Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography

by Daniel G. Brinton

The general accuracy of the contours delineated are now fully recognized by geologists. They are attested by the remaining beach-lines of this primitive ocean, by the geographical distribution of its contemporary fauna and flora, and by the proofs of elevation and submergence along the shores and in the bottom of the adjacent seas and oceans. The “great sink” of the western Sahara, the vast “schotts,” or shallow saltwater ponds south of the Atlas, the salt Dead Sea at the bottom of a profound depression, prove that the drying up of the ancient ocean is scarcely yet complete.

Outlines of the Eastern Hemisphere in the Early Quaternary.

So familiar have these ancient continental areas become to geological students that they have been named like a newly-discovered island or cape. The northern continent has been called Eurasia, compounded of the words Europe and Asia, and the southern Indo-Africa, from a supposed union of India and Africa.[41]

Neither of these names is quite acceptable. The former leaves out of account the connection of Europe with Africa, which is of the first importance in the study of early man; and the latter assumes a geographic union between India and Africa, which is not likely to have existed in the period of man’s life on earth. I prefer the two names which I have inserted on the map; Eurafrica, indicating the connection between Europe and Africa, and Austafrica, designating the whole of the continent south of the ancient dividing sea. The name Asia should be confined to the Central Asian plateau and the regions watered by the countless streams which flow from it toward the north, east and south.

Relics of Man.—Such was the configuration of land in the Eastern hemisphere when man first appeared. We know he was there at that time. I have referred to his rude stone (palæolithic) implements exhumed from the river-drift of the Thames and the Somme, a deposit which dates from a time when the hippopotamus bathed in those rivers; still older seem some rough implements discovered in gravel layers near Madrid, Spain, deposited by some large river in early quaternary times. The worked flints near Lisbon were manufactured when a wide fresh-water lake existed where now not a trace of it is visible on the surface, and according to some archæologists, are the most ancient manufactured products yet discovered.[42]

In numerous parts of North Africa, as near Tlemcen in the province of Oran, and in Tunisia, the oldest forms of stone implements have been found in place beneath massive layers of quaternary travertin,[43] and in some of the most barren portions of the Libyan desert, now utterly sterile, the travertin contains abundant remains of leaves and grasses, along with chipped flints, proving that at the recession of this diluvial sea not only was the vegetation luxuriant, but man was then on the spot, as a hunter and fisher.[44]

Not less certain is it that he was a most ancient occupant of Austafrica. Chert implements of the true “river-drift” type have been discovered “in place” in quaternary stratified gravels near Thebes, and elsewhere in the Nile valley; and in the diamond field of the Cape of Good Hope, palæolithic forms have been exhumed from diluvial strata forty or fifty feet below the surface of the soil.[45]

From similar evidence we know that man spread widely over the habitable earth in that remote time. It is known to archæologists as the earliest period of the Stone Age, and the implements attributed to it are singularly alike in size and form. They seem to indicate a race of beings who were unprogressive, lacking perchance the stimulus of necessity in their mild climate and with their few needs.

The Glacial Age.—But a wonderful change took place in their conditions of life. Slowly, from some yet unexplained cause, mighty ice-sheets, thousands of feet in thickness, gathered around the poles, and collected on the flanks of the northern mountains. With silent but irresistible might they advanced over land and sea, crushing beneath them all animal and vegetable life, changing the perennial summer of Eurafrica to an Arctic winter, or at best to an Alpine climate. The tropical animals fled, the plants perished, and under the enormous weight of the ice-mass, the ocean bottom in the north was depressed a thousand feet or more. This in turn brought about material oscillations in the land levels to the south. The bed of the Mediterranean sank, that of the Sahara Sea slightly rose, leaving the latter little more than a swamp, while the former assumed the shape which we now see.