Chapter VIII: Primitive Man; and the Horse, the Lion, and the Elephant (1)

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.