_EARLY MAN._
The science of the earth has its culmination and terminus in man; and
at this, the most advanced of our salient points, as we look back on
the long process of the development of the earth, we may well ask,
Was the end worthy of the means? We may well have doubts as to an
affirmative answer if we do not consider that the means were perfect,
each in its own time, and that man, the final link in the chain of
life, is that which alone takes hold of the unseen and eternal. He
alone can comprehend the great plan, and appreciate its reason and
design. Without his agency in this respect nature would have been a
riddle without any solution--a column without a capital, a tree without
fruit. Besides this, even science may be able to perceive that man may
be not merely the legatee of all the ages that lie behind, but the
heir of the eternity that lies before, the only earthly being that has
implanted in him the germ and instinct of immortality.
Whatever view we may take of these questions, it is of interest to us
to know, if possible, how and when this chief corner stone was placed
upon the edifice of nature, and what are the precise relations of
man to the later geological ages, as well as to the present order of
nature, of which he is at once a part, and its ruler and head. Let us
put this first in the form of a narrative based on geological facts
only, and then consider some of its details and relations to history.
The Glacial age had passed away. The lower land, in great part a bare
expanse of mud, sand, and gravel, had risen from the icy ocean in
which it had been submerged, and most of the mountain tops had lost
their covering of perennial snow and ice. The climate was ameliorated,
and the sun again shone warmly on the desolate earth. Gradually the
new land became overspread with a rich vegetation, and was occupied
by many large animals. There were species of elephant, rhinoceros,
hippopotamus, horse, bison, ox and deer, multiplying till the plains
and river valleys were filled with their herds, in spite of the fact
that they were followed by formidable carnivorous beasts fitted to prey
on them. At this time, somewhere in the warm temperate zone, in an
oasis or island of fertility, appeared a new thing on the earth, a man
and woman walking erect in the forest glades, bathing in the waters,
gathering and tasting every edible fruit, watching with curious and
inquiring eyes the various animals around them, and giving them names
which might eventually serve not merely to designate their kinds, but
to express actions and emotions as well. When, where, and how did this
new departure, fraught with so many possibilities, occur--introducing
as it did the dexterous fingers and inventive mind of Man upon the
scene? The last of these questions science is still unable to answer,
and though we may frame many hypotheses, they all remain destitute of
certain proof in so far as natural science is concerned. We can here
only fall back on the old traditional and historical monuments of
our race, and believe that man, the child of God, and with God-like
intellect, will, and consciousness, was placed by his Maker in an
Edenic region, and commissioned to multiply and replenish the earth.
The when and where of his introduction, and his early history when
introduced, are more open to scientific investigation.
That man was originally frugivorous, his whole structure testifies.
That he originated in some favourable climate and fertile land is
equally certain, and that his surroundings must have been of such a
nature as to give him immunity from the attacks of formidable beasts
of prey, also goes without saying. These are all necessary conditions
of the successful introduction of such a creature as man, and theories
which suppose him to have originated in a cold climate, to struggle at
once with the difficulties and dangers of such a position, are, from a
scientific point of view, incredible.
But man was introduced into a wide and varied world, more wide and
varied than that possessed by his modern descendants. The earliest
men that we certainly know inhabited out continents in the second
Continental age of the Kainozoic Period, when, as we know from ample
geological evidence, the land of the northern hemisphere was much more
extensive than at present, with a mild climate, and a rich flora and
fauna. If he was ambitious to leave the oasis of his origin the way
was open to him, but at the expense of becoming a toiler, an inventor,
and a feeder on animal food, more especially when he should penetrate
into the colder climates. The details of all this, as they actually
occurred, are not within the range of scientific investigation, for
these early men must have left few, if any, monuments; but we can
imagine some of them. Man's hands were capable of other uses than the
mere gathering of fruit. His mind was not an instinctive machine, like
that of lower animals, but an imaginative and inventive intellect,
capable of adapting objects to new uses peculiar to himself. A fallen
branch would enable him to obtain the fruits that hung higher than his
hands could reach, a pebble would enable him to break a nut too hard
for his teeth. He could easily weave a few twigs into a rough basket to
carry the fruit he had gathered to the cave or shelter, or spreading
tree, or rough hut that served him for a home; and when he had found
courage to snatch a brand from some tree, ignited by lightning, or by
the friction of dry branches, and to kindle a fire for himself, he
had fairly entered on that path of invention and discovery which has
enabled him to achieve so many conquests over nature.
Our imagination may carry us yet a little farther with reference to his
fortunes. If he needed any weapon to repel aggressive enemies, a stick
or club would serve his purpose, or perhaps a stone thrown from his
hand. Soon, however, he might learn from the pain caused by the sharp
flints that lay in his path the cutting power of an edge, and, armed
with a flint chip held in the hand, or fitted into a piece of wood, he
would become an artificer of many things useful and pleasing. As he
wandered into more severe climates, where vegetable food could not be
obtained throughout the year, and as he observed the habits of beasts
and birds of prey, he would learn to be a hunter and a fisherman,
and to cook animal food; and with this would come new habits, wants
and materials, as well as a more active and energetic mode of life.
He would also have to make new weapons and implements, axes, darts,
harpoons, and scrapers for skins, and bodkins or needles to make skin
garments. He would use chipped flint where this could be procured, and
failing this, splintered and rubbed slate, and for some uses, bone and
antler. Much ingenuity would be used in shaping these materials, and
in the working of bone, antler and wood, ornament would begin to be
studied. In the meantime the hunter, though his weapons improved, would
become a ruder and more migratory man, and in anger, or in the desire
to gain some coveted object, might begin to use his weapons against his
brother man. In some more favoured localities, however, he might attain
to a more settled life; and he, or more likely the woman his helpmate,
might contrive to tame some species of animals, and to begin some
culture of the soil.
It was probably in this early time that metals first attracted the
attention of men. The ages of stone, bronze, and iron believed in by
some archæologists, are more or less mythical to the geologist, who
knows that these things depend more on locality and on natural products
than on stages of culture. The analogy of America teaches us that the
use of different metals may be contemporaneous, provided that they can
be obtained in a native state. At the time of the discovery of America
the Esquimaux were using native iron, which, though rare in most parts
of the world, is not uncommon in some rocks of Greenland. The people of
the region of the great lakes, and of the valleys of the Mississippi
and Ohio, were using native copper from Lake Superior for similar
purposes. Gold was apparently the only metal among the natives of
Central America. The people of Peru had invented bronze, or had brought
the knowledge of it with them from beyond the sea. Thus the Peruvians
were in the bronze age, the Mexicans and Mound builders in the copper
age, and the Esquimaux in the iron age, while at the same time the
greater part of the aboriginal tribes were at one and the same time
in the ages of chipped and polished stone and in these ages what have
been called palæolithic and neolothic weapons were contemporaneous,
the former being most usually unfinished examples of the latter, or
extemporized tools roughly made in emergencies.[203] How long this
had lasted, or how long it would have continued, had not Europeans
introduced from abroad an iron age, we do not know. It was probably
the same in other parts of the world, in pre-historic times. In any
case, the discovery of native metals must have occurred very early.
Men searching in the beds of streams for suitable pebbles to form
hammers and other implements, would find nuggets of gold and copper,
and the properties of these, so different from those of other pebbles,
would at once attract attention, and lead to useful applications.
Native iron is of rarer occurrence, but in certain localities would
also be found.[204] It must have been experiments on these ores,
which resemble the native metals in colour, lustre and weight, that
led to the first attempts at smelting metals, and these must have
occurred at a very early period. Yet for ages the metals must have
been extremely scarce, and we know that in comparatively modern times
civilized nations like the Egyptians were using flint flakes after they
had domesticated many animals, had become skilful agriculturists and
artisans, and had executed great architectural works.
[203] "Fossil Men," by the Author. W. H. Holmes, "American
Anthropologist," 1890.
[204] The rarity of native iron, whether meteoric or telluric, and
its rapid decay by rusting, sufficiently account for its absence in
deposits where implements of stone and bone have been preserved.
Probably all these ends had been to some extent, and in some
localities, attained in the earliest human period, when man was
contemporary with many large animals now extinct. But a serious change
was to occur in human prospects. There is the best geological evidence
that in the northern hemisphere the mild climate of the earlier
Post-glacial period relapsed into comparative coldness, though not so
extreme as that of the preceding Glacial age. Hill tops, long denuded
of the snow and ice of the Glacial period, were again covered, and cold
winters sealed up the lakes and rivers, and covered the ground with
wintry snows of long continuance, and with this came a change in animal
life and in human habits. The old southern elephant (_E. antiquus_),
the southern rhinoceros (_E. leptorhinus_), and the river hippopotamus
(_H. major_), which had been contemporaries, in Europe at least,
of primitive man, retired from the advancing cold, and ultimately
perished, while their places were taken by the hairy mammoth (_E.
primigenius_), the woolly rhinoceros (_R. tichorhinus_), the reindeer,
and even the musk ox. Now began a fierce struggle for existence in
the more northern districts inhabited by man a struggle in which only
the hardier and ruder races could survive, except, perhaps, in some
of the more genial portions of the warm temperate zone. Men had to
become almost wholly carnivorous, and had to contend with powerful and
fierce animals. Tribe contended with tribe for the possession of the
most productive and sheltered habitats. Thus the struggle with nature
became aggravated by that between man and man. Violence disturbed the
progress of civilization, and favoured the increase and power of the
rudest tribes, while the more delicately organized and finer types of
humanity, if they continued to exist in some favoured spots, were in
constant danger of being exterminated by their fiercer and stronger
contemporaries.
In mercy to humanity, this state of things was terminated by a great
physical revolution, the last great subsidence of the continents--that
Post-glacial flood, which must have swept away the greater part of men,
and many species of great beasts, and left only a few survivors to
re-people the world, just as the mammoth and other gigantic animals had
to give place to smaller and feebler creatures. In these vicissitudes
it seemed determined, with reference to man, that the more gigantic and
formidable races should perish, and that one of the finer types should
survive to re-people the world.
The age of which we have been writing the history, is that which has
been fitly named the Anthropic, in that earlier part of it preceding
the great diluvial catastrophe, which has fixed itself in all the
earlier traditions of men, and which separates what may be called the
Palanthropic or Antediluvian age from the Neanthropic or Postdiluvian.
Independently altogether of human history, these are two geological
ages distinguished by different physical conditions and different
species of animals; and the time has undoubtedly come when all the
speculations of archæologists respecting early man must be regulated
by these great geological facts, which are stamped upon those later
deposits of the crust of the earth, which have been laid down since man
was its inhabitant. If they have only recently assumed their proper
place in the geological chronology, this is due to the great difficulty
in the case of the more recent deposits in establishing their actual
succession and relations to each other. These difficulties have,
however, been overcome, and new facts are constantly being obtained
to render our knowledge more definite. Lest, however, the preceding
sketch of the Palanthropic age--that in which gigantic men were
contemporaries of a gigantic fauna now extinct--should be regarded as
altogether fanciful, we may proceed to consider the geological facts
and classification as actually ascertained.
The Tertiary or Kainozoic period, the last of the four great "times"
into which the earth's geological history is usually divided, and
that to which man and the mammalia belong, was ingeniously subdivided
by Lyell, on the ground of percentages of marine shells and other
invertebrates of the sea. According to this method, which with some
modification in details is still accepted, the _Eocene_, or dawn of the
recent, includes those formations in which the percentage of modern
species of marine animals does not exceed 3-1/2, all the other species
found being extinct. The _Miocene_ (less recent) includes formations
in which the percentage of living species does not exceed 35, and the
_Pliocene_ (more recent) contains formations having more than 35 per
cent, of recent species. To these three may be added the _Pleistocene_,
in which the great majority of the species are recent, and the _Modern_
or Anthropic, in which we are still living. Dawkins and Gaudry give
us a division substantially the same with Lyell's, except that they
prefer to take the evidence of the higher animals instead of the marine
shells. The Eocene thus includes those formations in which there are
remains of mammals or ordinary land quadrupeds, but none of these
belong to recent species or genera, though they may be included in
the same families and orders with the recent mammals. This is a most
important fact, as we shall see, and the only exception to it is that
Gaudry and others hold that a few living genera, as those of the dog,
civet, and marten, are actually found in the later Eocene. The Miocene,
on the same mammalian evidence, will include formations in which there
are living genera of mammals, but no species which survive to the
present time. The Pliocene and Pleistocene show living species, though
in the former these are very few and exceptional, while in the latter
they become the majority.
With regard to the geological antiquity of man, no geologist expects
to find any human remains in beds older than the Tertiary, because
in the older periods the conditions of the world do not seem to have
been suitable to man, and because in these periods no animals nearly
akin to man are known. On entering into the Eocene Tertiary we fail
in like manner to find any human remains; and we do not expect to
find any, because no living species and scarcely any living genera
of mammals are known in the Eocene; nor do we find in it remains of
any of the animals, as the anthropoid apes, for instance, most nearly
allied to man. In the Miocene the case is somewhat different. Here we
have living genera at least, and we have large species of apes; but
no remains of man have been discovered, if we except some splinters
of flint found in beds of this age at Thenay, in France, and some
notched bones. Supposing these objects to have been chipped or notched
by animals, which is by no means certain in the case of the flints,
the question remains, Was this done by man? Gaudry and Dawkins prefer
to suppose that the artificer was one of the anthropoid apes of the
period. It is true that no apes are known to do such work now; but then
other animals, as beavers and birds, are artificers, and some extinct
animals were of higher powers than their modern representatives. But
if there were Miocene apes which chipped flints and cut bones, this
would, either on the hypothesis of evolution or that of creation by
law, render the occurrence of man still less likely than if there were
no such apes. The scratched and notched bones, on the other hand,
indicate merely the gnawing of sharks or other carnivorous animals. For
these reasons neither Dawkins nor Gaudry, nor indeed any geologists of
authority in the Tertiary fauna, believe in Miocene man.
In the Pliocene, though the facies of the mammalian fauna of Europe
becomes more modern, and a few modern species occur, the climate
becomes colder, and in consequence the apes disappear, so that the
chances of finding fossil men are lessened rather than increased in
so far as the temperate regions are concerned. In Italy, however,
Capellini has described a skull, an implement, and a notched bone
supposed to have come from Pliocene beds. To this it may be objected
that the skull--which I examined in 1883 in the museum at Florence--and
the implement are of recent type, and probably mixed with the Pliocene
stuff by some slip of the ground. As the writer has elsewhere
pointed out,[205] similar and apparently fatal objections apply to
the skull and implements alleged to have been found in Pliocene
gravels in California. Dawkins further informs us that in the Italian
Pliocene beds supposed to hold remains of man, of twenty-one mammalia
whose bones occur, all are extinct species, except possibly one, a
hippopotamus. This, of course, renders very unlikely in a geological
point of view the occurrence of human remains in these beds.
[205] "Fossil Men," 1880.
In the Pleistocene deposits of Europe--and this applies also to
America--we for the first time find a predominance of recent species
of land animals. Here, therefore, we may look with some hope for
remains of man and his works, and here, in the later Pleistocene, or
the early Modern, they are actually found. When we speak, however, of
Pleistocene man, there arise some questions as to the classification of
the deposits, which it seems to the writer Dawkins and other British
geologists have not answered in accordance with geological facts, and
a misunderstanding as to which may lead to serious error. They have
extended the term Pleistocene over that Post-glacial period in which
we find remains of man, and thus have split the "Anthropic" period
into two; and they proceed to divide the latter part of it into the
Pre-historic and Historic periods, whereas the name Pleistocene should
not be extended to the Post-glacial age. The close of the Glacial
period, introducing great physical and climatal changes, some new
species of mammalia and man himself, should be regarded as the end of
the Pleistocene, and the introduction of what some French geologists
have called the _Anthropic_ period, which I have elsewhere divided
into Palanthropic, corresponding to the so-called Palæolithic age, and
Neanthropic, corresponding to the later stone and metal ages.[206]
These may be termed respectively the earlier and later stages of the
Modern period as distinguished from the Pleistocene Tertiary.
[206] "Modern Science in Bible Lands."
In point of logical arrangement, and especially of geological
classification, the division into historic and pre-historic periods
is decidedly objectionable. Even in Europe the historic age of the
south is altogether a different thing from that of the north, and to
speak of the pre-historic period in Greece and in Britain or Norway
as indicating the same portion of time is altogether illusory. Hence
a large portion of the discussion of this subject has to be properly
called "the overlap of history." Further, the mere accident of the
presence or absence of historical documents cannot constitute a
geological period comparable with such periods as the Pleistocene
and Pliocene, and the assumption of such a criterion of time merely
confuses our ideas. On the one hand, while the whole Tertiary or
Kainozoic, up to the present day, is one great geological period,
characterized by a continuous though gradually changing fauna and
series of physical conditions, and there is consequently no good basis
for setting apart, as some geologists do, a Quaternary as distinct from
the Tertiary period; on the other hand, there is a distinct physical
break between the Pliocene and the Modern in the great Glacial age.
This, in its Arctic climate and enormous submergence of the land,
though it did not exterminate the fauna of the northern hemisphere,
greatly reduced it, and at the close of this age some new forms came
in. For this reason the division between the Pleistocene and Anthropic
ages should be made at the beginning of the Post-glacial age. The
natural division would thus be:--
I. Pleistocene, including--
(_a_) _Early Pleistocene_, or first continental period. Land very
extensive, moderate climate. This passes into the preceding Pliocene.
(_b_) _Later Pleistocene_, or glacial, including Dawkins' "Mid
Pleistocene." In this there was a great prevalence of cold and glacial
conditions, and a great submergence of the northern land.
II. Anthropic, or period of man and modern mammals, including--
(_a_) _Palanthropic_, _Post-glacial_, or second continental period,
in which the land was again very extensive, and Palæocosmic man was
contemporary with some great mammals, as the mammoth, now extinct,
and the area of land in the northern hemisphere was greater than at
present. This includes a later cold period, not equal in intensity
to that of the Glacial period proper, and was terminated by a great
and very general subsidence, accompanied by the disappearance of
Palæocosmic man and some large mammalia, and which may be identical
with the historical deluge.
(_b_) _Neanthropic_ or _Recent_, when the continents attained their
present levels, existing races of men colonized Europe, and living
species of mammals. This includes both the Pre-historic and Historic
periods.
On geological grounds the above should clearly be our arrangement,
though of course there need be no objection to such other subdivisions
as historians and antiquarians may find desirable for their purposes.
On this classification _the earliest certain indications of the
presence of man in Europe, Asia, or America, so far as yet known,
belong to the Modern or Anthropic period alone_. That man may have
existed previously no one need deny, but no one can at present
positively affirm on any ground of actual fact. It may be necessary
here to explain the contentions often made that in Britain and Western
Europe man belongs to an interglacial period. When with Dr. James
Geikie, the great Scottish glacialist, we hold that there were several
interglacial periods, the Glacial age may be extended by including the
warm period of the Palanthropic, and the cold at its termination, as
one of the interglacial and Glacial periods. In this way, as a matter
of classification, man appears in the latest Interglacial periods.
This, however, as above stated, I regard as an error in arrangement;
but it makes no practical difference as to the facts.
Inasmuch, however, as the human remains of the Post-glacial epoch are
those of fully developed men of high type, it may be said, and has
often been said, that man in some lower stage of development _must_
have existed at a far earlier period. That is, he must, if certain
theories as to his evolution from lower animals are to be sustained.
This, however, is not a mode of reasoning in accordance with the
methods of science. When facts fail to sustain certain theories we are
usually in the habit of saying "so much the worse for the theories,"
not "so much the worse for the facts," or at least we claim the right
to hold our judgment in suspense till some confirmatory facts are
forth-coming.
We have now to inquire as to the actual nature of the indications
of man in Europe and Western Asia at the close of the Glacial or
Pleistocene period. These are principally such of his tools or weapons
as could escape decay when embedded in river gravels, or in the earth
and stalagmite of caverns or rock shelters, or buried with his bones
in caves of sepulture. Very valuable accessory fossils are the broken
bones of the animals he has used as food. Most valuable, and rarest
of all, are well-preserved human skulls and skeletons. Some doubt may
attach to mere flint flakes, in the absence of other remains; but
the other indications above referred to are indisputable, and when
proper precautions are taken to notice the succession of beds, and to
eliminate the effects of any later disturbance of the deposits, human
fossils become as instructive and indisputable as any others.
When the whole of the facts thus available are put together, we
find that the earliest men of whom we have osseous remains, and
who, undoubtedly, inhabited Europe and Western Asia in the second
continental period, before the establishment of the present geography,
and before the disappearance of the mammoth and its companions, were
of two races or subraces, agreeing in certain respects, differing in
others. Both have long or dolichocephalic heads, and seem to have
been men of great strength and muscular energy, with somewhat coarse
countenances of Mongolian type, and they seem to have been of roving
habits, living as hunters and fishermen in a semi-barbarous condition,
but showing some artistic skill and taste in their carvings on bone and
other ornaments.
The earliest of the two races locally, though, on the whole, they
were contemporaneous, is that known as the Cannstadt or Neanderthal
people, who are characterized by a low forehead, with beetling brows,
massive limb bones and moderate stature. So far as known they were
the ruder and less artistic of the two races. The other, the Engis or
Cromagnon race, was of higher type, with well-formed and capacious
skull, and a countenance which, if somewhat broad, with high cheek
bones, eyes lengthened laterally, and heavy lower jaw, must have been
of somewhat grand and impressive features. These men are of great
stature, some examples being seven feet in height, and with massive
bones, having strong muscular impressions. The Engis skull found in
a cave in Belgium, with bones of the mammoth, the skeletons of the
Cromagnon cave in the valley of the Vezere, in France, and those of the
caves of Mentone, in Italy, represent this race. Doubts, it is true,
have been entertained as to whether the last-mentioned race is really
palanthropic; but the latest facts as to their mode of occurrence and
associations seem to render this certain. These men were certainly
contemporaneous with the mammoth, and they disappeared in the cataclysm
which closed the earlier anthropic period. Attempts have, however,
been made to separate them into groups according to age, within this
period;[207] and there can be no doubt that both in France and England
the lower and older strata of gravels and caves yield ruder and less
perfect implements than the higher. Independently, however, of the fact
that the very earliest men may have been peaceful gatherers of fruit,
and not hunters or warriors, having need of lethal weapons, such facts
may rather testify to local improvement in the condition of certain
tribes than to any change of race. Such local improvement would be very
likely to occur wherever a new locality was taken possession of by a
small and wandering tribe, which, in process of time, might increase in
numbers and in wealth, as well as in means of intercourse with other
tribes. A similar succession would occur when caves, used at first as
temporary places of rendezvous by savage tribes, became afterwards
places of residence, or were acquired by conquest on the part of
tribes a little more advanced, in the manner in which such changes are
constantly taking place in rude communities.
[207] Mortillet, "Pre-historic Men."
Yet on facts of this nature have been built extensive generalizations
as to a race of river-drift men, in a low and savage condition,
replaced, after the lapse of ages, by a people somewhat more advanced
in the arts, and specially addicted to a cavern life; and this
conclusion is extended to Europe and Asia, so that in every case where
rude flint implements exist in river gravels, evidence is supposed to
be found of the earlier of these races. But no physical break separates
the two periods; the fauna remained the same; the skulls, so far
as known, present little difference; and even in works of art the
distinction is invalidated by grave exceptions, which are intensified
by the fact, which the writer has elsewhere illustrated, that in the
case of the same people their residences in caves, etc., and their
places of burial are likely to contain very different objects from
those which they leave in river gravels.
It is admitted that the whole of these Palæocosmic men are racially
distinct from modern men, though most nearly allied in physical
characters to some of the Mongoloid races of the northern regions.
Some of their characters also appear in the native races of America,
and occasional cases occur, when even the characters of the Cannstadt
skull reappear in modern times. The skull of the great Scottish king
Robert Bruce was of this type; and his indomitable energy and governing
power may have been connected with this fact. Attempts have even been
made[208] to show an intimate connection between the cave men and the
Esquimaux of Greenland and Arctic America, but, as Wilson has well
shown,[209] this is not borne out by their cranial characters, and the
resemblances, such as they are, in arts and implements, are common
to the Esquimaux and many other American tribes. In many respects,
however, the arts and mode of life, as well as some of the physical
characters of the Palæocosmic men of Europe were near akin to those of
the ruder native races of America.
[208] Dawkins, "Early Man in Britain."
[209] Address to Anthropological section of the American Association,
1882.
Perhaps one of the most curious examples of this is the cave at
Sorde, in the western Pyrenees. On the floor of this cave lay a human
skeleton, covered with fallen blocks of stone. With it were found
forty canine teeth of the bear, and three of the lion, perforated for
suspension, and several of these teeth are skilfully engraved with
figures of animals, one bearing the engraved figure of an embroidered
glove. This necklace, no doubt just such a trophy of the chase as
would now be worn by a red Indian hunter, though more elaborate, must
have belonged to the owner of the skull, who would appear to have
perished by a fall of rock, or to have had his body covered after death
with stones. In the deposit near and under these remains were flint
flakes. Above the skull were several feet of refuse, stones, and bones
of the horse, reindeer, etc., and "Palæolithic" flint implements, and
above all were placed the remains of thirty skulls and skeletons with
beautifully chipped flint implements, some of them as fine as any
of later age. After the burial of these the cave seems to have been
finally closed with large stones. The French explorers of this cave
refer the lower and upper skulls to the same race, that of Cromagnon;
but others consider the upper remains as "Neolithic," though there is
no reason why a man who possessed a necklace of beautifully carved
teeth should not have belonged to a tribe which used well-made stone
implements, or why the weapons buried with the dead should have been
no better than the chips and flakes left by the same people in their
rubbish heaps. In any case the interment and this applies also to the
Mentone caves recalls the habits of American aborigines. In some of
these cases we have even deposits of red oxide of iron, representing
the war paint of the ancient hunter.
Widely different opinions have been held by archæologists as to the
connection of the Palanthropic and Neanthropic ages. It suits the
present evolutionist and exaggerated uniformitarianism of our day
to take for granted that the two are continuous, and pass into each
other. But there are stubborn facts against this conclusion. Let us
take, for example, the area represented by the British Islands and the
neighbouring continent. In the earlier period Britain was a part of the
mainland, and was occupied by the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and
other animals, now locally or wholly extinct. The human inhabitants
were of a large-bodied and coarse race not now found anywhere. In the
later period all this is changed. Britain has become an island. Its
gigantic Post-glacial fauna has disappeared. Its human inhabitants are
now small in stature and delicate in feature, and represented to this
day by parts of the population of the south of Wales and Ireland. They
buried their dead in the peculiar cemeteries known as long barrows, and
their implements and weapons are of a new type, previously unknown.
All this shows a great interval of physical and organic mutation.
In connection with this we have the high-level gravel and rubble,
which Prestwich has shown to belong to this stage, and which proves
a subsidence even greater than that to be inferred from the present
diminution of the land area. Knowing as we do that the close of the
Glacial period was not more than 8,000 years ago, and deducting from
this the probable duration of the Palanthropic age on the one hand, and
that of modern history on the other, we must admit that the interval
left for the great physical and faunal changes above referred to is
too small to permit them to have occurred as the result of slow and
gradual operations. Considerations of this kind have indeed some of
the best authorities on the subject, as Cartailhac, Forel, and de
Mortillet, to hold that there is "an immense space, a great gap,
during which the fauna was renewed, and after which a new race of men
suddenly made its appearance, and polished stone instead of chipping
it, and surrounded themselves with domestic animals."[210] There is
thus, in the geological history of man an interval of physical and
organic change, corresponding to that traditional and historical deluge
which has left its memory with all the more ancient nations. Thus our
men of the Palanthropic, Post-glacial or Mammoth age are the same
we have been accustomed to call Antediluvians, and their immediate
successors are identical with the Basques and ancient Iberians, a
non-Aryan or Turanian people who once possessed nearly the whole of
Europe, and included the rude Ugrians and Laps of the north, the
civilized Etruscans of the south, and the Iberians of the west, with
allied tribes occupying the British Islands. This race, scattered
and overthrown before the dawn of authentic history in Europe by the
Celts and other intrusive peoples, was unquestionably that which
succeeded the now extinct Palæocosmic race, and constituted the men
of the so-called "Neolithic period," which thus connects itself with
the modern history of Europe, from which it is not separated by any
physical catastrophe like that which divides the older men of the
mammoth age and the widely spread continents of the Post-glacial period
from our modern days. This identification of the Neolithic men with
the Iberians, which the writer has also insisted on, Dawkins deserves
credit for fully elucidating, and he might have carried it farther,
to the identification of these same Iberians with the Berbers, the
Guanches of the Canary Islands, and the Caribbean and other tribes of
eastern and central America. On these hitherto dark subjects light
is now rapidly breaking, and we may hope that much of the present
obscurity will soon be cleared away.
[210] Quatrefages, "The Human Species." The interval should not,
however, be placed after the reindeer period, as this animal occurs in
both ages.
Supposing, then, that we may apply the term Anthropic to that portion
of the Kainozoic period which intervenes between the close of the
Glacial age and the present time, and that we admit the division of
this into two portions, the earlier, called the Palanthropic, and the
later, which still continues, the Neanthropic, it will follow that one
great physical and organic break separates the Palanthropic age from
the preceding Glacial, and a second similar break separates the two
divisions of the Anthropic from each other. This being settled, if
we allow say 2,500 years from the Glacial age for the first peopling
of the world and the Palanthropic age, and if we consider the modern
history of the European region and the adjoining parts of Asia and
Africa to go back for 5,000 years, there will remain a space of from
500 to 1,000 years for the destruction of the Palæocosmic men and the
re-peopling of the old continent by such survivors as founded the
Neocosmic peoples. These later peoples, though distinct racially from
their predecessors, may represent a race contemporary with them in some
regions in which it was possible to survive the great cataclysm, so
that we do not need to ask for time to develop such new race.[211]
[211] For details of the physical characters of the older races of men
I may refer to the works mentioned below, or to the writings of Dawkins
and Quatrefages.
We cannot but feel some regret that the grand old Palæocosmic race was
destined to be swept away by the flood, but it was no doubt better
for the world that it should be replaced by a more refined if feebler
race. When we see how this has, in some of its forms, reverted to the
old type, and emulated, if not surpassed it in filling the earth with
violence, we may, perhaps, congratulate ourselves on the extinction of
the giant races of the olden time.
References:--"Fossil Men," London, 1880. The Antiquity of Man,
_Princeton Review_. "Pre-historic Man in Egypt and the Lebanon,"
_Trans. Vict. Institute_, 1884. Pre-historic Times in Egypt and
Palestine, _North American Review_, June and July, 1892.
_MAN IN NATURE._
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF
MY DEAR FRIEND DR. P. P. CARPENTER,
at once an eminent Naturalist and
Educator--
equally a Lover of Nature,
of his Fellow Men and of God.
What is Nature--Man a Part of Nature--Distinction between Man and
other Animals--Man as an Imitator of Nature--Man As at War With
Nature--Man in Harmony With Nature
[Illustration: Carving of the Palanthropic Age.--Cave of Mas d'Azil,
France; after Cartailhac.
Heads of the wild horse, carved on antler of the reindeer, and showing
accurate imitation of nature, with ideal and adaptive art on the part
of the antediluvian sculptor. (See p. 490.)]