(b) Neanthropic or Recent, when the continents attained their present levels, existing races of men colonized Europe, and living species of mammals. This includes both the Pre-historic and Historic periods.
On geological grounds the above should clearly be our arrangement, though of course there need be no objection to such other subdivisions as historians and antiquarians may find desirable for their purposes. On this classification the earliest certain indications of the presence of man in Europe, Asia, or America, so far as yet known, belong to the Modern or Anthropic period alone. That man may have existed previously no one need deny, but no one can at present positively affirm on any ground of actual fact. It may be necessary here to explain the contentions often made that in Britain and Western Europe man belongs to an interglacial period. When with Dr. James Geikie, the great Scottish glacialist, we hold that there were several interglacial periods, the Glacial age may be extended by including the warm period of the Palanthropic, and the cold at its termination, as one of the interglacial and Glacial periods. In this way, as a matter of classification, man appears in the latest Interglacial periods. This, however, as above stated, I regard as an error in arrangement; but it makes no practical difference as to the facts.
Inasmuch, however, as the human remains of the Post-glacial epoch are those of fully developed men of high type, it may be said, and has often been said, that man in some lower stage of development must have existed at a far earlier period. That is, he must, if certain theories as to his evolution from lower animals are to be sustained. This, however, is not a mode of reasoning in accordance with the methods of science. When facts fail to sustain certain theories we are usually in the habit of saying "so much the worse for the theories," not "so much the worse for the facts," or at least we claim the right to hold our judgment in suspense till some confirmatory facts are forth-coming.
We have now to inquire as to the actual nature of the indications of man in Europe and Western Asia at the close of the Glacial or Pleistocene period. These are principally such of his tools or weapons as could escape decay when embedded in river gravels, or in the earth and stalagmite of caverns or rock shelters, or buried with his bones in* caves of sepulture. Very valuable accessory fossils are the broken bones of the animals he has used as food. Most valuable, and rarest of all, are well-preserved human skulls and skeletons. Some doubt may attach to mere flint flakes, in the absence of other remains; but the other indications above referred to are indisputable, and when proper precautions are taken to notice the succession of beds, and to eliminate the effects of any later disturbance of the deposits, human fossils become as instructive and indisputable as any others.
When the whole of the facts thus available are put together, we find that the earliest men of whom we have osseous remains, and who, undoubtedly, inhabited Europe and Western Asia in the second continental period, before the establishment of the present geography, and before the disappearance of the mammoth and its companions, were of two races or subraces, agreeing in certain respects, differing in others. Both have long or dolichocephalic heads, and seem to have been men of great strength and muscular energy, with somewhat coarse countenances of Mongolian type, and they seem to have been of roving habits, living as hunters and fishermen in a semi-barbarous condition, but showing some artistic skill and taste in their carvings on bone and other ornaments.
The earliest of the two races locally, though, on the whole, they were contemporaneous, is that known as the Cannstadt or Neanderthal people, who are characterized by a low forehead, with beetling brows, massive limb bones and moderate stature. So far as known they were the ruder and less artistic of the two races. The other, the Engis or Cromagnon race, was of higher type, with well-formed and capacious skull, and a countenance which, if somewhat broad, with high cheek bones, eyes lengthened laterally, and heavy lower jaw, must have been of somewhat grand and impressive features. These men are of great stature, some examples being seven feet in height, and with massive bones, having strong muscular impressions. The Engis skull found in a cave in Belgium, with bones of the mammoth, the skeletons of the Cromagnon cave in the valley of the Vezere, in France, and those of the caves of Mentone, in Italy, represent this race. Doubts, it is true, have been entertained as to whether the last-mentioned race is really palanthropic; but the latest facts as to their mode of occurrence and associations seem to render this certain. These men were certainly contemporaneous with the mammoth, and they disappeared in the cataclysm which closed the earlier anthropic period. Attempts have, however, been made to separate them into groups according to age, within this period;[207] and there can be no doubt that both in France and England the lower and older strata of gravels and caves yield ruder and less perfect implements than the higher. Independently, however, of the fact that the very earliest men may have been peaceful gatherers of fruit, and not hunters or warriors, having need of lethal weapons, such facts may rather testify to local improvement in the condition of certain tribes than to any change of race. Such local improvement would be very likely to occur wherever a new locality was taken possession of by a small and wandering tribe, which, in process of time, might increase in numbers and in wealth, as well as in means of intercourse with other tribes. A similar succession would occur when caves, used at first as temporary places of rendezvous by savage tribes, became afterwards places of residence, or were acquired by conquest on the part of tribes a little more advanced, in the manner in which such changes are constantly taking place in rude communities.
[207] Mortillet, "Pre-historic Men."
Yet on facts of this nature have been built extensive generalizations as to a race of river-drift men, in a low and savage condition, replaced, after the lapse of ages, by a people somewhat more advanced in the arts, and specially addicted to a cavern life; and this conclusion is extended to Europe and Asia, so that in every case where rude flint implements exist in river gravels, evidence is supposed to be found of the earlier of these races. But no physical break separates the two periods; the fauna remained the same; the skulls, so far as known, present little difference; and even in works of art the distinction is invalidated by grave exceptions, which are intensified by the fact, which the writer has elsewhere illustrated, that in the case of the same people their residences in caves, etc., and their places of burial are likely to contain very different objects from those which they leave in river gravels.
It is admitted that the whole of these Palæocosmic men are racially distinct from modern men, though most nearly allied in physical characters to some of the Mongoloid races of the northern regions. Some of their characters also appear in the native races of America, and occasional cases occur, when even the characters of the Cannstadt skull reappear in modern times. The skull of the great Scottish king Robert Bruce was of this type; and his indomitable energy and governing power may have been connected with this fact. Attempts have even been made[208] to show an intimate connection between the cave men and the Esquimaux of Greenland and Arctic America, but, as Wilson has well shown,[209] this is not borne out by their cranial characters, and the resemblances, such as they are, in arts and implements, are common to the Esquimaux and many other American tribes. In many respects, however, the arts and mode of life, as well as some of the physical characters of the Palæocosmic men of Europe were near akin to those of the ruder native races of America.
[208] Dawkins, "Early Man in Britain."