With such views the skeletons of the most ancient known men[87] fully accord. They indicate
Fig. 187.—Tooth of Elasmotherium. Grinding surface, natural size. Siberia. From Nature. a people of great stature, of powerful muscular development, especially in the lower limbs, of large brain, indicating great capacity and resources ([Fig. 188]), but of coarse Turanian features, like those of the tribes that now roam over the plains of Northern Asia (Fig. 189). They used flint and bone implements, which they manufactured with much skill ([Figs. 190, 191]). They were probably clothed in dressed skins, ornamented with embroidery, in the manner of the North American Indians. They used shells and carved bones as ornaments. Recent discoveries at Soloutre, in France, render it probable that some of the tribes had tamed the horse, and resided in fortified villages. They buried their dead with offerings, indicating a belief in immortality. These Post-glacial men are certainly known as yet only in Europe and Western Asia; and we cannot therefore determine if they represent the average man of the period. There were in Belgium and other parts of Europe, men of smaller stature and of lower cranial type, contemporary or nearly so with the higher race. There may have been fruit-eating or agricultural peoples in the more genial and fertile lands of the east and south. The conditions above sketched are, I think, fairly deducible from the facts stated by Christy and Lartet, Dupont, Rivière, Dawkins, and others, who have studied the remains of these early men, the Palæolithic men of some writers, or the men of the Mammoth age, and whom I have elsewhere named Palæocosmic men, as a term less objectionable than those founded on implements not confined to any age, or animals which may have long antedated
Fig. 188.—Engis Skull. Reduced.—After Lyell. The Skull of one of the Men of the Mammoth age. man. Recent discoveries in the caves of Spy in Belgium,[88] taken in connection with the previous discoveries of Schmerling and Dupont, seem to show the existence in that country of men of the low-browed Neanderthal or Canstadt type ([Fig. 189] third outline), perhaps locally preceding but perhaps contemporaneous with, the larger and better developed men of the Cro-Magnon type ([Fig. 189] first outline). These two types are, however, allied, and there are intermediate forms, so that they are to be regarded as two races of Palæocosmic men not more dissimilar than we find in cognate rude races at present.
Fig. 189.—Outlines of Three Prehistoric European Skulls compared with an American Skull from Hochelaga.
Outer outline, Cro-Magnon Skull. Second outline, Engis Skull. Third outline (dotted), Neanderthal Skull. Inner figure, Hochelagan Skull on a smaller scale.
They were succeeded in Western Europe by a smaller and less elevated race, identical apparently with the modern Lapps and Basques, and in whose time the mammoth and many large animals had disappeared, Europe had become clad with dense forests, and the reindeer had extended his range far to the south, while the land of our continents had become narrowed to its present limits, or even less. The cause of these changes must have been physical, and to some extent cataclysmal; and its wide-spread and effectual character is shown by the fact that it exterminated so many animals of both continents which had survived the Glacial age. Similar testimony is borne by the occurrence of the implements and remains of Palæocosmic men in gravels and in diluvial clays in caverns, and by the changes of level and deep erosions of valleys that are referable to the close of the Palæocosmic age. The most probable agencies in this revolution were subsidences of the land, accompanied with climatal changes; but the precise nature and extent of these is still unknown; and the prevalent tendency on the part of geologists to stretch the doctrine of uniformity, so valuable within proper limits, to the absurd extreme of excluding all changes not exemplified even in amount in the modern period, will probably for some time prevent any adequate conception of them.