Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography

by Daniel G. Brinton

Such dreams meet no countenance from pre-historic archæology. The oldest remains of man’s arts, the first rude flints which he shaped into utensils and weapons, have not been discovered in Asia, and do not occur at all in the northern latitudes of either continent. They have been exhumed from the late tertiary or early quaternary deposits of southern England, of France, of the Iberian peninsula, and of the valleys of the Atlas in northern Africa. They have been searched for most diligently but in vain in Scandinavia, Germany, Russia, Siberia, and Canada. Not any of the older types of so-called “palæolithic” implements have been reported in early deposits in those countries.[37] But in the “river drift” of the Thames, the Somme, the Garonne, and the Tagus, quantities of rough stone implements have been disinterred, proving that in a remote epoch, at a time when the hippopotamus and rhinoceros, the African elephant and the extinct apes, found a congenial home near the present sites of London, Paris and Lisbon, man also was there. These relics, especially those found in Portugal, Central Spain and Southern France, are the very oldest proofs of the presence of man on the earth yet brought to light.

Where, now, do we find the remains of the highest of the lower animals? By a remarkable coincidence, in the same region. Of all the anthropoid apes yet known to the palæontologist, that most closely simulating man is the so-called Dryopithecus fontani, whose bones have been disinterred in the upper valleys of the Garonne, in Southern France. Its height was about that of a man, its teeth strongly resembled those of the Australians, and its food was chiefly vegetables and fruits. Other remains of a similar character have been found in Italy.[38]

It is well known to geologists that the apes and monkeys or Simiadæ were abundant and highly developed in Southern Europe in the pliocene and early pleistocene, just the time, as near as we can fix it, that man first appeared there. These facts answer the third of our inquiries—that for a climate suitable to man in an unprotected early condition, when he had to contend with the elements and the parsimony of nature, ill-provided as he is with many of the natural advantages possessed by other animals. At that date Southern Europe and Northern Africa were under what are called sub-tropical conditions, possessing a climate not wholly tropical, but yet singularly mild and equable. This we know from the remains, both animal and vegetable, preserved in the deposits of that epoch.

A series of negative arguments strengthens this conclusion. Where we find no remains of apes or monkeys of the higher class, we cannot place the scene of man’s ancestral evolution. This excludes America, where no tailless and no narrow-nosed (catarhine) monkeys and no large apes have been found; it excludes Australia, and all portions of the Old World north of the Alps and the Himalayas.

In view of such facts, Darwin reached the conclusion that it is most probable that our earliest progenitors lived on the African continent. There to this day we find on the one hand the human beings most closely allied to the lower animals, and the two species of these, the gorilla and the chimpanzee, now man’s nearest relations among the brutes.[39]

Darwin was disturbed in this conclusion by the presence of the large apes to whom I have referred in Southern Europe in late tertiary times. This, however, merely requires a modification in his conclusion, the general tenor of which, to the effect that man was first developed in the warm regions of the western or Atlantic portion of the Old World, somewhere within the present or ancient area of Africa, and not in Asia, has been steadily strengthened since the great evolutionist wrote his remarkable work on the Descent of Man.

Quaternary Geography of Europe and Africa.—The modification which I refer to is the obvious fact that since the late tertiary epoch, and especially during and after the glacial epoch, some material changes have taken place in the physical geography of Europe and Africa. To these I must now ask your particular attention, as they controlled not only the scene of man’s origin, but the lines of his early migrations.

When primal man, with no weapon or tool but one chipped from a stone flake, roamed over France, England and the Iberian peninsula, along with the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and the elephant, the coast lines of Europe and North Africa were quite unlike those of to-day. England and Ireland were united to the mainland, and neither the Straits of Dover nor St. George’s Channel had been furrowed by the waves. Huge forests, such as can yet be traced near Cromer, covered the plains which are now the bottom of the German Ocean. In the broad shallow sea to the north, the mountainous regions of Scandinavia rose as islands, and between them and the Ural Mountains its waters spread uninterruptedly.

To the south, Northern Africa was united to Southern Europe by two wide land-bridges, one at the Straits of Gibraltar, one connecting Tunis with Sicily and Italy. The eastern portion of the Mediterranean was a contracted fresh-water lake, pouring its waters into a broad stream which connected the Atlantic with the Indian Oceans. This stream covered most of the present desert of the Sahara, the delta of Egypt, and a large portion of Arabia and Southern Asia. Its northern beach extended along the southern base of the Atlas Mountains from the River Dra on the Atlantic to the Gulf of Gabes in the Mediterranean; thence northward between Malta and Sicily to the Straits of Otranto; by the Ionian islands easterly till it intersected the present coast-line near the mouth of the Orontes; northeasterly to about Diarbekir, whence it trended south and east along the foot of the Zagros mountains to the Persian Gulf. From that point it followed the present coast-line to the mouth of the Indus, and thence pursued the base of the great northern mountain range to the mouth of the Ganges, covering the north of Hindustan, while the southern elevations of that spacious peninsula, as well as a large part of southern and western Arabia, rose as extensive irregular islands above the water. Toward them the mainland of equatorial Africa extended much nearer than at present. It included in its area the island of Madagascar, and reached far beyond into the Indian Ocean. Toward the north, peninsulas and chains of islands, now the summits of the plateaus and mountains of the central Sahara, reached nearly or quite to the present shore-line of the Mediterranean, about Tripolis.[40]

This disposition of the water left two great land areas in the old world, probably not actually united though separated only by narrow straits, one between the modern Tripolis and Tunis, and another on the northern Syrian coast. I represent these areas on the accompanying map, not indeed minutely, but approximately.