DID MAN EXIST BEFORE THE DRIFT?
FIRST, let us ask ourselves this question, Did man exist before the
Drift?
If he did, he must have survived it; and he could hardly have passed
through it without some remembrance of such a terrible event
surviving in the traditions of the race.
If he did not exist before the Drift, of course, no myths descriptive
of it could have come down to us.
This preliminary question must, then, be settled by testimony.
Let us call our witnesses
"The palæolithic hunter of the mid and late Pleistocene
river-deposits in Europe belongs, as we have already shown, to a
fauna which arrived in Britain before the lowering of the temperature
produced glaciers and icebergs in our country; he may, therefore, be
viewed as being probably pre-glacial."[1]
Man had spread widely over the earth before the Drift; therefore, he
had lived long on the earth. His remains have been found in Scotland,
England, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Greece; in Africa, in
Palestine, in India, and in the United States.[2]
"Man was living in the valley of the lower Thames before the Arctic
mammalia had taken full possession of
[1. Dawkins's "Early Man in Britain," p. 169.
2. Ibid., pp. 165, 166.]
{p. 122 }
the valley of the Thames, and before the big-nosed rhinoceros had
become extinct."[1]
Mr. Tidderman[2] writes that, among a number of bones obtained during
the exploration of the Victoria Cave, near Settle, Yorkshire, there
is one which Mr. Busk has identified as _human_. Mr. Busk says:
"The bone is, I have no doubt, human; a portion of an unusually
clumsy fibula, and in that respect not unlike the same bone in the
Mentone skeleton."
The deposit from which the bone was obtained is overlaid "by a bed of
stiff glacial clay, containing ice-scratched bowlders." "Here then,"
says Geikie, "is direct proof that men lived in England prior to the
last inter-glacial period."[3]
The evidences are numerous, as I have shown, that when these deposits
came upon the earth the face of the land was above the sea, and
occupied by plants and animals.
###
SECTION AT ST. ACHEUL.
The accompanying cut, taken from Sir John Lubbock's "Prehistoric
Times," page 364, represents the strata at St. Acheul, near Amiens,
France.
[1. Dawkins's "Early Man in Britain," p. 137.
2. "Nature," November 6, 1873.
3. "The Great Ice Age," p. 475.]
{p. 123}
The upper stratum (_a_) represents a brick earth, four to five feet
in thickness, and containing a few angular flints. The next (_b_) is
a thin layer of angular gravel, one to two feet in thickness. The
next (_c_) is a bed of sandy marl, five to six feet in thickness. The
lowest deposit (_d_) _immediately overlies the chalk_; it is a bed of
partially rounded gravel, and, in this, _human implements of flint
have been found_. The spot was used in the early Christian period as
a cemetery; _f_ represents one of the graves, made fifteen hundred
years ago; _e_ represents one of the ancient coffins, of which only
the nails and clamps are left, every particle of the wood having
perished.
And, says Sir John Lubbock:
"It is especially at the _lower part_" of these lowest deposits "that
the flint implements occur."
The bones of the mammoth, the wild bull, the deer, the horse, the
rhinoceros, and the reindeer are found near the bottom of these
strata mixed with the flint implements of men.
"All the fossils belong to animals which live on land; . . . we find
no marine remains."[2]
Remember that the Drift is unfossiliferous and unstratified; that it
fell _en masse_, and that these remains are found in its lower part,
or _caught between it and the rocks below it_, and you can form a
vivid picture of the sudden and terrible catastrophe. The trees were
imbedded with man and the animals; the bones of men, smaller and more
friable, probably perished, ground up in the tempest, while only
their flint implements and the great bones of the larger animals,
hard as stones, remain to tell the dreadful story. And yet some human
bones
[1. "Prehistoric Times," p. 366.
2. Ibid., pp. 366, 367.]
{p. 124}
have been found; a lower jaw-bone was discovered in a pit at
Moulinguignon, and a skull and other bones were found in the valley
of the Seine by M. Bertrand.[1]
And these discoveries have not been limited to river-gravels. In the
Shrub Hill gravel-bed in England, "_in the lowest part of it_,
numerous flint implements of the palæolithic type have been
discovered."[2]
We have, besides these sub-drift remains, the skulls of men who
probably lived before the great cataclysm,--men who may have looked
upon the very comet that smote the world. They represent two widely
different races. One is "the Engis skull," so called from the cave of
Engis, near Liége, where it was found by Dr. Schmerling. "It is a
fair average human skull, which might," says Huxley, "have belonged
to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a
savage."[3] It represents a
###
THE ENGIS SKULL.
civilized, if not a cultivated, race of men. It may represent a
victim, a prisoner, held for a cannibalistic feast or a trader from a
more civilized region.
[1. "Prehistoric Times," p. 360.
2. Ibid., p. 351.
3. "Man's Place in Nature," p. 156.]
{p. 125}
In another cave, in the Neanderthal, near Hochdale, between
Düsseldorf and Elberfeld, a skull was found which is the most
ape-like of all known human crania. The mail to whom it belonged must
have been a barbarian brute of the rudest possible type. Here is a
representation of it.
###
THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL.
I beg the reader to remember these skulls when he comes to read, a
little further on, the legend told by an American Indian tribe of
California, describing the marriage between the daughter of the gods
and a son of the grizzly bears, from which union, we are told, came
the Indian tribes. These skulls represent creatures as far apart, I
was about to say, as gods and bears. The "Engis skull," with its full
frontal brain-pan, its fine lines, and its splendidly arched dome,
tells us of ages of cultivation and development in some favored
center of the race; while the horrible and beast-like proportions of
"the Neanderthal skull" speak, with no less certainty, of
undeveloped, brutal, savage man, only a little above the gorilla in
capacity;--a prowler, a robber, a murderer, a cave-dweller, a
cannibal, a Cain.
{p. 126}
We shall see, as we go on in the legends of the races on both sides
of the Atlantic, that they all looked to some central land, east of
America and west of Europe, some island of the ocean, where dwelt a
godlike race, and where alone, it would seem, the human race was
preserved to repeople the earth, while these brutal representatives
of the race, the Neanderthal people, were crushed out.
And this is not mere theorizing. It is conceded, as the result of
most extensive scientific research:
1. That the great southern mammalia perished in Europe when the Drift
came upon the earth.
2. It is conceded that these two skulls are associated with the bones
of these locally extinct animals, mingled together in the same
deposits.
3. The conclusion is, therefore, logically irresistible, that these
skulls belonged to men who lived during or before the Drift Age.
Many authorities support this proposition that man--palæolithic man,
man of the mammoth and the mastodon--existed in the caves of Europe
before the Drift.
"After having occupied the English caves for untold ages, palæolithic
man disappeared for ever, and with him vanished many animals now
either locally or wholly extinct."[1]
Above the remains of man in these caves comes a deposit of
stalagmite, twelve feet in thickness, indicating a vast period of
time during which it was being formed, and during this time _man was
absent_.[2]
Above this stalagmite comes another deposit of cave-earth:
"The deposits immediately _overlying_ the stalagmite and cave-earth
contain an almost _totally different assemblage_
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 411.
2. Ibid., p. 411.]
{p. 127}
_of animal remains_, along with relics of the neolithic, bronze,
iron, and historic periods.
"There is no passage, but, on the contrary, a _sharp and abrupt
break_ between these later deposits and the underlying palæolithic
accumulations."[1]
Here we have the proof that man inhabited these caves for ages before
the Drift; that he perished with the great mammals and disappeared;
and that the twelve feet of stalagmite were formed while no men and
few animals dwelt in Europe. But some fragment of the human race had
escaped elsewhere, in some other region; there it multiplied and
replenished the earth, and gradually extended and spread again over
Europe, and reappeared in the cave-deposits above the stalagmite.
And, in like manner, the animals gradually came in from the regions
on which the Drift had not fallen.
But the revelations of the last few years prove, not only that man
lived during the Drift age, and that he dwelt on the earth when the
Drift fell, but that he can be traced backward for ages before the
Drift; and that he was contemporary with species of great animals
that had run their course, and ceased to exist centuries, perhaps
thousands of years, before the Drift.
I quote a high authority:
"Most of the human relics of any sort have been found in the more
recent layers of the Drift. They have been discovered, however, not
only in the older Drift, but also, though very rarely, _in the
underlying Tertiary_. For instance, in the Upper Pliocene at St.
Prest, near Chartres, were found stone implements and cuttings on
bone, in connection with relics of a long-extinct elephant (_Elephas
meridionalis_) _that is wholly lacking in the Drift_. During the past
two years the evidences of human existence in the Tertiary period, i.
e., previous to the age of mammoths
[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 411.]
{p. 128}
of the Diluvial period, have multiplied, and by their multiplication
give cumulative confirmation to each other. Even in the lower strata
of the Miocene (the middle Tertiary) important discoveries of stone
knives and bone-cuttings have been made, as at Thenay, department of
Marne-et-Loire, and Billy, department of Allier, France. Professor J.
D. Whitney, the eminent State geologist of California, reports
similar discoveries there also. So, then, we may believe that before
the last great upheaval of the Alps and Pyrenees, and while the yet
luxuriant vegetation of the then (i. e., in the Tertiary period)
paradisaic climate yet adorned Central Europe, man inhabited this
region."[1]
We turn to the American Continent and we find additional proofs of
man's pre-glacial existence. The "American Naturalist," 1873, says:
"The discoveries that are constantly being made in this country are
proving that man existed on this continent as far back in geological
time as on the European Continent; and it even seems that America,
really the Old World, geologically, will soon prove to be the
birthplace of the earliest race of man. One of the late and important
discoveries is that by Mr. E. L. Berthoud, which is given in full,
with a map, in the 'Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of
Sciences for 1872,' p. 46. Mr. Berthoud there reports the discovery
of ancient fire-places, rude stone monuments, and implements of stone
in great number and variety, in several places along Crow Creek, in
Colorado, and also on several other rivers in the vicinity. These
fire-places indicate several ancient sites of an unknown race
differing entirely from the mound-builders and the present Indians,
while the shells and other fossils found with the remains make it
quite certain that the deposit in which the ancient sites are found
_is as old as the Pliocene, and perhaps as the Miocene_. As the
fossil shells found with the relies of man are of estuary forms, and
as the sites of the ancient towns are on extended
[1. "Popular Science Monthly," April, 1875, p. 682.]
{p. 129}
points of land, and at the base of the ridges or bluffs, Mr. Berthoud
thinks the evidence is strongly in favor of the locations having been
near some ancient fresh-water lake, whose vestiges the present
topography of the region favors."
I quote the following from the "Scientific American" (1880):
"The finding of numerous relies of a buried race on an ancient
horizon, _from twenty to thirty feet below the present level of
country in Missouri and Kansas_, has been noted. The St. Louis
'Republican' gives particulars of another find of an unmistakable
character made last spring (1880) in Franklin County, Missouri, by
Dr. R. W. Booth, who was engaged in iron-mining about three miles
from Dry Branch, a station on the St. Louis and Santa Fé Railroad. At
a depth of _eighteen feet below the surface_ the miners uncovered a
human skull, with portions of the ribs, vertebral column, and
collar-bone. With them were found two flint arrow-heads of the most
primitive type, imperfect in shape and barbed. _A few pieces of
charcoal were also found_ at the same time and place. Dr. Booth was
fully aware of the importance of the discovery, and tried to preserve
everything found, but upon touching the skull it crumbled to dust,
and some of the other bones broke into small pieces and partly
crumbled away; but enough was preserved to fully establish the fact
that they are human bones.
"Some fifteen or twenty days subsequent to the first finding, at a
depth of _twenty-four feet below the surface_, other bones were
found--a thigh-bone and a portion of the vertebra, and several pieces
of _charred wood, the bones apparently belonging to the first-found
skeleton_. In both cases the bones rested on a fibrous stratum,
suspected at the time to be a fragment of coarse matting. This lay
upon a floor of soft _but solid iron-ore_, which retained the imprint
of the fibers. . . .
"The indications are that the filled cavity had originally been a
sort of cave, and that the supposed matting was more probably a layer
of twigs, rushes, or weeds, which the inhabitants of the cave had
used as a bed, as the fiber
{p. 130}
marks cross each other irregularly. The ore-bed in which the remains
were found, and part of which seems to have formed after the period
of human occupation of the cave, lies in the second (or saccharoidal)
sandstone of the Lower Silurian."
Note the facts: The remains of this man are found separated--part are
eighteen feet below the surface, part twenty-four feet--that is, they
are _six feet apart_. How can we account for this condition of
things, except by supposing that the poor savage had rushed for
safety to his shallow rock-shelter, and had there been caught by the
world-tempest, and _torn to pieces_ and deposited in fragments with
the _débris_ that filled his rude home?
In California we encounter a still more surprising state of things.
The celebrated Calaveras skull was found in a shaft _one hundred and
fifty feet deep_, under five beds of lava and volcanic tufa, and four
beds of auriferous gravel.
The accompanying cut represents a plummet found in digging a well in
the San Joaquin Valley, California, _thirty feet below the surface_.
###
PLUMMET FROM SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, CAL.
Dr. Foster says:
"In examining this beautiful relic, one is led almost instinctively
to believe that it was used as a plummet, for the purpose of
determining the perpendicular to the horizon [for building
purposes?]; . . . when we consider its symmetry of form, the contrast
of colors brought out by the process of grinding and polishing, and
the delicate drilling of the hole through a material (syenite) so
liable to fracture, we are free to say it affords an exhibition of
the lapidary's skill superior to anything yet furnished by the Stone
age of either continent."[1]
[1. "The Prehistoric Races of the United States," p. 55.]
{p. 131}
In Louisiana, layers of pottery, _six inches thick_, with remnants of
matting and baskets, were found _twelve feet below the surface_, and
underneath what Dr. Foster believes to be strata of the Drift.[1]
I might fill pages with similar testimony; but I think I have given
enough to satisfy the reader that man _did_ exist before the Drift.
I shall discuss the subject still further when I come to consider, in
a subsequent chapter, the question whether pre-glacial man was or was
not civilized.
[1. "The Prehistoric Races of the United States," p. 56.]
{p. 132}