THE LENGTH OF TIME DURING WHICH MAN HAS EXISTED
In the preceding chapter, no mention has been made of the length of the
Quaternary sub-division of Cenozoic time, and it will now be our aim to
briefly review this period and then investigate the evidence which we
have as to how much of this time man has been a portion of its fauna.
With the opening of the Quaternary Period, we come to what is
undoubtedly the most remarkable era in all geological time. From a
climate which had been, heretofore, uniformly, warmly temperate, with
but few exceptions, we come to a period known as the Glacial, in which,
by a depression in the temperature, all vegetation and animals in high
latitudes were killed; _viz._: in the central west--almost to the Ohio
River; in Europe--to the northern part of Italy--while the addition of
vast quantities of ice to the oceans, destroyed all life in them to
about the latitude of the northern portion of the Gulf of Mexico. Nor
was this period of cold confined to the northern hemisphere, as the
southern part of South America and Africa show. Concerning the cause
of the Glacial Period, but little is positively known. Of the theories
which have been advanced, it seems very plausible that perhaps two more
clearly account for the conditions which must have then existed, if we
consider them together, than all the rest.
The geological record teaches us that in the so-called Glacial Period,
at least two distinct epochs of low temperature, and the consequential
accumulation of ice, are to be definitely discerned. Still further
back, we see evidence of glacial action in the Permian Strata, and
possibly as far back as the Cambrian formations, although these eras
of cold are not comparable with the period at the beginning of the
Quaternary time. Croll, the Scottish physicist, first called attention
to the fact that at certain regular intervals of time, the precession
of the equinoxes, and the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, would
so act in conjunction as to render favorable a great many conditions
which would certainly all point toward a period of extreme cold. He
calculated that the earth was traveling around the sun in an ellipse
of maximum eccentricity, and that winter was occurring in the northern
hemisphere when the earth was furthest from the sun, for the last time
some quarter of a million years ago. About eighty thousand years after
this date, the coincidence of the two phenomena reached a maximum
effect, and about eighty thousand years later, climatic conditions
were again about as we have them to-day. Upon this hypothesis, another
period of extreme cold must have existed some one-half million years
earlier, as calculations upon the same premises as were used in the
last computation will show. It is likewise true that, according to this
theory, there must have been at least one other such period further
back in geological time, and it is now to be seen whether our records,
as shown by the strata, establish these facts.
Prior to the enunciation of this theory by Croll, the famous English
geologist, Sir Charles Lyell, from measurements of the strata, had
calculated that the last period of glaciation occurred about as
Croll stated, and that a period of cold and ice far more intense and
extensive occurred some four or five hundred thousand years earlier.
Mr. Laing has shown that, in order to make such conditions as must have
existed at this time, not only is a low temperature necessary, but a
certain amount of land must have an elevation sufficient to give the
required initial fall to the ice river, so that it may move over the
obstacles in its way, and that the higher such elevations in the Arctic
zones, and the greater the humidity of the air when it strikes such
elevated polar plateaux, the more augmented will be the probability of
glacial activity. The rapidity of the glacier's movement can have no
bearing upon the duration of the glacial period, inasmuch as a certain
length of time may have been required for the ice-cap to form and push
forward to a certain place, and it may have remained there for an
indeterminate period, governed only by the amount of snow deposited
upon the original source, and the rapidity of melting at the moraine.
In Eastern England, no less than four distinct boulder clays have been
found separated by the débris deposited from the moraines of each ice
sheet, and a few hundred miles away in France, the record is so certain
that we know that the Arctic fauna and flora gave away twice for that
of the warmer parts of the Temperate zones.
We are certain that both that portion of Scandinavia and Canada, which
were the centers of the great European and American ice-caps, had an
elevation greatly in excess of what it is to-day, at the time of the
glacial epoch. During the first glaciation, Eastern Canada, or that
part south of Hudson's Bay, was certainly twenty-five hundred feet
higher than it is now, and the area covered by ocean formations or
marine beds to the southward, show that at the same time these sections
were very much lower than they are at the present day. On the other
side of the Atlantic Ocean, the elevation in Norway was at least a
couple of thousand feet more than at present; while both England and
Ireland have risen a considerable amount since this period.
There are other ways by which we may form some estimate of the time
which has elapsed since the melting away of the great glaciers, besides
that given by Croll. From measurements taken on Table Rock, at Niagara
Falls, which we know has receded in post-glacial times from Lewiston
to the place which it occupies at present, we are certain that Lyell
was not far wrong when he estimated this to have taken at least sixty
thousand years. Shaler, on entirely different grounds,--mainly the
redistribution of certain angiosperms--has arrived at figures in
excess of these. Calculations made upon the canyons of the Columbia,
San Joaquin, and Colorado Rivers, all show the estimations previously
given to be conservative. Of course, the figures given will apply
only to the time which has elapsed since the melting of the American
ice-cap, as we have no means of knowing that the American and European
glaciers acted at all in unison in their retreat to the northward. The
manner in which we can get some idea of the length of time required
to account for the enormous quantity of work done in the Champlain
period, is by taking into account the deposits which lie in almost
all of the great river valleys which were covered by the glaciers, or
whose watersheds were made into lakes by the subsidence of the land to
the north, and the rapid melting of that portion of the ice-cap which
contained stones, dirt, and other material picked up in the travels of
the glacier across the country. The Rhine, the Rhone, and the Danube
in Europe, and the St. Lawrence, the Connecticut, and the Mississippi
in America, all flow through valleys lined with cliffs of loess. These
accumulations overlying the coarser sands and gravels, and conforming
to the river valleys, have been measured in the case of the Rhine, and
were found to be about eight hundred feet in depth. It is unreasonable
to suppose that these deposits being, as they are, material thrown down
out of the water after the rivers had lost their transporting power,
could have accumulated at a greater rate than that now going on in the
rivers, such as the Mississippi and the Nile, to-day, and if this was
the case, these deposits must have taken no less than three hundred and
twenty-five thousand years to form. Inasmuch as this work was all done
during the Champlain period, this figure can be safely taken as the
minimum for the measure of the duration of that time.
Arriving now at the recent period of Quaternary time, we find in Europe
evidences of a very short and less intense period of cold; in the
remains of the reindeer and other Arctic animals in southern France.
Associated with these, although of a later period, we find the bones
of the cave bear, hyena, and lion, and in many of the localities
intimately associated with these are the bones of man. In fact, since
the first discovery of the paleolithic implements in the gravels of
the Somme, there have been almost countless finds of human remains in
England, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Greece, in Europe; Algiers,
Morocco, Egypt, and Natal, in Africa; in China, Japan, India, Syria,
and Palestine, in Asia; in Brazil and Argentina in South America, and
in no less than ten States of this country, associated with stone
implements or paleoliths, and all of which, dating from the beginning
of the Quaternary period, have established the certainty of human
existence during the entire Quaternary era, beyond the possibility of
doubt.
The evidences of the existence of the human species during Tertiary
time are many, and hardly a year goes by without adding another
discovery of human remains in the deposits belonging to this period. To
begin with, the existence of man so generally and widely distributed as
we find him to be at the beginning of the Quaternary period, is almost
_prima facie_ evidence of his occupation of the earth for some time
previous. With the means of communication and the motives for it, such
as they must have been at this remote period, we know that thousands
of years would have been required to scatter any species all over the
earth, as we have seen that man was from the locations of the remains
found. Further than this, there are three well-authenticated cases
where the bones of Tertiary animals have been found, upon which there
were cuts made by edged tools, which could have been made only by human
agency. Since these have been discovered, crude implements as well as
human bones have been found in no less than a dozen places in both the
Eastern and Western Hemispheres, which attest, beyond doubt, to man's
having existed since the Middle Miocene or early Pliocene time. We not
only have the opinions of such authorities as Rames, Hamy, Mortillet,
Quatrefages, and Delauney, to accept in this matter, but the more
recent thorough investigations of Laing and Haeckel.
Turning now from geological evidence to that founded upon other
observations, as to the length of time man has been an inhabitant of
the earth, perhaps one of the most interesting discoveries was that of
the Tumuli or mounds of shells of such animals as the oyster, cockle,
limpet, etc., and, along with this, the bones of birds, wild animals,
and fish, together with stone implements and rude pottery. These
kitchen-middens were first discovered in Denmark, but they have since
been found in many countries where savages have lived along the coast.
In many of the Swiss lakes, such as Zurich and Neufchatel, there have
been found piles driven into the ground, around which, in dredging,
human bones, as well as stone implements, have been brought up, and
which are now known to have been the dwelling-places and remains of
prehistoric peoples, who located in this manner so as to protect
themselves from prowling wild animals and from their savage neighbors.
From the amount and character of these deposits, we are forced to
assume that the habitations were used for a long period, and from
geological computation of the time required to deposit the silt around
these piles in the Swiss Lake-villages, and from the similarity of the
remains in the Danish peat-mosses and the kitchen-middens no period
could be assigned to their antiquity of less than seven thousand years.
Our earliest record of historic man is found in the Valley of the
Nile, where we can say with certainty that, over seven thousand
years ago, there existed a high state of civilization under the old
Egyptian Empire. Menes was the first recorded king who sat on the
throne, and during the six dynasties of kings which composed this
period, we see the rise to supremacy of Memphis, the building of the
pyramids, the accumulation of a varied and extensive literature, and
the perfection of the industrial and fine arts. In fact, so faithfully
and indestructibly were the lines of human faces reproduced upon
stone and other materials, that, at this day, we have no difficulty
in identifying the different races of men from their resemblance at
the present time. Menes, himself, carried to completion the great
engineering feat of turning the course of the Nile so as to obtain a
site for his capital, at Memphis. His successor was not only a patron
but a practitioner of the art of medicine. From the monuments and
papyri of the great tombs of Ghizeh and Sakkara, we have learned so
much of the social and political life of Egypt at this period through
the deciphering of the Rosetta stone by Champollion, that we may be
said to have a very accurate knowledge of mankind, as his existence
was conditioned in Egypt from four to five thousand years before the
beginning of our present era. From Memphis, the seat of the government
first shifts to Heracleopolis, and then to Thebes, and, during these
changes, we see Egypt go back into the night of semi-barbarism
(comparatively speaking), and after a long period of time to again
develop a high state of civilization, under a new language and a new
religion, in the eleventh dynasty. Egyptian influence extended from
the equator on the south, to southern Syria on the north, and Isis
and Osiris were the deities that commanded the veneration of the then
civilized world. The kings of this dynasty built the famous labyrinth
of Fayoum, where in the desert was formed a large artificial lake
with tunnels and sluices so arranged that the annual inundations of
the Nile were partially controlled by allowing the surplus water
to fill this lake, and in the time of a drouth, letting it out to
irrigate the valley as needed. Many temples, obelisks, and statues
were erected, and the period was one of social and literary activity.
About two thousand years before Christ, the seat of the government was
transferred from Thebes to the Delta, and, shortly after this, the
Hyksos dynasty began with a conquest by these invaders, who laid all
Egypt under tribute. The conquerors adopted both the civilization and
the religion of their subjects, and reigned over Egypt somewhat more
than five hundred years. Their expulsion marks the beginning of the new
empire, which extended the Egyptian influence from the Persian Gulf to
the Mediterranean, and subjugated both Babylon and Nineveh. From this
time on, we are on certain and firm historical grounds, and with the
founding of the great library at Alexandria, by Ptolemy Philadelphus,
Egypt received her last great literary impulse, and since the fourth
century of this era the part which she has played in the struggle of
humanity has been inconsiderable. From other data gathered by Horner,
who sunk numerous shafts across the Nile Valley at Memphis, and who
brought up copper knives and pottery from depths approximately of
sixty feet, it has been calculated, from the rate of deposition in
that valley to-day, that these remains are upward of twenty-five
thousand years old. In other places, Paleoliths have been found that
are undoubtedly very much older than the oldest temples and tombs.
Furthermore, we know that in all the traditions of this country, the
first inhabitants are represented as being autochthonous, which, if
correct, must mean a very great state of antiquity, so far as man is
concerned; if it be granted that this Egyptian civilization, which is
known to have existed at Memphis, had to develop of its own accord in
the Valley of the Nile, abundantly fertile though it always has been.
In the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, we have further
evidence of the existence of a high state of civilization, as taken
from the cylinder of Sargon I, which reads, "Sharrukin the mighty king
am I, who knew not his father, but whose mother was a royal princess,
who, to conceal my birth, placed me in a basket of rushes closed with
pitch, and cast me into the river, from which I was saved by Akki, the
water-carrier, who brought me up as his own child." The date of this
king is generally accepted as about four thousand years before Christ,
and his exploits have been found pictured and described on the relics
taken from Cyprus, Syria, and Babylonia. He did for Mesopotamia what
Menes did for Egypt, and the prestige of his arms, and the renown
of his civilization, spread over all Asia Minor. As a patron of
literature, he founded some of the most famous libraries in Babylonia,
and compiled a work of seventy-two volumes on Astronomy and Astrology,
which was even translated into Greek. From recent researches, which
have resulted in the finding of a great many clay tablets from the
libraries of Mesopotamia, it seems certain that this Sargon I, upon his
ascension to the throne, found the Accadian people (he was a Semite)
already enjoying a high civilization, with sacred temples, a sacred
and profane literature, and one who had a large and well-ordered
knowledge of astronomy, as well as of agriculture and the industrial
arts. From the archæological remains which have been discovered, and,
in particular, the marble statue of a king by the name of David, which
was recently found at Bisinya, and whose antiquity is probably greater
than 4,500 B. C., it is entirely conservative to assume that Chaldean
civilization was as old, if not older, than that of Egypt; while no
figure can be set upon the length of time which was required in these
fertile valleys for this state of affairs to develop from a condition
of barbarism.
In China, strangely enough, where the oldest historical records would
be expected, we can find nothing to compare with the Egyptian papyri
or the Chaldean clay-cylinders, and competent authorities are well
agreed that there is great reason to suppose that much of the early
civilization was brought from Accadia. In any case, at the dawn of
history, we find China just as she is to-day:--an overpopulated,
agricultural country, where blind imitation of predecessors ruled, and,
consequently, progress, unless brought in by conquest, is extremely
slow. If the empire was founded, as has been supposed, by an Accadian
invasion or immigration, which must have occurred about 5,000 B. C.,
or at least before the time of Sargon I, then these wanderers drove
out the aboriginal inhabitants, the Mioutse, who have been crowded at
last into the mountains of the western provinces. Certain it is that no
greater date can be assigned to the civilization of this country, at
the beginning of its historical record, than about 2,750 B. C., which
time is known in Chinese tradition as the "Age of the Five Rulers."
Perhaps next in order of antiquity, comes the small country known as
Elam, lying between the Tigris River and the Lagros Mountains, and
extending to the south along the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf
to the Arabian Sea. As in both Egypt and Chaldea, this country was
brought into prominence by an aggressive and warlike king,--the famous
Cyrus of history,--and, fortunately, his clay-cylinder; from one of
the magnificent libraries of Susa, or Shushan; was recently found by
Mr. Rassam, amid the débris composing the mound, which is now the
only mark left to show where these great centers of population once
were, in the fertile valleys and coast plains of this part of Asia;
and this cylinder is now kept, with hundreds from like sources, in the
British Museum at London. On this memorial cylinder, Cyrus gives his
genealogy and an account of his exploits, and we find that he came from
a line of kings, and held to the popular faith of his country, thanking
and petitioning the whole Elamite Hierarchy of gods. Cyrus carried
the Elamite arms into southern Syria and Palestine, and overthrew
Mesopotamia about 2,300 B. C. It was the reaction from this conquest
that caused some of the most gigantic struggles of antiquity.
Of the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon, no definite historical
record can be found earlier than from fifteen hundred to two thousand
years before Christ. The Hittite civilization and influence we find at
their height at about the same time, but here we can get no inkling of
a greater antiquity for man than that given in the Middle Egyptian
Empire. In the cities of Troy and Mycenæ, we find civilization at its
crest some five hundred years later, and it is not until we come to
Arabia that we again find evidence of such high antiquity as we find
in Chaldea and Egypt. The old kingdom of Saba was built upon the ruins
of a still older, known as Ma'in, and the former was in its decline
as an empire at the beginning of the eighth century, B. C. Now,
contemporary history shows that this country has gone through all the
transformations which Egypt and Chaldea had, and if this is also true
of the Ma'in kingdom, then a date of great antiquity must be given to
it. But these are not certainties, while in the cases of Chaldea and
Egypt there can be no mistake. The Israelite civilization was at its
height under David and Solomon, about contemporaneously with that of
Troy and Mycenæ, and even the Hebrew tradition does not attempt to
antedate the year 2,000 B. C., so that we can obtain no information
from this source. Greece flourished but five hundred years before the
present era, and even if we regard Homer as authentic, no more remote
date can be given to their earliest civilization than that of the
attack by the Hellenes upon Troy, which was about 1,000 B. C.
In the Western Hemisphere archeologists are every year making valuable
discoveries in Mexico and Peru which will probably give a remote date
for the civilizations which flourished in these countries long before
the conquests of the Spaniards. The great pyramids of the Sun and
Moon on the Mexican plateau and the similarity of their design and
orientation with the Egyptian all point to an interchange of ideas
between the East and the West in prehistoric time.
The geological table given at the close of this chapter may be of
interest, as a careful consideration of it, and the foregoing facts,
will show the real value of man in nature. That man is ascendent now,
does not, in the light of experience, mean necessarily that he will by
any means remain so. In the warm Champlain period, we know that brute
mammals thrived and attained gigantic size, and, as Dana aptly remarks,
"the great abundance of their remains and their conditions show that
the climate and food were all that could have been desired." Yet the
mastodon and the cave-bear have gone, together with countless other
species which have become extinct, and, if science teaches anything at
all, it tells us that nature delights in fostering one species at the
expense of another. In the case of man, we most clearly see this. "For
the historical succession of vertebrate fossils corresponds completely
with the morphological scale which is revealed to us by comparative
anatomy and ontology. After the Silurian fishes come the dipnoi of the
Devonian period,--the Carboniferous amphibia, the Permian reptilia and
the Mesozoic Mammals. Of these again, the lowest forms, the monotremes,
appear first in the Triassic period; the marsupials in the Jurassic,
and then the oldest placentals in the Cretaceous. Of the placentals,
in turn, the first to appear in the oldest Tertiary period are the
lowest primates, the prosimiæ, which are followed by the simiæ, in the
Miocene. Of the carrhinæ, the cynopitheci precede the anthropomorpha;
from one branch of the latter, during the Pliocene period, arises the
apeman, without speech, and from him descends finally the speaking man.
"Since the germ of the human embryo passes through the same
chordula-stages as the germ of all other vertebrates; since it evolves,
similarly, out of the two germinal layers of a gastrula, we infer by
virtue of the biogenetic law, the early existence of corresponding
ancestral forms. Most important of all is the fact that the human
embryo, like that of all other animals, arises, originally, from a
single cell, for this stem-cell--the impregnated egg cell--points,
indubitably, to a corresponding unicellular ancestor, a primitive
Laurentian protozoon."
In the foregoing quotation, Haeckel clearly states what every geologist
and embryologist plainly knows to be the truth, and in this case, as in
all others, does it hold good:
"Because truth is truth, to follow truth
Were wisdom, in the scorn of consequence."
For any human being, endowed with reason, to wilfully deceive himself
could be nothing less than the height of folly. There is nothing
more pitiful in all literature than Cicero, at the close of his "De
Senectute," bowed down with years, and crushed with grief over the
loss of his son and intimate friends, saying that if his belief in
personal immortality be illogical and untrue, as he almost intimates
that he thinks it more than likely to be, then he wishes to willingly
delude himself for the satisfaction which he will get therefrom. How
different from the man who, in his impeachment of Verres, or his
defense of Archias, runs the chance of public disfavor,--always little
less than death to the politician,--or even to that staunch patriot,
who, with almost his last breath, defied the powerful Antony, although
it cost him his life! How strange it is that Tully did not realize that
allegiance to the truth, regardless of whether it be for or against us,
carries with it, _per se_, the greatest of all virtues,--the virtue of
sincerity. Polonius' death demonstrated the truth of his philosophy:
"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
In considering this problem of the origin and destiny of man, which,
axiomatically, includes ourselves, let us remember that it matters not
what we may wish, for we have no choice in the matter,--the truth is
inexorable, and, consequently, cannot be influenced. It is directly up
to each human being to work out this problem for himself, and this can
only be done by the fearless recognition of the truth, wherever found.
It is in this spirit that the preceding and the succeeding chapters are
written, and if they contain misstatements and errors, the author will
not only most cheerfully acknowledge the same, when proven to him, but
will accept the logical conclusions drawn therefrom, although they may
completely revolutionize the philosophy of life as he now sees it, and
is trying to live it.
Geological Table, showing Approximate Minimum Duration in Time.
Comparative Duration of Periods: Paleozoic, 12/16ths; Mesozoic,
3/16ths; Cenozoic, 1/16th. Geological Time, at least 200,000,000
years.
Geological Epoch | Petrographic | Ascendant Form | Thickness
Sub-Division | Formation | of Life | of
of G. E. | | | Deposits
| | |
Paleozoic | | |
| | |
Laurentian | Archaic Igneous | Eozoon |
| Rocks | Canadense | 30,000 ft.
Cambrian or | | |
L. Silurian | Potsdam Sandstone |} |
| Magnesian Limestone |} Diatoms | 18,000 ft.
| Trenton Limestone |} |
| | |
Upper Silurian| Niagara Limestone |} |
| Medina Sandstone |} |
| Saline Formations |} Lower Fishes | 22,000 ft.
| Lower Helderberg |} |
| Oriskany Sandstone |} |
| | |
Devonian | Corniferous or |} |
| Upper Helderberg |} |
| Limestone, |} Dipnoi |
| Hamilton, |} |
| Portage and Chemung|} |
| Shales |} |
| | |
Carboniferous | Crinoidal Limestone |} |
| Lower Coal Measures |} |
| Mill Stone Grit |} Amphibia and | 42,000 ft.
| Upper Coal Measures |} Sagillaria |
| Permian Sandstone |} |
| | |
Mesozoic | | |
| | |
Triassic | Sandstones | Monotremes and |
| | Gymnosperms |
Jurassic | Wassatch Mountains | Marsupials | 15,000 ft.
| | |
Cretaceous | Sandstone and Chalk | Placentals |
| | |
Cenozoic | | |
| | |
Tertiary-- | | Lowest Primates |
Eocene | | and Angiosperms| 3,000 ft.
Miocene | | Simiæ |
Pliocene | | Catarrhinæ |
| | |
Quaternary-- | | |
Glacial | | |
Champlain| | |
Recent | | |