Flint arrow-heads found together in a modern Indian deposit in Canada, and showing the coincidence in time of rude and finished flint weapons, or that among all savages using chipped flint, the palæolithic and neolithic ages are contemporaneous.
Lastly, both of these old European races were Turanian, Mongolian, or American in their head-forms and features, as well as in their habits, implements, and arts. To illustrate this, in so far as the older of the two races is concerned, I have carefully compared collections of American Indian skulls with casts and figures representing the form and dimensions of some of the oldest European crania above referred to. Some of the American skulls may fairly be compared in their characters with the Mentone skull, and others with those of Cro-magnon, Engis, and Neanderthal; and so like are some of the Huron, Iroquois, and other northern American skulls to these ancient European relics and others of their type, that it would be difficult to affirm that they might not have belonged to near relatives. On the other hand, the smaller and shorter heads of the race of the reindeer age in Europe may be compared with the Laps, and with some of the more delicately formed Algonquin and Chippewayan skulls in America. If, therefore, the reader desires to realize the probable aspect of the men of Cro-magnon, of Mentone, or of Engis, I may refer him to modern American heads. So permanent is this great Turanian race, out of which all the other races now extant seem to have been developed, in the milder and more hospitable regions of the Old World, while in northern Asia and in America it has retained to this day its primitive characters.
The reader, reflecting on what he has learned from history, may be disposed here to ask, Must we suppose Adam to have been one of these Turanian men, like old men of Cro-magnon? In answer, I would say that there is no good reason to regard the first man as having resembled a Greek Apollo or an Adonis. He was probably of sterner and more muscular mould. But the gigantic palæolithic men of the European caves are more probably representatives of that fearful and powerful race who filled the antediluvian world with violence, and who reappear in postdiluvian times as the Anakim and traditional giants, who constitute a feature in the early history of so many countries. Perhaps nothing is more curious in the revelations as to the most ancient cave-men than that they confirm the old belief that there were 'giants in those days.'
And now let us pause for a moment to picture these so-called palæolithic men. What could the old man of Cro-magnon have told us had we been able to sit by his hearth and listen understandingly to his speech?—which, if we may judge from the form of his palate-bones, must have resembled more that of the Americans or Mongolians than of any modern European people. He had, no doubt, travelled far, for to his stalwart limbs a long journey through forests and over plains and mountains would be a mere pastime. He may have bestridden the wild horse, which seems to have abounded at the time in France, and he may have launched his canoe on the waters of the Atlantic. His experience and memory might extend back a century or more, and his traditional lore might go back to the times of the first mother of our race. Did he live in that wide Post-Pliocene continent which extended westward through Ireland? Did he know and had he visited the nations that lived in the valley of the great Gihon, that ran down the Mediterranean Valley, or on that nameless river which flowed through the Dover Straits? Had he visited or seen from afar the great island Atlantis, whose inhabitants could almost see in the sunset sky the islands of the blest? Or did he live at a later time, after the Post-Pliocene subsidence, and when the land had assumed its present form? In that case he could have told us of the great deluge, of the huge animals of the antediluvian World—known to him only by tradition—and of the diminished strength and longevity of men in his comparatively modern days. We can but conjecture all this. But, mute though they may be as to the details of their lives, the man of Cro-magnon and his contemporaries are eloquent of one great truth, in which they coincide with the Americans and with the primitive men of all the early ages. They tell us that primitive man had the same high cerebral organization which he possesses now, and, we may infer, the same high intellectual and moral nature, fitting him for communion with God and headship over the lower world. They indicate, also, like the Mound-builders, who preceded the North American Indian, that man's earlier state was the best—that he had been a high and noble creature before he became a savage. It is not conceivable that their high development of brain and mind could have spontaneously engrafted itself on a mere brutal and savage life. These gifts must be remnants of a noble organization degraded by moral evil. They thus justify the tradition of a Golden and Edenic Age, and mutely protest against the philosophy of progressive development as applied to man, while they bear witness to the identity in all important characters of the oldest prehistoric men with that variety of our species which is at the present day at once the most widely extended and the most primitive in its manners and usages.
Thus it would appear that these earliest known men are not specifically distinct from ourselves, but are a distinct race, most nearly allied to that great Turanian stock which is at the present day, and has apparently from the earliest historic times been, the most widely spread of all. Though rude and uncultured, they were not either physically or mentally inferior to the average men of to-day, and were indeed in several respects men of high type, whose great cranial capacity might lead us to suppose that their ancestors had recently been in a higher state of civilization than themselves. It is, however, possible that this characteristic was rather connected with great energy and physical development than with high mental activity.
To the hypothesis of evolution, as applied to man, these facts evidently oppose great difficulties. They show that such modern degraded races as the Fuegians or the Tasmanians cannot present to us the types of our earlier ancestors, since the latter were men of a different and higher style. Nor do these oldest known men present any approximation in physical characters to the lower animals. Further, we may infer from their works, and from what we know of their beliefs and habits, that they were not creatures of instinct, but of thought like ourselves, and that materialistic doctrines of automatism and brain-force without mind would be quite as absurd in their application to them as to their modern representatives.
It is not too much to say that, in presence of these facts, the spontaneous origin of man from inferior animals cannot be held as a scientific conclusion. It may be an article of faith in authority, or a superstition or an hypothesis, but is in no respect a result of scientific investigation into the fossil remains of man. But if man is not such a product of spontaneous evolution, he must have been created by a Being having a higher reason and a greater power than his own; and the ancestry of the agnostic, and the rational powers which he exercises, constitute the best refutation of his own doctrine.