfere with work; and, of course, this is as true of the joy of the

mind as of the joy of the body. As a man steams into the Mediterranean

between the African coast and the "purple, painted headlands" of Spain,

it is well for him if he can bring before his vision the galleys of the

Greek and Carthaginian mercantile adventurers, and of the conquering

Romans; the boats of the wolf-hearted Arabs; the long "snakes" of the

Norse pirates, Odin's darlings; the stately and gorgeous war craft of

Don John, the square-sailed ships of the fighting Dutch admirals, and

the lofty three-deckers of Nelson, the greatest of all the masters of

the sea. Aden is like a furnace between the hot sea and the hot sand;

but at the sight of the old rock cisterns, carved by forgotten hands,

one realizes why on that coast of barren desolation every maritime

people in turn, from the mists that shroud an immemorial antiquity to

our own day of fevered materialistic civilization, has seized Aden

Bay--Egyptian, Sabean, Byzantine, Turk, Persian, Portuguese, Englishman;

and always, a few miles distant, in the thirsty sands, the changeless

desert folk have waited until pride spent itself and failed, and the new

power passed, as each old power had passed, and then the merciless men

of the waste once more claimed their own.

Gibraltar and Aden cannot mean to the unimaginative what they mean to

the men of vision, to the men stirred by the hero tales of the past, by

the dim records of half-forgotten peoples. These men may or may not do

their work as well as others, but their gifts count in the joy of

living. Enjoyment the same in kind comes to the man who can clothe with

flesh the dry bones of bygone ages, and can see before his eyes the

great beasts, hunters and hunted, the beasts so long dead, which

thronged the Californian land at a time when in all its physical

features it had already become essentially what it still continues to

be.

The beast life of this prehistoric California must be called ancient by

a standard which would adjudge the Egyptian pyramids and the

Mesopotamian palace mounds and the Maya forest temples to be modern. Yet

when expressed in geologic terms it was but of yesterday. When it

flourished the Eurasian hunting savages were in substantially the same

stage of progress as the African hunting savages who now live surrounded

by a similar fauna. On the whole, taking into account the number,

variety, and size of the great beasts, the fauna which surrounded

Palæolithic man in Europe was inferior to that amid which dwell the

black-skinned savages of equatorial Africa. Even Africa, however,

although unmatched in its wealth of antelopes, cannot quite parallel,

with its lion, elephant, and zebras, the lordlier elephant, the great

horse, and the huge cat of the earlier Californian fauna; and the

giraffe, the hyena, the rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus do not quite

offset the sabretooth, the giant wolf, the mastodon, the various species

of enormous ground-sloths, and the huge camel; the bison and buffalo

about balance each other.

There were no human eyes to see nor human ears to hear what went on in

southern California when it held an animal life as fierce and strange

and formidable as mid-Africa to-day. The towering imperial elephants and

the burly mastodons trumpeted their approach one to the other. The great

camels, striding noiselessly on their padded feet, passed the clumsy

ground-sloths on their way to water. The herds of huge horses and bison

drank together in pools where the edges were trodden into mire by

innumerable hoofs. All these creatures grew alertly on guard when the

shadows lengthened and the long-drawn baying of the wolf pack heralded

the night of slaughter and of fear; and the dusk thrilled with the

ominous questing yawns of sabretooth and giant tiger, as the beasts of

havoc prowled abroad from their day lairs among the manzanitas, or under

cypress and live-oak.

The tar-pools caught birds as well as beasts. Most of these birds were

modern--vultures, eagles, geese, herons. But there were condor-like

birds twice the size of any living condor, the biggest birds, so far as

we know, that ever flew. There were also, instead of wild turkeys, great

quantities of wild peacocks--at least they have been identified as

peacocks or similar big, pheasant-like birds. If the identification is

correct, this is an unexpected discovery and a fresh proof of how this

extinct American fauna at so many points resembled that of Asia. It was

natural that a collateral ancestor of the present Asiatic pheasant-like

birds should dwell beside a collateral ancestor of the present Asiatic

tiger.[1]

Moreover, the tar-pools hold human bones. These, however, are probably

of much later date than the magnificent fauna above described, perhaps

only a few thousand years old. They belong to a rather advanced type of

man. It is probable that before man came to America at all, the earlier

types had died out in Eurasia, or had been absorbed and developed, or

else had been thrust southward into Africa, Tasmania, Australia, and

remote forest tracts of Indo-Malaysia, where, being such backward

savages, they never developed anything remotely resembling a

civilization. It was probably people kin to some of the later

cave-dwellers who furnished the first (and perhaps until the advent of

the white man the only important) immigration to America. These

immigrants, the ancestors of all the tribes of Indians, spread from

Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Over most of the territory in both Americas

they remained at the hunting stage of savage life, although they

generally supplemented their hunting by a certain amount of cultivation

of the soil, and although in places they developed into advanced and

very peculiar culture communities.

When these savages reached North America it is likely, from our present

knowledge, that the terrible and magnificent Pleistocene fauna had

vanished, although in places the last survivors of the mastodon, and

perhaps of one or two other forms, may still have lingered. What were

the causes of this wide-spread, and complete, and--geologically

speaking--sudden extermination of so many and so varied types of great

herbivorous creatures, we cannot say. It may be we can never do more

than guess at them. It is certainly an extraordinary thing that complete

destruction should have suddenly fallen on all, literally all, of the

species. Camels and horses, after they had dwelt on this continent for

millions of years, since almost the dawn of mammalian life, developing

from little beasts the size of woodchucks into the largest and most

stately creatures of their kind that ever trod the earth's surface, all

at once disappeared to the very last individual. Ground-sloths and

elephants vanished likewise. The bigger forms of bison also died out,

although one species remained. Many causes of extinction have been

suggested. Perhaps all of them were more or less operative. Perhaps

others of which we know nothing were operative. We cannot say.

But as regards certain of the formidable, but heavy rather than active,

beasts of prey it is possible to hazard a guess. Compared to agile

destroyers like the cougar and the timber-wolf, the sabretooth and the

big-headed, small-legged giant wolf were strong, heavy, rather clumsy

creatures. Predatory animals of their kind were beasts of battle rather

than beasts of the chase. They were fitted to overcome by downright

fighting strength a big, slow, self-confident quarry, rather than to run

down a swift and timid quarry by speed or creep up to a wary and timid

quarry by sinuous stealth. So long as the heavy herbivores were the most

numerous these fighting carnivores were dominant over their sly, swift,

slinking brethren. But when the great mass of plant-eaters grew to

trust to speed and vigilance for their safety there was no longer room

for preying beasts of mere prowess.

In South America it is probable that the heavy fauna died out much later

than in North America and northern Eurasia; that is, it died out much

later than in what zoogeographers call the holarctic realm. During most

of the Tertiary period or age of mammals, the period intervening between

the close of the age of great reptiles and the time when man in human

form appeared on the planet, South America was an island, and its faunal

history was as distinct and peculiar as that of Australia. Aside from

marsupials and New World monkeys, its most characteristic animals were

edentates and very queer ungulates with no resemblance to those of any

other continent. Toward the close of the Tertiary land bridges connected

the two Americas, and an interchange of faunas followed. The South

American fauna was immensely enriched by the incoming of elephants,

horses, sabretooth cats, true cats, camels, bears, tapirs, peccaries,

deer, and dogs, all of which developed along new and individual lines. A

few of these species, llamas and tapirs for instance, still persist in

South America although they have died out in the land from which they

came. But in the end, and also for unknown causes, this great fauna

died out in South America likewise, leaving a continent faunistically

even more impoverished than North America. The great autochthonous forms

shared the extinction of the big creatures of the immigrant fauna; for

under stress of competition with the newcomers, the ancient ungulates

and edentates had developed giants of their own.

Recent discoveries have shown that the extinction was not complete when

the ancestors of the Indians of to-day reached the southern Andes and

the Argentine plains. An age previously the forefathers of these

newcomers had lived in a land with the wild horse, the wild elephant,

and the lion; and now, at the opposite end of the world, they had

themselves reached such a land. The elephants were mastodons of peculiar

type; the horses were of several kinds, some resembling modern horses,

others differing from them in leg and skull formation more than any of

the existing species of ass, horse, or zebra differ from one another;

the huge cats probably resembled some other big modern feline more than

they did the lion. Associated with them were many great beasts, whose

like does not now exist on earth. The sabretooth was there, as

formidable as his brother of the north, and, like this brother, bigger

and more specialized than any of his Old World kin, which were probably

already extinct. Among the ungulates of native origin was the

long-necked, high-standing macrauchenia, shaped something like a huge,

humpless camel or giraffe, and with a short proboscis. This animal

doubtless browsed among the trees. Another native ungulate, the toxodon,

as big and heavily made as a rhinoceros, was probably amphibious, and

had teeth superficially resembling those of a rodent. The edentates not

only included various ground-sloths, among them the megatherium, which

was the size of an elephant, and the somewhat smaller mylodon, but also

creatures as fantastic as those of a nightmare. These were the

glyptodons, which were bulkier than oxen and were clad in defensive

plate-armor more complete than that of an armadillo; in one species the

long, armored tail terminated in a huge spiked knob, like that of some

forms of mediæval mace.

The glyptodons doubtless trusted for protection to their mailed coats.

The ground-sloths had no armor. Like the terrestrial ant-bear of Brazil

they walked slowly on the outer edges of their fore feet, which were

armed with long and powerful digging claws. They could neither flee nor

hide; and it seems a marvel that they could have held their own in the

land against the big cats and sabretooth. Yet they persisted for ages,

and spread northward from South America. It is hard to account for this.

But it is just as hard to account for certain phenomena that are

occurring before our very eyes. While journeying through the interior of

Brazil I not infrequently came across the big tamandua, the ant-bear or

ant-eater. We found it not only in the forests but out on the marshes

and prairies. It is almost as big as a small black bear. In its native

haunts it is very conspicuous, both because of its size and its

coloration, and as it never attempts to hide it is always easily seen.

It is so slow that a man can run it down on foot. It has no teeth, and

its long, curved snout gives its small head an almost bird-like look.

Its fore paws, armed with long, digging claws, are turned in, and it

walks on their sides. It is long-haired and thick-hided, colored black

and white, and with a long, bushy tail held aloft; and as it retreats at

a wabbly canter, its brush shaking above its back, it looks anything but

formidable. Yet it is a gallant fighter, and can inflict severe wounds

with its claws, as well as hugging with its powerful fore legs; and if

menaced it will itself fearlessly assail man or dog. When chased by

hounds, in the open, I have seen one instantly throw itself on its back,

in which position it was much more dangerous to the hounds than they

were to it. Doubtless if attacked by a jaguar--and we killed jaguars in

the immediate neighborhood--it would, if given a moment's warning, have

defended itself in the same fashion. I suppose that this defense would

be successful; for otherwise it seems incredible that such a

conspicuous, slow-moving beast can exist at all in exactly the places

where jaguars, able to kill a cow or horse, are plentiful. But, even so,

it is difficult to understand how it has been able to persist for ages

in company with the great spotted cat, the tyrant of the Brazilian

wilderness. At any rate, with this example before us, we need not wonder

overmuch at the ability of megatherium and mylodon to hold their own in

the presence of the sabretooth.

In the late fall of 1913, as previously described, I motored north from

the beautiful Andean lake, Nahuel Huapi, through the stony Patagonian

plains to the Rio Negro. The only wild things of any size that we saw

were the rheas, or South American ostriches, and a couple of guanacos,

or wild llamas, small, swift, humpless camels, of which the ancestral

forms were abundant in the North American Miocene. But one of my

companions, the distinguished Argentine explorer, educator, and man of

science, Francisco Moreno, had some years previously made a discovery

which showed that not many thousand years back, when the Indians had

already come into the land, the huge and varied fauna of the Pleistocene

still lingered at the foot of the Andes. He had found a cave in which

savage men had dwelt; and in the cave were the remains of the animals

which they had killed, or which had entered the cave at times when its

human tenants were absent. Besides the weapons and utensils of the

savages, he had found the grass which they had used for beds, and

enclosures walled with stones for purposes of which he could not be

sure. It will be remembered that in the cave-home of the 'Ndorobo which

Kermit found there were beds of grass, and enclosures walled with brush,

in which their dogs were kept. Whether these early Patagonian Indians

had dogs I do not know; but many African tribes build low stone walls as

foundations for sheds used for different purposes; and sometimes, among

savages, it is absolutely impossible to guess the use to which a given

structure is put unless it is actually seen in use--exactly as

sometimes it is wholly impossible to divine what a particular specimen

of savage pictorial art indicates unless the savage is there to explain

it to his civilized brother.

Among the signs of human occupation Doctor Moreno found, well preserved

in the cold cave, not only the almost fresh bones, but even pieces of

the skin, of certain extinct animals. Among the species whose bones were

found were the macrauchenia, tiger, horse, and mylodon. When Doctor

Moreno said tiger, I asked if he did not mean jaguar; but he said no,

that he meant a huge cat like an Old World lion or tiger; I do not know

with what modern feline its affinities were closest. The discovery of

the comparatively fresh remains of the horse gave rise in some quarters

to the belief that it was possible this species of horse survived to the

day the Spaniards came to the Argentine and was partly ancestral to the

modern Argentine horse; but the supposition is untenable, for the horse

in question represents a very archaic and peculiar type, with

specialized legs and an extraordinary skull, and could not possibly have

had anything to do with the production of the wild, or rather feral,

horses of the pampas and the Patagonian plains. Of the mylodon Doctor

Moreno found not only comparatively fresh bones, with bits of sinew,

but dried dung--almost as large as that of an elephant--and some big

pieces of skin. The skin was clothed with long, coarse hair, and small

ossicles were set into it, making minute bony plates. Doctor Moreno gave

me a fragment of the skin, and also bones and dung; they are now in the

American Museum of Natural History. The discovery gave rise to much

fanciful conjecture; it was even said that the mylodon had been

domesticated and kept tame in the caves; but Doctor Moreno laughed at

the supposition and said that it lacked any foundation in fact. He also

said that, contrary to what has sometimes been asserted, the age of the

remains must be estimated in thousands, possibly ten thousands, and

certainly not hundreds, of years.

There is no need of fanciful guesswork in order to enhance the startling

character of the discovery. It seems to show beyond question that the

early hunting savages of southernmost South America lived among the

representatives of a huge fauna, now wholly extinct, just as was true of

the earlier, and far more primitive, hunting savages of Europe.

Save in tropical Africa and in portions of hither and farther India this

giant fauna has now everywhere died out. In most regions, and in the

earlier stages, man had little or nothing to do with its destruction.

But during the last few thousand years he has been the chief factor in

the extermination of the great creatures wherever he has established an

industrial or agricultural civilization or semicivilization. The big cat

he has warred against in self-defense. The elephant in India has been

kept tame or half tame. The Old World horse has been tamed and

transplanted to every portion of the temperate zones, and to the dry or

treeless portions of the torrid zone.

Around the Mediterranean, the cradle of the ancient culture of our race,

we have historic record of the process. Over three thousand years ago

the Egyptian and Mesopotamian kings hunted the elephant in Syria. A

thousand years later the elephant was a beast of war in the armies of

the Greeks, the Carthaginians, and the Romans. Twenty-five hundred years

ago the lion was a dreaded beast of ravin in the Balkan Peninsula and

Palestine, as he was a hundred years ago in North Africa; now he is to

be found south of the Atlas, or, nearing extinction, east of the

Euphrates. Seemingly the horse was tamed long after the more homely

beasts, the cattle, swine, goats, and sheep. He was not a beast for

peaceful uses; he was the war-horse, whose neck was clothed with

thunder, who pawed the earth when he heard the shouting of the captains.

At first he was used not for riding, but to draw the war chariots.

Rameses and the Hittites decided their great battles by chariot charges;

the mighty and cruel Assyrian kings rode to war and hunting in chariots;

the Homeric Greeks fought in chariots; Sisera ruled the land with his

chariots of iron; and long after they had been abandoned elsewhere war

chariots were used by the champions of Erin. Cavalry did not begin to

supersede them until less than a thousand years before our era; and from

that time until gunpowder marked the beginning of the modern era the

horse decided half the great battles of history.

But with this process primitive man had nothing to do. He was and, in

the few remote spots where he still exists unchanged, he is wholly

unable even to conceive of systematic war against the lion, or of trying

to tame the horse or elephant. These three, alone among the big beasts

of the giant fauna in which the age of mammals had culminated, once

throve in vast numbers from the Cape of Good Hope and the valley of the

Nile northward to the Rhone and the Danube, eastward across India and

Siberia, and from Hudson Bay to the Straits of Magellan. They were

dominant figures in the life of all the five continents when primitive

man had struggled upward from the plane of his ape-like ancestors and

had become clearly human. For ages he was too feeble to be as much of a

factor in their lives as they were in the lives of one another; and in

North America he never became such a factor. The great man-killing cat

was his dreaded enemy, to be fought only under the strain of direst

need. The horse became a favorite prey when he grew cunning enough to

devise snares and weapons. The elephant he feared and respected for its

power and occasional truculence, and endeavored to destroy on the

infrequent occasions when chance gave an opening to his own crafty

ferocity.

All this is true, at the present day, in portions of mid-Africa. I have

been with tribes whom only fear or imminent starvation could drive to

attack the lion; and I have seen the naked warriors of the Nandi kill

the great, maned manslayer with their spears. Again and again, as an

offering of peace and good-will, I have shot zebras for natives who

greedily longed for its flesh. My son and I killed a rogue elephant bull

at the earnest petition of a small Uganda tribe whose crops he had

destroyed, whose field watchers he had killed, and whose village he

menaced with destruction.

Of all the wonderful great beasts with which primitive man in his most

primitive forms has been associated, the three with which on the whole

this association was most wide-spread in time and space, were the horse,

the lion, and the elephant.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Professor J. C. Merriam, of the University of California,

first studied this fauna. The excavations are now being carried on by

Director Frank S. Daggett, of the capital Museum of Los Angeles County.

I have spoken above of the vast herds of game encountered over a century

ago by Lewis and Clark on the upper Missouri. The journals of these two

explorers form an American classic, and they have found a worthy editor

in Reuben Gold Thwaites; there could not be an edition more satisfactory

from every standpoint--including that of good taste. In anthropology I

follow the views of Fairfield Osborne and Ales Hrdlicka; I am not

competent to decide as to the points where they differ; and they would

be the first to say that some of the hypotheses they advance must be

accepted as provisional until our knowledge is greater.]