Chapter IX: Part 9

The history of the world is the history of the human mind. The oldest documents affording us knowledge of it lie buried in those most mighty and comprehensive historical archives, the geological strata of our planet. Natural philosophy has learned to read these stained, crumpled, and much-torn pages that record the habitation of the earth by living beings; but only a few sections of this book of the universe have yet been perused, and these appear but fragmentary in comparison with the whole task. The passages that relate to the human race are small in number and often even ambiguous, and it is only the last pages that can give an account of it.

The oldest undisputed traces of the presence of man on the earth that have hitherto been discovered are met with in the strata of the Drift Epoch, and it is only during the last generation that the existence of “Drift Man” has been palæontologically proved beyond dispute. The late Sir J. Prestwick believed, however--and his results have been confirmed by later discoveries--in the existence of evidence of the presence of man in Western Europe before the present river system of our land was established, long before the age of the “Drift” relics. The evidence consists of rudely shaped pieces of flint, apparently artificially chipped along one or more edges. These supposed implements are termed “Eoliths.” They were first discovered by Mr. Benjamin Harrison in the high-level plateau, probably of the Upper Pliocene Age, in Kent, and their significance is now widely accepted.

Up to the middle of last century research appeared to have established as a positive fact that man could not be traced back to the older geological strata; remains of man were said to be found only in the newest stratum of the earth’s formation--in the alluvial, or “recent” stratum. The bones of man were accordingly claimed to be sure guides to the geological formations of the present time, as the bones of the mammoth and cave-bear were to the strata of the Drift. Where traces of man were found it was considered as proved by natural science that the particular stratum in which they occurred was to be allotted to the most recent system, which we see forming and being transformed under our eyes at the present day.

It is in the successive layers of the earth’s strata with their
human and animal remains that we read the story of the past.
Embedded in the earth itself we have the existence of “Drift Man”
established. Our illustration is that of a section of the famous
Kent’s Cavern, near Torquay, which is rich in prehistoric remains.
]

[Sidenote: The Theory of Natural Catastrophes]

While it was declared that man belonged to the alluvial stratum, it was at the same time stated, according to the doctrine of Cuvier, which had the weight of a dogma, that man could not have belonged to an older geological stratum or era, and therefore not even to the next older one, the Drift. The beginning and the end of geological eras are marked by mighty transformations which have caused a local interruption in the formation of the strata of the earth’s surface. In many cases we can point to volcanic eruptions as the chief causes, but more especially to a change in the distribution of land and water. Cuvier had conceived these changes involving the transformation to have been violent terrestrial revolutions, the collapse of all existing things, in which all living beings belonging to the past epoch must have been annihilated. It appeared impossible that a living thing could have survived this hypothetical battle of the elements, and passed from an older epoch into the next one; and the new epoch was supposed to have received plants and animals by re-creation. All this had to be applied to man also; he was supposed to have come into existence only in the alluvial period. Not without consideration for the Mosaic account of the Creation, which, like the creation legends of numerous peoples scattered far and wide over all the continents of the earth, tells of a great deluge at the beginning of the present age, the Pleistocene Epoch of the earth’s formation preceding the present period had been termed the Flood Epoch, or Diluvium. In its stratifications it was thought that the effects of great deluges could largely be recognised; but the human eye could not have beheld these, for, according to the catastrophe theory, it appeared out of the question that man could have been “witness of the Flood.”

[Sidenote: What Actually Happened]

Here modern research in the primeval history or palæontology of mankind begins, starting from the complete transformation of the doctrine of the geological epochs brought about by Lyell and his school. Proofs of terrestrial revolutions, as local phenomena and epoch marks, are doubtless to be found, imposing enough to make the views of the older school appear intelligible; but, generally speaking, a complete interruption of the existing conditions did not take place between the periods. Everything tends to prove that even in the earlier eras the transformation of the earth’s surface went on in practically the same way as we see it going on before our eyes to-day in a degree that is slight only to appearance. The effects of volcanic action; the rising and sinking of continents and islands, and the alteration in the distribution of sea and land caused thereby; the inroads of the sea and its work in the destruction of coasts; the formation of deltas and the overflowing of rivers; the action of glaciers and torrents in the mountains, and so forth, are constantly working, more or less, at the transformation of the earth’s surface.

[Sidenote: Nature’s Unbroken Chain]

As we see these newest alluvial deposits being formed, so in principle have the strata of the earlier eras also been formed, and their miles of thickness prove, not the violence of extreme and sudden catastrophes, but only the length of time that was necessary to remove such mighty masses here and pile them up there. It was not sudden general revolutions of great violence, but the slowly working forces, small only to appearance, well known from our present-day surroundings, which destroy in one place and build up again in another with the material obtained from the destruction--it was these which were the causes of the gradual transformation of the earth in all periods of its history comparable to the present. According to this new conception of geological processes, a general destruction of plants and animals at the end of eras, and a new creation at the beginning of the following ones, was no longer a postulate of science as it had been. The living creatures of the earliest eras could now be claimed as ancestors of those living to-day; the chain seems nowhere completely broken. The ancestors of the human race were also to be sought in the strata of the earlier geological periods.

The coming of the sea over the land is so slow as to be almost
imperceptible, but these pictures illustrate its progress. The
pictures in the upper half of the page show how the sea is
encroaching on the coast; the opposite result is shown in the
bottom view from Reigate Hill, where we see an ancient arm of the
sea now a rich and populous valley.
]

Among the forces which we find attended by a transformation of the fauna and flora of the earth’s eras, the influences of climatic changes in particular are clearly and surely shown. In that primeval period in which the coal group was formed the climate in widely different parts of the earth was comparatively equable, little divided into zones, and of a moist warmth; this is proved by the really gigantic masses of plant growth implied by the formation of many coal strata, in which the remains of a luxuriant cryptogamic flora are everywhere embedded. In Greenland, in the strata belonging to the chalk period, and even in the deposits of the Tertiary Period, which immediately precedes the Drift Era, the remains of higher dicotyledonous plants of tropical character are found. The occurrence of palæozoic coral reefs in high latitudes also goes to prove that the temperature of the sea water there was higher at that time: in fact, that a tropical climate existed in the farthest north--an extreme contrast to the present ice-sheet on its land and the icebergs of its seas.

This map and section illustrate the coast line of Prehistoric
Europe when the British Isles were part of the Continent and the
North Sea did not exist. The black parts of the section were all
above the level of the Atlantic.
]

This map and section show how the Continental shelf of Europe runs
out to the Atlantic, and how enormous is the area now submerged in
the comparatively shallow water of the North Sea, the Irish Sea,
and the Channel.
]

In Central Europe the climatic conditions can have been only slightly different. During the middle Tertiary Period palms grew in Switzerland; and even at the end of the Tertiary Period, as it was slowly passing into the Drift Era, the climate in Central Europe was still warmer than now, being much like that of Northern Italy, and its protected west coast the Riviera. There was also a rich flora, partly evergreen, and a fauna adapted to such mild surroundings. Even in the oldest (Preglacial) strata, and again in the middle (Interglacial) strata of the Central European drift, there was still an abundant plant-growth requiring a temperate climate, at any rate not more severe than Central Europe possesses at the present day. Our chief forest trees grew even then--the pine, fir, larch, and yew, and also the oak, maple, birch, hazel, etc. On the other hand, Northern and Alpine forms are absent among the plants. The same holds good of the animal world, which was certainly much farther removed than the plant world from the conditions prevailing now. The gigantic forms--the elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus--appear particularly strange to us, as also the large beasts of prey--the hyena, lion, etc. But besides these, and the giant deer with its powerful antlers, and two large bovine species--the bison and the urus--there were also the majority of the present wild animals of Central and Northern Europe that were originally natives--as the horse, stag, roe, wild boar, and beaver, with the smaller rodents and insectivora, and the wolf, fox, lynx, and bears, of which last the cave-bear was far larger than the present brown bear, and even than the Polar and grizzly bears.

We have sure proofs that through a decrease in the yearly temperature a glacial period set in over Europe, North Asia, and North America, burying vast areas under a sheet of ice, of the effect and extent of which Northern Greenland, with its ground-relief veiled in inland ice, can give us an idea.

The immediate consequence of this total climatic change was an essential change in the fauna. Forms that were not suited to the deteriorated climate, that could neither stand it nor adapt themselves to it, were first compelled to retire, and then were exterminated. This fate befell the hippopotamuses, and also one of the two elephant species, _Elephas antiquus_, with its dwarf breeds in Sicily and Malta, probably thus developed by this retreat; then the rhinoceros-like _Elasmotherium_, a species of beaver; the _Trogontherium_, and the powerful cat _Machairodus_ or _Trucifelis_, which still lived in England, France, and Liguria during the Drift Period. Other animals, like the lion and hyena, withdrew to more southerly regions, not affected by the increasing cold and more remote from its effects.

[Sidenote: The Older Drift Animals]

On the other hand, according to Von Zittel’s description, an immigration of cold-loving land animals took place, which at the present day live either in the Far North or on the wild Asiatic steppes, or in the high mountain ranges. These new immigrants mixed with the surviving forms of the older drift fauna. The latter lived, as we have seen, by no means in a warm climate, but only in a temperate “northerly” one, even in the warmer periods of the epoch. So we can understand that many of this older animal community were well able to adapt themselves to colder climatic conditions, and among them two of the large Drift pachydermata, the elephant and rhinoceros, whose kin we now find only in the warmest climes. But a thick woolly coat made these two Drift animals well fitted to defy a raw climate--namely, the woolly-haired mammoth, _Elephas primigenius_, one of the two Drift species of elephants of Europe, and the woolly-haired rhinoceros, _Rhinoceros antiquitatis_. A second species of rhinoceros, _Rhinoceros merckii_, was also preserved, and maintained its region of distribution. The horse was now more largely distributed, and inhabited the plains in herds; but, above all, the reindeer immigrated along with other animals that now belong only to Far Northern and Arctic regions, and pastured in large herds at the edges of the glaciers. With the reindeer, although less frequent, was the musk-ox of the Far North, besides many other cold-loving species, such as the lemming, snow-mouse, glutton, ermine, and Arctic fox. Many of the animal forms that were very frequent then, in the Drift Period, appear now in Central Europe only as Alpine dwellers, living on the borders of eternal snow, such as the ibex, chamois, marmot, and Alpine hare.

[Sidenote: The Animal Invasion of Europe]

[Sidenote: The Change of the Ice Age Climate]

Of special importance for our main question is the great invasion of Europe by Central Asiatic animals; immigrants direct from the Asiatic steppes pushed westward “as in a migration of nations,” among them the wild ass, saiga antelope, bobac, Asiatic porcupine, zizel, jumping mouse, whistling hare, and musk shrew-mouse. According as the glaciers and inland ice grew or shrank, the animals of the glacial period advanced more or less far to the North or retired more to the South, extending or reducing their range of distribution. The Glacial Period was no invariable climatic phenomenon. It is perfectly certain that a first Glacial Period with a low yearly temperature, under the influence of which the ice-masses, with their moraines, advanced a long way from the North and from the high mountains, so that in Germany, for instance, only a comparatively narrow strip remained free and habitable for higher forms of life between the two opposing rivers of ice--was succeeded by at least one period of warmer climate, and that certainly not a short one. The mean yearly temperature had increased so much that the ice-masses melted to a considerable extent, and had to retire far to the North and into the high valleys of the Alps. In this warmer Interglacial Period, as it is called, the Drift animals advanced far to the North, especially the mammoth, which, with the exception of the greater part of Scandinavia and Finland (districts which remained covered with ice during the Interglacial Period), is distributed throughout the drift strata of the whole of Europe and North Africa, and as far as Lake Baikal and the Caspian Sea in Northern Asia. Even the older Drift fauna, so far as it had not yet died out or retired, returned to its old habitats, so that the Interglacial fauna of Central Europe appear very similar to the Preglacial fauna. A long-sustained decrease of temperature led once more to the growth of the ice, which in this second Glacial Period almost reconquered the territory it had won at first.

In consequence of these oscillations in the climatic conditions of the Drift Era as a whole, we have to distinguish the Preglacial Era and the Interglacial Era, as warmer sub-periods of the Drift, from the real Glacial Periods. The latter appear as a first, or earlier, and a second, or later Glacial Period, as remains of which the zone of the older moraines and the zone of the later ones clearly mark the limits of the former glaciation.

The Chamois

The Ibex

The Marmot Dando

TYPES OF ANIMALS SURVIVING IN CENTRAL EUROPE FROM THE DRIFT PERIOD

Many of the animal forms that were very frequent in the Drift
Period appear now in Central Europe only as Alpine dwellers, living
on the borders of eternal snow. Such are the ibex, chamois, marmot,
and Alpine hare.
]

[Sidenote: Breaking up of the Earth]

It was this second deterioration of the climate, with the fresh advances made by the glaciers and masses of inland ice, which definitely did away with the older Drift fauna that was not equal to the sudden climatic change. Nor did the woolly-haired rhinoceros, the _Rhinoceros merckii_, and the cave-bear survive the climax of the new Glacial Period. Even the woolly-haired mammoth succumbed. It and the woolly-haired rhinoceros, accompanied by the musk-ox and bison, had made their way into the Far North of Asia. But while the two last species bore the inclemencies of the climate, the rhinoceroses and elephants met their end here. And yet they had long preserved their lives on the borders of eternal ice. Whole carcases, both of the woolly-haired and Merckian rhinoceroses, and also of the woolly-haired mammoth, the bison, and the musk-ox, with skin and hair and well-preserved soft parts, have been discovered in the ice and frozen ground between the Yenisei and Lena, and on the New Siberian Islands at the mouth of the Lena. The carcases of the mammoth and rhinoceros found imbedded in the ice were covered with a coat of thick woolly hair and reddish-brown bristles ten inches long; about thirty pounds of hair from such a mammoth were placed in the St. Petersburg Natural History Museum. A mane hung from the animal’s neck almost to its knees, and on its head was soft hair a yard long. The animals were therefore in this respect well equipped for enduring a cold climate. As regards their food they were also adapted to a cold climate, traces of coniferæ and willows--that is, “Northern plants”--having been found in the hollows of the molar teeth of mammoths and rhinoceroses. The mammoth proves to have had greater resisting power, and to have been more fit for further migrations, than the rhinoceros. The latter’s range of distribution extended over the whole of Northern and Temperate Europe, China and Central Asia, and Northern Asia and Siberia. But, as we have seen, the mammoth penetrated not only into North Africa, but, what is of the highest importance for the proper understanding of the settling of the New World, even into North America.

[Sidenote: Companions of the Mammoth]

[Sidenote: Mammoth’s Arrival in Europe]

The connection which in earlier geological periods had united Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America in the greatest homogeneous zoogeographical kingdom, the Arctogæa, was broken during the Tertiary and Drift Periods, so that several zoogeographical provinces were formed. The connection with North America was the first to be broken, so that even in the last two divisions of the Tertiary Period, the Miocene and Pliocene Epochs, the Old and the New Worlds stood in the relation of independent zoogeographical provinces to one another. Now, it is of the greatest importance to note that during the Drift Period North America again received some Northern immigrants from the Old World, according to Von Zittel “probably viâ Eastern Asia.” Consequently, during the Drift Period communication existed, at least temporarily, between Asia and North America in the region of Bering Strait, sufficient to allow the mammoth and some companions to migrate from the one continent to the other. In Kotzebue Sound mammoth remains are found in the “ground-ice formation,” together with those of the horse, elk, reindeer, musk-ox and bison. Mammoth remains are also known to have been found in the Bering Islands, St. George in the Pribylov group, and Unalaska, one of the Aleutian Islands. In that period the mammoth arrived in the New World as a colonist driven from the Old. It spread widely over British North America, Alaska, and Canada; it has also been found in Kentucky. A relatively recent union of the circumpolar regions of the Northern Hemisphere--of Europe, Asia, and North America--is also proved by the occurrence of animals that we recognise as companions of the mammoth, but which, surviving the Glacial Period, are still distributed over the whole region, such as the reindeer, elk, and bison. The absence in Asia of several animals specially characteristic of the European Drift (the hippopotamus, ibex, chamois, fallow-dear, wildcat, and cave-bear) explains also their absence in the North American Drift fauna. It is particularly strange that the cave-bear did not reach Northern Asia. It is otherwise the most frequent beast of prey of the Drift Period, and hundreds of its carcases often lie buried in the caves and clefts it once inhabited. In Southern Russia numerous remains of it are found, whereas in the English caves it is rarer, the cave-hyena predominating here. Apart from the exceptions just mentioned, J. F. Brandt considers North Asia and the high Northern latitudes to be the region in which the European, North Asiatic, and North American land fauna had concentrated during the Tertiary and Drift Periods, and whence their migrations and advances took place according as it grew older. As the northern fauna spread over more southern latitudes during the Drift Period, they took possession of the habitats of the species there belonging to the Tertiary Period, drove them back into tropical and subtropical regions, and formed the real stock of the Drift fauna, as described by Von Zittel in his “Palæozoology.”

This stuffed carcase of a mammoth is the rarest treasure of St.
Petersburg Academy. Skeletons of these creatures exist in plenty,
but actual carcases are very rare. This was found embedded in
the ice on the New Siberian Islands. One carcase so embedded was
discovered five years before it could be freed from the ice.
]

One thing is certain--namely, that the northern borders of Siberia were not the real home of the mammoth and its companions; the original habitat of these animals points to the far interior of Asia, particularly to the wild table-lands, where they so far steeled themselves in enduring the climate that in the course of the Glacial Period half the world became accessible to them. As far as is known to-day, the mammoth arrived in Europe earlier than on the northern borders of Asia, where, protected by climatic conditions, its remains are most numerous and best preserved. The number of these gigantic animals must have been very considerable in this Far Northern region for a time, judging from the abundance of bones found there. In Central Europe only a few places are known--such as Kannstatt, Predmost in Moravia, etc.--where the mammoth is found with similar frequency. The mammoth attained its widest distribution in the Interglacial Period. In that period it crossed the Alps, and arrived on the other side, in North Asia, at the border of the “stone-ice” masses of inland ice that were still preserved from the first Glacial Period. The vegetation there was richer then than it is to-day; now only the vegetation of the tundra can exist. Animals found coniferæ, willows, and alders in sufficient quantity to enable them to keep in herds. All the same, we have not to imagine the climate on the borders of the ice to have been “genial,” for from that period originate the mammoth carcases that are found frozen entire in crevasses of the ice-fields. When the new period of cold--the second Glacial Period--began, these Far Northern regions must have become unsuitable for the mammoth owing to the want of food. Von Toll, who has examined the fossil ice-beds and, their relation to the mammoth carcases particularly on New Siberian Islands, says:

The mammoths and their contemporaries lived where their remains
are found; they died out gradually in consequence of physical
geographical changes in the region they inhabited, and through no
catastrophe; their carcases were deposited during low temperatures,
partly on the river-terraces, and partly on the banks of lakes or
on glaciers (inland ice), and covered with mud; like the ice-masses
that formed the foundation of their graves, their mummies were
preserved to the present day, thanks to the persistent or
increasing cold.

in the Natural History Museum, South Kensington.
]

The woolly-haired mammoth did not survive the second Glacial Period anywhere; in the post-Glacial Period its traces have disappeared.

The Drift series of strata are nowhere so clearly exemplified as in the New Siberian Islands, where the Drift stone-ice still forms very extensive high “ice-cliffs,” always covered with a layer of loam, sand, and peat, and having precipices often of great height--in one place seventy-two feet.

Embedded in these cliffs of stone-ice have been found the mammoth carcases, which formerly sank into crevices in the ice. These crevices are partly filled up with snow, which has turned into “firn” and finally into ice, but partly also with loam or sand, which are merged above immediately into the strata overlying the stone-ice. In the year 1860 Bojavski, the mammoth-hunter, found a mammoth, with all its soft parts preserved, sticking upright in a crevice in the ice filled with loam; in 1863 it was thrown down, together with the coast-wall that sheltered it, and washed away by the sea.

Only one representative of the great Drift fauna, the musk-ox, has
been able to preserve its life to the present day on the larger
remnants of its former vast home, such as Greenland and Grinnell
Land.
]

The Tunguse Schumachow had been more fortunate as early as 1799. During his boating expeditions along the coast, on the look-out for mammoth-tusks, he observed one day, between blocks of ice, a shapeless block which was not at all like the masses of driftwood that are generally found there. In the following year the block had melted a little, but it was only at the end of the third summer that the whole side and one of the tusks of a mammoth appeared plainly out of the ice; the animal, however, still remained sunk in the ice-masses. At last, towards the end of the fifth year, the ice between the ground and the mammoth melted more quickly than the rest, the base began to slope, and the enormous mass, impelled by its own weight, glided down on to the sand of the coast. Here Adams found the carcase in 1806, or as much as the dogs and wild animals had left of it. The whole skeleton, with a portion of the flesh, skin, and hair, has since formed one of the chief ornaments of the collection in the Academy at St. Petersburg. According to Von Toll, who personally visited the site of Bojavski’s discovery, the following profile presented itself there: first the tundra stratum; then an alternation of thin strata of loam and ice; under these a peat-like layer of grass, leaves, and other vegetation, that had been washed together; then a fine layer of sand, with remains of _Salix_, etc., and finally stone-ice. At another place, in Gulf Anabar, in 73° north latitude, Von Toll also found the ground-moraine under a fossil ice-bed, which appears to prove his theory of a Drift region of inland ice, of which the stone-ice beds of New Siberia and Eschscholtz Bay are remains.

Of these strata the frozen loam deposits over the stone-ice, containing the willow and the alder, are doubtless Interglacial. Some of the remains of the alder are in such wonderful preservation that there are still leaves and whole clusters of catkins on the branches.

The land-mass to which the present New Siberian Islands belong was only dismembered at the end of the Interglacial Period, when colder sea-currents procured an entrance, and the accumulation of snow-masses diminished simultaneously with the sinking of the land, whereas the cold increased. The flora died off, says Von Toll, and the animal world was deprived of the possibility of roaming freely over vast areas. Only one representative of the great Drift fauna, the musk-ox, has been able to preserve its life to the present day on the larger remnants of its former vast home, such as Greenland and Grinnell Land.

[Sidenote: Remains of the Ice Age]

As we have said, the geological and climatic conditions in all regions of the earth affected by the Glacial Period were closely similar to those just described. In other places the Drift stone-ice has long disappeared, but the ground-moraines of the former inland ice-masses, and the surface-moraines (terminal and lateral) of the former gigantic glaciers, constitute its unobliterated traces. On the moraines of the earlier Glacial Period we find the strata of the Interglacial Period deposited, and on the later moraines of the second (last) Glacial Period lie the remains of the post-Glacial Period, in the course of which a continual increase in the yearly temperature--probably only a few degrees of the thermometer--caused the glaciers to melt and retreat, and opened the way for the return of plants and animals to what had been deserts of snow and ice. The place formerly occupied by the Interglacial and Glacial fauna is then taken by the post-Glacial fauna, which proves considerably different.

A number of the most characteristic species of the former sections of the Drift Period are already absent in the earliest post-Glacial deposits; the fauna approaches nearer and nearer in its composition to that of the present day. The inland ice-masses and gigantic glaciers began to melt away, and gradually retired to the present limits of the glaciation that forms the remains of the Glacial Period of the Drift. The animal forms of the beginning of the post-Glacial Period are still living, and the plants characterising this final stage of the Drift Period are still growing on the borders of the ice at the present day. In the post-Glacial Period a few Northern forms--such as the reindeer, lemming, ringed lemming, glutton, zizel, whistling hare, and jumping mouse--still retained for a time their habitats in Central Europe. Part of the Drift fauna--as the horse, wild ass, saiga antelope, and Asiatic porcupine--concentrated again in the Asiatic steppes, from which they had formerly won their territory of the Drift Period; the specific Glacial forms--the reindeer and his above-mentioned companions--followed the retreating ice-masses into the Far North, and even into Polar regions. Another part--the specially Alpine forms, such as the ibex, chamois, marmot, and Alpine hare--migrated with the Alpine glaciers into the high valleys of the Alps, where they could continue the life they had led in the lowlands during the Glacial Period. The mammoth, woolly-haired rhinoceros, and cave-bear are extinct.

The present-day mammalian fauna of Europe and North Asia accordingly bears a comparatively young character; during the Drift, and especially in consequence of the Glacial Period, it underwent the most considerable transformations.

[Sidenote: Coming of Man upon the Scene]

It is in the middle of this great drama of a gigantic animal world struggling and fighting for its existence with the superior powers of Nature, during the Interglacial period of the Drift, that man suddenly appears upon the scene in Europe like a _deus ex machina_.

Whence he came we do not know.

Did he make his entrance into Europe in company with the Drift fauna that immigrated from Central Asia, or have we to seek his original home in the New World?

This page represents the most typical of the giant creatures that
inhabited the world before man. With possibly one exception, they
had disappeared before man came and, through long centuries, slowly
won dominion over the earth.
]

THE WORLD
BEFORE
HISTORY--II

Professor
JOHANNES
RANKE
]

THE APPEARANCE OF MAN ON THE EARTH

[Sidenote: The Mystery of a Human Skull]

The remains of the Drift fauna are usually found mixed up and washed together in caves and rock-crevices. From the investigation of the caves in Thuringia, Franconia, and elsewhere practically proceeded the first knowledge of the Drift fauna of Central Europe. Here, right among the bones of primeval animals, were also found bones and skulls of man. The strata in which they were discovered appeared undisturbed; that they came into the old burial-places of the Drift fauna subsequently--perhaps by an intentional burial of relatively recent times--was thought to be out of the question. The discovery that became most famous was Esper’s, in one of the richest caves of “Franconian Switzerland,” the Gaillenreuth cave. There, in 1774, Esper found a man’s lower jaw and shoulder-blade at a perfectly untouched spot protected by a stone projection in the cave wall, in the same loam as bones of the cave-bear and other Drift animals. Later, a human skull with some rude potsherds of clay came to light in another place. Esper argued thus:

As the human bones (lower jaw and shoulder-blade) lay among the
skeletons of animals, of which the Gaillenreuth caves are full,
and as they were found in what is in all probability the original
stratum, I presume, and I think not without sufficient reason, that
these human limbs are of equal age with the other animal fossils.

The Cuvier catastrophe theory could not allow this inference; according to that theory it was a “scientific postulate” that man could not have appeared on the earth until the alluvial period, and therefore after the Drift fauna had become extinct. Therefore, in spite of appearances, the human bones must have been more recent; and it was indeed absolutely proved that the skull that Esper had found in the cave with the rude clay potsherds originated from a burial in the floor of the cave. As this was full of remains of Drift animals, the corpse, which had been covered with the earth that had been thrown up in digging the grave, was necessarily surrounded by these remains, and even appeared embedded in them.

[Sidenote: The Story of the Caves]

It was ascertained that in very early times, but yet long after the Drift Period, the dwellers near by had had a predilection for using the caves as burial-places, so that the fact of human bones coming together with bones of Drift animals in the floor of the same cave is easily explained. Moreover, it was found that from the earliest times down to the present day the caves had been used by hunters, herdsmen, and others as places of shelter in bad weather, as cooking-places, and sometimes even--especially in very early times--as regular dwelling-places for longer periods, so that refuse of all kinds, and often of all ages and forms of civilisation that the land has seen from the Drift Period down to modern times, must have got into the floors of the caves. If these were damp and soft, the remains of every century were trodden in and got to lie deeper and deeper, so that, for instance, the fragments of a cast-iron saucepan were actually found right among the bones of regular Drift animals in a cave in Upper Franconia.

[Sidenote: The Caves do not Prove Drift Man]

The discoveries of human remains in caves appeared discredited by this, and to be of no value as proofs of the co-existence of man with the Drift fauna. And indeed this position must practically be still taken at the present day: all cave-finds are to be judged with the greatest caution. They in themselves would never have been sufficient to establish the existence of Drift Man, although, according to the general change in scientific thought that led to the overthrow of Cuvier’s theory, Drift Man is now just as much a postulate of science as was formerly the case for the opposite assumption.

[Sidenote: Finding the First Drift Man]

The first sure proofs were adduced in France by Boucher de Perthes, in the Drift beds of the Somme valley, near Abbeville, at the end of the third decade of the nineteenth century. Fully recognising the inadequacy of proof given by cave-finds, he had sought for the relics of man in the undisturbed Drift beds of gravel and coarse sand that contains the bones of Drift animals, which by their covering and depth precluded all suspicion of having been subsequently dug over. And he was successful. He had argued in exactly the same manner as Esper had formerly done, but with better right. In the stratified Drift formations every period is sharply defined by the layers of differently coloured and differently composed strata horizontally overlying one another. Here the proofs begin. They are irrefutable if it is shown that the relics of man have been there since the deposit. Being no less immovable than this stratum in which they lie, as they came with it, they were likewise preserved with it; and as they have contributed to its formation, they existed before it.

[Sidenote: The Overthrow of Cuvier’s Famous Theory]

That is the line of thought according to which Boucher de Perthes was able, in 1839, to lay before the leading experts in Paris--at their head Cuvier himself--his discoveries proving the former existence of Drift man. But his demonstrations were not then sufficient to break the old ban of prejudices that were apparently founded on such good scientific bases; his proofs of the presence of man in the Somme valley at the time of the Drift, contemporaneously with the extinct Drift animals, were ridiculed. It was twenty years before these long-neglected discoveries in the Somme valley concerning the early history of man were recognised by the scientific world. This was only made possible by Lyell, whose authority as a geologist had risen above Cuvier’s, placing the whole weight of it on Boucher’s side, after having personally travelled over the Somme valley three times in the year 1859, and having himself examined all the chief places where relics of Drift Man had been discovered. According to Lyell’s description, the Somme valley lies in a district of white chalk, which forms elevations of several hundred feet in height. If we ascend to this height we find ourselves on an extensive tableland, showing only moderate elevations and depressions, and covered uninterruptedly for miles with loam and brick earth about five feet thick and quite devoid of fossils. Here and there on the chalk may be noticed outlying patches of Tertiary sand and clay, the remains of a once extensive formation, the denudation of which has chiefly furnished the Drift gravel material in which the relics of man and the bones of extinct animals lie buried. The Drift alluvial deposit of the Somme valley exhibits nothing extraordinary in its stratification or outward appearance, nor in its composition or organic contents. The stratum in which the bones of the Drift fauna are found intermingled with the relics of man is partly a marine and partly a fluviatile deposit. The human relics in particular are mostly buried deep in the gravel; almost everywhere one has to pass down through a mass of overlying loam with land shells, or a fine sand with fresh-water molluscs, before coming to beds of gravel, in which the relics of Drift Man are found.

[Sidenote: Animals of the Ice Age]

Everything shows that the relics of man are here in a secondary _situs_, deposited in the same way as the bones of extinct animals and the whole geological material in which everything is embedded. That is the reason why the finds cannot be more exactly dated. They doubtless belong to the general drift, but whether to the Postglacial Period, or the warmer Interglacial Period, cannot be decided. The fauna admits of no absolute limitation, owing to its being mixed from both periods. The mammalia most frequently found in the strata in question are the mammoth, Siberian rhinoceros, horse, reindeer, ure-ox, giant fallow-deer, cave-lion, and cave-hyena. In very similar Drift deposits of the Somme near Amiens traces of man were found beside the bones of the hippopotamus and the elephant.

These animals were chiefly prevalent in France and Germany in the Preglacial and Interglacial Periods of the Drift. Part of the animal remains found near Abbeville, particularly those of the cave-lion and cave-hyena, also point to the warmer Interglacial Period; on the other hand, the mammoth, Siberian rhinoceros, and especially the reindeer, appear to indicate with all certainty the second Glacial and Postglacial Periods. The bones of the older Drift animals may have been washed out of other primary _situs_; the reindeer had certainly already taken possession of those parts of France when the relics of man were embedded.

Cuvier

Boucher De Perthes

THE OVERTHROW OF A FAMOUS THEORY OF THE ORIGIN OF THE EARTH AND MAN

When Cuvier was supreme among geologists his theory that the great
geological ages ended with sudden catastrophes which annihilated
all life, and that all life was then created afresh, was
universally accepted. One result of this theory was the disbelief
in the existence of man before the Glacial Age. Boucher de Perthes
sought to establish the former existence of Drift Man on finding
human relics in the Somme Valley; but not until Sir Charles Lyell
threw his influence on the side of De Perthes was the Preglacial
existence of man admitted, and the long-accepted theory of Cuvier
overthrown.
]

In spite of the most eager search for similar relic-beds affording sure evidence of Drift Man, only a very few have as yet been discovered that can be placed by the side of those in the Somme valley. Two are in Germany, and are the more valuable as a more exact date can be given to them within the Drift Period. One is near Taubach (Weimar), the other at the source of the Schussen. The one at Taubach belongs to the Interglacial Period, that at the source of the Schussen to the Postglacial Period. The former lies on the moraines of the first Glacial Period, which was followed by the Interglacial Period; the latter on the moraines of the second Glacial Period, which slowly passed into the Postglacial Period.

[Sidenote: The Climate of the Ice Age]

The Drift relic-bed in the calc-tufa near Taubach lies, as we have said, over the remains of the first Glacial Period, and according to Penck, one of the best authorities on the Drift, belongs to the warmer intermediate epoch between the two great periods of glaciation. The proofs given by the plant and animal remains agree entirely with the proofs given by the conditions of stratification. In the rich fauna found there, animals indicating a cold climate are entirely absent, and a comparison of the whole of the finds proves that at the time when man was present there no kind of arctic conditions can have prevailed. There is no reindeer, no lemming. The roe, stag, wolf, brown bear, beaver, wild boar, and aurochs were at that time inhabitants of these regions, and the only inference they allow is that of a temperate climate. The mollusc fauna, in which also all Glacial forms are absent, also leads to the same conclusion; all that occur are familiar to us from those of the present day in the same district. The fauna would really appear quite modern were it not that a very ancient stamp is imparted to it by several extinct types. With the modern animals enumerated are associated the cave-lion, cave-hyena, ure-elephant, and Merckian rhinoceros, characterising the whole deposit as a distinctly Drift one, which is still further proved stratigraphically by the covering of “loess.” The Taubach relic-bed is a typical illustration of the climatic and biological conditions of the warmer Interglacial Period; the regions of Central Europe, which had been covered with masses of ice in the first Glacial Period, had, after the ice melted, become once more accessible to the banished plants and animals of the Preglacial Period, until they were annihilated, or at least driven definitely from their old habitats by the second Glacial Period. The celebrated relic-bed at the source of the Schussen, near Schussenried, at a little distance from Ulm, brings us--in strong contrast to Taubach--into quite glacial surroundings. It was on the glacier-moraines of the last great glaciation, and belongs, therefore, to that period which must still be reckoned as part of the Drift--the Postglacial Period, which gradually passed into the warmer present period. Under the tufa and peat at the source of the Schussen we find the type of a purely northern climate, with exclusively northern flora and fauna; everything corresponds to climatic conditions such as prevail nowadays on the borders of eternal snow and ice, or begin at 70° north latitude.

[Sidenote: Flora and Fauna of the Ice Age]

Schimper, one of the best authorities on mosses at the present day, found among the plant-remains under the tufa at the source of the Schussen only mosses of northern or high Alpine forms. Among them was a moss brought from Lapland by Wahlenberg, which, according to Schimper, occurs in Norway near the chalets on the Dovrefjeld, on the borders of eternal snow, and also in Greenland, Labrador, and Canada, and on the highest summits of the Tyrolese Alps and the Sudetic Mountains. It has a special preference for the pools in which the water of the snow and glaciers flows off with its fine sand. There were also found mosses which have now emigrated to cold regions, to Greenland and the Alps. The most numerous animals were the reindeer, and yellow and Arctic foxes, as distinctly Arctic forms; and there were also the brown bear and wolf, a small ox, the hare, the large-headed wild horse--which always occurs in the Drift as the companion of the reindeer--and, lastly, the whistling swan, which now breeds in Spitzbergen or Lapland. There is an absence of all the present animal forms of Upper Swabia, as well as of the extinct Drift animals, either of which would indicate a warmer climate.

More decided climatic or biological contrasts than those afforded by the relic-beds at Taubach and the source of the Schussen could not be imagined; here we have with certainty two perfectly different periods before us, but both belonging to the general Drift Era.

Although almost all the other places where Drift Man has been found exhibit peculiarities, Taubach and the source of the Schussen seem the best representatives of the two chief types in Europe. Places giving better proof have not yet come to light anywhere in the Old World.

A section of the earth, representing excavators in the act of
discovering the remains of mammals in a cave in the South of
England. Our illustration is reproduced from Buckland’s “Reliquiæ
Diluvianæ,” London, 1822.
]

[Sidenote: Evidence from South America]

At first sight the palæontological strata of South America, in which the presence of man has been proved by Ameghino, appear to give a very different picture. The animal forms occurring here contemporaneously with man deviate to such an extent from those familiar to us in the Drift of the Old World that it required the keen eye and the complete grasp of the whole palæontological material of the world that characterise Von Zittel to recognise and establish the connections here, while the discoverer himself thought that he must date his discoveries of man back to the Tertiary Period. The strata in which the earliest traces of man as yet appear to be proved in South America are the extensive “loess-like” loam deposits of the so-called “pampas” formation in Argentina and Uruguay, with their almost incomparable wealth of animal remains, particularly conspicuous among which are gigantic representatives of edentates that now occur only in small species in South America: Glyptodontia (with the gigantic _Glyptodon reticulatum_) and dasypoda; also of the gravigrada, the giant sloth (_Megatherium americanum_). The toxodontia were also large animals, now extinct. But besides the specifically South American forms, numerous “North American immigrants” also appear in the pampas formation. It was only at the close of the Tertiary Period that the southern and northern halves of America grew together into one continent, and the faunæ of North and South America, so characteristically different, then began to intermingle with one another. The South American autochthons migrate northward; on the other hand, North American types--as the horse, deer, tapir, mastodon, _Felis_, _Canis_, etc.--use the newly-opened passage to extend their range of distribution. The northern animal forms are very conspicuous among the animal world of South America, hitherto cut off from North America and characterised by the above-mentioned wonderful and, in part, gigantic edentates, marsupials, platyrhine apes, etc. Of the great elephantine animals of North America only the mastodon crossed over to South America. In the middle and latest Tertiary formations the genus mastodon is widely distributed over Europe, North Africa, and South Asia. In North America the oldest species of the mastodon appear in the Middle Tertiary (Upper Miocene), but the most species are found in the latest Tertiary (Pliocene) and the Drift (Pleistocene); in South America the mastodon is limited to the time of the pampas formation. Its tusks are long and straight, or slightly curved upward; its lower jaw also possesses two tusks, which project in a straight direction, but are considerably less than the upper tusks in size. From the results of Ameghino’s investigations man appears to have come to South America with these northern immigrants, especially with the mastodon. In Ameghino’s lists of the animals of the pampas formation Von Zittel describes man, like the animal forms enumerated above, as an immigrant from North America, and as a northern type.

According to Von Zittel’s statements there is no longer any doubt that the pampas formation, and with it early man, of South America, is to be assigned to the Drift Era; he sums up the case in these words:

In South Asia and South America the Tertiary Period is followed
by Drift faunæ, which in the main are composed of species still
existing at the present day, but yet show somewhat closer relations
to their Tertiary predecessors.

THE WORLD
BEFORE
HISTORY--III

Professor
JOHANNES
RANKE
]

THE LIFE OF MAN IN THE STONE AGE

[Sidenote: Man a Witness of the Flood]

The oldest remains affording us knowledge of man are not parts of his body--not the skeleton from which, in the case of primeval animals, we have learned to reconstruct their frame--but evidences of the human mind. Until the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes turned the scale, search had been made in vain among the bones of the fossil fauna for remains of the skeleton of fossil man of undoubtedly the same age; it was not bones, but tools, by which the Abbeville antiquary proved that man had been a “witness of the Flood” in Europe; tools which taught irrefutably that the mental powers of fossil man of the Drift were similar in kind to, if possibly less in degree than, those of living members of mankind. The Drift tools prove that, even in that early epoch to which we have learned from Boucher to trace him back, man was distinctively man.

Boucher de Perthes was an expert archæologist, and he knew that in Europe, in a very early period of civilisation, men had made their tools and weapons of stone, as many tribes and races in a backward state of civilisation--for example in South America, the South Sea Islands, and many other places--do at the present day. These stone implements are practically indestructible, and from ancient times manifold superstitions have attached to the curious articles that the peasant turns up out of the earth in ploughing. Such stone weapons were called lightning-stones by the Romans, as they are by country-folk at the present day. Scientific archæology occupied itself with them at an early date. In 1778 Buffon declared the so-called lightning-stones, or thunder-stones, to be the oldest art-productions of primeval man, and as early as 1734, Mahudel and Mercati had pronounced them to be the weapons of antediluvian man. Such views determined the line of thought in Boucher’s researches. From the very beginning he sought, in the undisturbed Drift beds of his home, not so much for the bones of Drift Man as for his tools, which he suspected to be of the form of the lightning-stones, although he knew that, so far as was hitherto known, these belonged to a very much later epoch--that is, specially to the Alluvial or “Recent” Period.

His expectations were crowned with success. Deep below the mass of overlying loam and sand, right in the strata of gravel and coarse sand, he found stone tools, which without the slightest doubt had been worked by the hand of man for definite and easily recognisable purposes as implements and weapons. Although to a certain extent ruder, they are practically the same forms as the tools, weapons, and implements of stone that we see in use among so-called “savages” of the present day. It is the tool artificially prepared for a certain purpose that raises man above the animal world to-day, as it did in the time of the Drift.

[Sidenote: Drift Man’s Three Kinds of Tools]

[Sidenote: The Chief Forms of Tools]