Fig. 3.—Flint Disc, Kent’s Cavern. (½).
Such, then, are some of the indications which have been assumed to point to the ancient presence of man in the New World. If we estimate this by historical, and not by geological periods, whatever proofs of his antiquity archæology may supply will be found to accord with other evidence; and especially with proofs furnished by the multitude of independent languages, and the diversity of types of race, ranging from the Arctic circle to Tierra del Fuego. But it would be rash to assume from the partial evidence yet obtained, that the juxtaposition of flint arrow-heads with the mastodon of Missouri, the pottery with bones and tusk of the same animal in the post-pleiocene of South Carolina, the human bones in the rich ossiferous caverns of the Brazils, or the flint implements, and human remains recovered from Californian and other auriferous drifts, unquestionably prove the existence of man on the American continent contemporaneously with the fossil elephant or the mastodon.
The proofs hitherto adduced have been at best only suggestive of further research. There is no question that Dr. Lund visited that portion of Brazil lying between the Rio das Velhas and the Rio Paraopeba, with very important palæontological results. He there found a mountain chain of limestone rock, abounding with fissures and caverns; and from some of these calcareous caves he recovered, not only the bones of numerous fossil mammals imbedded in red earth, but also human bones which he pronounced to be fossil. The remains included not only those of sloths and armadillos of gigantic size, but also extinct genera of monkeys, all assumed to have been contemporaries of the fossil cave-men. But experience is teaching the palæontologist that the mere recovery of bones or implements from the same cave is no proof of contemporaneity. A cave which had been filled with cave-earth and bone breccia, together with extinct animals of the period of the glyptodon and the mylodon, may in a long subsequent era have become the shelter or the place of sepulture of Indians.
Nearly forty years have elapsed since Dr. Lund’s discovery. Since then the lamented Agassiz has visited Brazil with valuable results to science; but no additional light has been thrown on the significance of the disclosures of this interesting locality. One important fact, however, has not only been admitted, but insisted upon. The crania of the fossil men of Brazil betray no traces of approximation to that of the fossil monkey, but on the contrary differ in no respect from the predominant American Indian type; and the same has since been affirmed of a set of human skulls now in the Smithsonian collection, which were found incrusted with stalagmite, in a limestone cave in Calaveras County, California. Their fossil character and extreme antiquity were at first assumed to be indisputable. In this other respect they correspond with the Brazilian fossil remains. Professor Jeffreys Wyman reported of them that they present “no peculiarities by which they could be distinguished from other crania of California.”[[28]]
Here then might seem to be additional proofs “that the general type of races inhabiting America at that inconceivably remote era was the same which prevailed at the period of the Columbian discovery”;[[29]] and that, therefore, Dr. Morton’s assumed uniform cranial type pertains to the American man from remotest geological time. There seems more reason, however, for believing that the Calaveras Cave was a place of interment of the present race of Indians; and that its crania are very modern compared even with the fossil Caribs of Guadaloupe. But the increasing evidence of the remote antiquity of the European man has naturally suggested a revision of the evidence adduced in confirmation of his ancient presence in the New World.
Sir Charles Lyell latterly regarded with greater favour than he had once done, the possible coexistence of man with the mastodon, megalonyx, and other extinct species, among bones of which, in the loam of the Mississippi valley, near Natchez, a human pelvic bone was recovered, and made the basis of very comprehensive theories. In the delta of the same river, near New Orleans, a complete human skeleton is reported to have been found, buried at a depth of sixteen feet, under the remains of four successive cypress forests; and this discovery furnished the data from which Dr. Bennet Dowler has assigned to the human race an existence in the delta of the Mississippi 57,000 years ago.[[30]]
Evidence of this exceptional nature requires to be used with modest caution. Antiquaries of Europe having found tobacco pipes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alongside of pottery and other undoubted remains of Roman art, have hastily antedated the use of tobacco to classic times.[[31]] On equally good evidence it might be carried back to those of the mammoth, as the discovery of a similar relic has been recorded at a depth of many feet, in sinking a coal-pit at Misk, in Ayrshire.[[32]]
| [6] | The British Dominions in North America. Lond. 1832. Vol. i. p. 89. |