Some Salient Points in the Science of the Earth

by Sir John William Dawson

Our imagination may carry us yet a little farther with reference to his fortunes. If he needed any weapon to repel aggressive enemies, a stick or club would serve his purpose, or perhaps a stone thrown from his hand. Soon, however, he might learn from the pain caused by the sharp flints that lay in his path the cutting power of an edge, and, armed with a flint chip held in the hand, or fitted into a piece of wood, he would become an artificer of many things useful and pleasing. As he wandered into more severe climates, where vegetable food could not be obtained throughout the year, and as he observed the habits of beasts and birds of prey, he would learn to be a hunter and a fisherman, and to cook animal food; and with this would come new habits, wants and materials, as well as a more active and energetic mode of life. He would also have to make new weapons and implements, axes, darts, harpoons, and scrapers for skins, and bodkins or needles to make skin garments. He would use chipped flint where this could be procured, and failing this, splintered and rubbed slate, and for some uses, bone and antler. Much ingenuity would be used in shaping these materials, and in the working of bone, antler and wood, ornament would begin to be studied. In the meantime the hunter, though his weapons improved, would become a ruder and more migratory man, and in anger, or in the desire to gain some coveted object, might begin to use his weapons against his brother man. In some more favoured localities, however, he might attain to a more settled life; and he, or more likely the woman his helpmate, might contrive to tame some species of animals, and to begin some culture of the soil.

It was probably in this early time that metals first attracted the attention of men. The ages of stone, bronze, and iron believed in by some archæologists, are more or less mythical to the geologist, who knows that these things depend more on locality and on natural products than on stages of culture. The analogy of America teaches us that the use of different metals may be contemporaneous, provided that they can be obtained in a native state. At the time of the discovery of America the Esquimaux were using native iron, which, though rare in most parts of the world, is not uncommon in some rocks of Greenland. The people of the region of the great lakes, and of the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio, were using native copper from Lake Superior for similar purposes. Gold was apparently the only metal among the natives of Central America. The people of Peru had invented bronze, or had brought the knowledge of it with them from beyond the sea. Thus the Peruvians were in the bronze age, the Mexicans and Mound builders in the copper age, and the Esquimaux in the iron age, while at the same time the greater part of the aboriginal tribes were at one and the same time in the ages of chipped and polished stone and in these ages what have been called palæolithic and neolothic weapons were contemporaneous, the former being most usually unfinished examples of the latter, or extemporized tools roughly made in emergencies.[203] How long this had lasted, or how long it would have continued, had not Europeans introduced from abroad an iron age, we do not know. It was probably the same in other parts of the world, in pre-historic times. In any case, the discovery of native metals must have occurred very early. Men searching in the beds of streams for suitable pebbles to form hammers and other implements, would find nuggets of gold and copper, and the properties of these, so different from those of other pebbles, would at once attract attention, and lead to useful applications. Native iron is of rarer occurrence, but in certain localities would also be found.[204] It must have been experiments on these ores, which resemble the native metals in colour, lustre and weight, that led to the first attempts at smelting metals, and these must have occurred at a very early period. Yet for ages the metals must have been extremely scarce, and we know that in comparatively modern times civilized nations like the Egyptians were using flint flakes after they had domesticated many animals, had become skilful agriculturists and artisans, and had executed great architectural works.

[203] "Fossil Men," by the Author. W. H. Holmes, "American Anthropologist," 1890.

[204] The rarity of native iron, whether meteoric or telluric, and its rapid decay by rusting, sufficiently account for its absence in deposits where implements of stone and bone have been preserved.

Probably all these ends had been to some extent, and in some localities, attained in the earliest human period, when man was contemporary with many large animals now extinct. But a serious change was to occur in human prospects. There is the best geological evidence that in the northern hemisphere the mild climate of the earlier Post-glacial period relapsed into comparative coldness, though not so extreme as that of the preceding Glacial age. Hill tops, long denuded of the snow and ice of the Glacial period, were again covered, and cold winters sealed up the lakes and rivers, and covered the ground with wintry snows of long continuance, and with this came a change in animal life and in human habits. The old southern elephant (E. antiquus), the southern rhinoceros (E. leptorhinus), and the river hippopotamus (H. major), which had been contemporaries, in Europe at least, of primitive man, retired from the advancing cold, and ultimately perished, while their places were taken by the hairy mammoth (E. primigenius), the woolly rhinoceros (R. tichorhinus), the reindeer, and even the musk ox. Now began a fierce struggle for existence in the more northern districts inhabited by man a struggle in which only the hardier and ruder races could survive, except, perhaps, in some of the more genial portions of the warm temperate zone. Men had to become almost wholly carnivorous, and had to contend with powerful and fierce animals. Tribe contended with tribe for the possession of the most productive and sheltered habitats. Thus the struggle with nature became aggravated by that between man and man. Violence disturbed the progress of civilization, and favoured the increase and power of the rudest tribes, while the more delicately organized and finer types of humanity, if they continued to exist in some favoured spots, were in constant danger of being exterminated by their fiercer and stronger contemporaries.

In mercy to humanity, this state of things was terminated by a great physical revolution, the last great subsidence of the continents—that Post-glacial flood, which must have swept away the greater part of men, and many species of great beasts, and left only a few survivors to re-people the world, just as the mammoth and other gigantic animals had to give place to smaller and feebler creatures. In these vicissitudes it seemed determined, with reference to man, that the more gigantic and formidable races should perish, and that one of the finer types should survive to re-people the world.

The age of which we have been writing the history, is that which has been fitly named the Anthropic, in that earlier part of it preceding the great diluvial catastrophe, which has fixed itself in all the earlier traditions of men, and which separates what may be called the Palanthropic or Antediluvian age from the Neanthropic or Postdiluvian. Independently altogether of human history, these are two geological ages distinguished by different physical conditions and different species of animals; and the time has undoubtedly come when all the speculations of archæologists respecting early man must be regulated by these great geological facts, which are stamped upon those later deposits of the crust of the earth, which have been laid down since man was its inhabitant. If they have only recently assumed their proper place in the geological chronology, this is due to the great difficulty in the case of the more recent deposits in establishing their actual succession and relations to each other. These difficulties have, however, been overcome, and new facts are constantly being obtained to render our knowledge more definite. Lest, however, the preceding sketch of the Palanthropic age—that in which gigantic men were contemporaries of a gigantic fauna now extinct—should be regarded as altogether fanciful, we may proceed to consider the geological facts and classification as actually ascertained.

The Tertiary or Kainozoic period, the last of the four great "times" into which the earth's geological history is usually divided, and that to which man and the mammalia belong, was ingeniously subdivided by Lyell, on the ground of percentages of marine shells and other invertebrates of the sea. According to this method, which with some modification in details is still accepted, the Eocene, or dawn of the recent, includes those formations in which the percentage of modern species of marine animals does not exceed 3-1/2, all the other species found being extinct. The Miocene (less recent) includes formations in which the percentage of living species does not exceed 35, and the Pliocene (more recent) contains formations having more than 35 per cent, of recent species. To these three may be added the Pleistocene, in which the great majority of the species are recent, and the Modern or Anthropic, in which we are still living. Dawkins and Gaudry give us a division substantially the same with Lyell's, except that they prefer to take the evidence of the higher animals instead of the marine shells.. The Eocene thus includes those formations in which there are remains of mammals or ordinary land quadrupeds, but none of these belong to recent species or genera, though they may be included in the same families and orders with the recent mammals. This is a most important fact, as we shall see, and the only exception to it is that Gaudry and others hold that a few living genera, as those of the dog, civet, and marten, are actually found in the later Eocene. The Miocene, on the same mammalian evidence, will include formations in which there are living genera of mammals, but no species which survive to the present time. The Pliocene and Pleistocene show living species, though in the former these are very few and exceptional, while in the latter they become the majority.

With regard to the geological antiquity of man, no geologist expects to find any human remains in beds older than the Tertiary, because in the older periods the conditions of the world do not seem to have been suitable to man, and because in these periods no animals nearly akin to man are known. On entering into the Eocene Tertiary we fail in like manner to find any human remains; and we do not expect to find any, because no living species and scarcely any living genera of mammals are known in the Eocene; nor do we find in it remains of any of the animals, as the anthropoid apes, for instance, most nearly allied to man. In the Miocene the case is somewhat different. Here we have living genera at least, and we have large species of apes; but no remains of man have been discovered, if we except some splinters of flint found in beds of this age at Thenay, in France, and some notched bones. Supposing these objects to have been chipped or notched by animals, which is by no means certain in the case of the flints, the question remains, Was this done by man? Gaudry and Dawkins prefer to suppose that the artificer was one of the anthropoid apes of the period. It is true that no apes are known to do such work now; but then other animals, as beavers and birds, are artificers, and some extinct animals were of higher powers than their modern representatives. But if there were Miocene apes which chipped flints and cut bones, this would, either on the hypothesis of evolution or that of creation by law, render the occurrence of man still less likely than if there were no such apes. The scratched and notched bones, on the other hand, indicate merely the gnawing of sharks or other carnivorous animals. For these reasons neither Dawkins nor Gaudry, nor indeed any geologists of authority in the Tertiary fauna, believe in Miocene man.