[87] Dawson, Trans. Vict. Institute, May 1884; also Modern Science in Bible Lands.
If in imagination we suppose ourselves to visit the caves of the Nahr-el-Kelb pass, when they were inhabited by these early men, we should find them to be tall muscular people, clothed in skins, armed with flint-tipped javelins and flint hatchets, and cooking the animals caught in the chase in the mouths of their caves. They were probably examples of the ruder and less civilised members of that powerful and energetic antediluvian population which had apparently perfected so many arts, and the remains of whose more advanced communities are now buried in the silt of the sea bottom. If we looked out westward on what is now the Mediterranean, we should see a wide wooded or grassy plain as far as eye could reach, and perhaps might discern vast herds of elephant, rhinoceros, and bison wandering over these plains in their annual migrations. Possibly on the far margin of the land we might see the smoke of antediluvian towns long ago deeply submerged in the sea.
The great diluvial catastrophe which closed this period, and finally introduced the present geographical conditions, we have seen good reason to identify with the historical Deluge, and the old peoples of the age of the mammoth and rhinoceros were antediluvians, and must have perished from the earth before the earliest migration of the Beni Noah.
Putting together the results referred to in the preceding pages, we may restore the prehistoric ages of the Eastern Mediterranean under the following statements:
1. In the period immediately preceding human occupancy, the land of Palestine, Egypt, and Arabia participated in the great pleistocene depression, accompanied by a rigorous climate.
2. The next stage was one of continental elevation, in which the borders of the Mediterranean were dry land, and vast plains in this basin, and even in the Western Atlantic, were open to human migration. In this age palæocosmic men took up their abode all over Western Asia, Europe, and Northern Africa, and probably occupied broad lands since submerged. At this period the region was inhabited by the mammoth, rhinoceros, bison, and other large animals now altogether or locally extinct.
3. The earlier part of this post-glacial or antediluvian period was one of mild climatal conditions, followed by a slight return of the conditions of the previous glacial age.
4. The period was terminated by a great submergence, accompanied with vast destruction of animal and human life; and of comparatively short duration, corresponding to the historical Deluge.
5. From this depression the more limited continents of the modern period were elevated, and man again overspread them from his primitive seats in the Euphratean region, as recorded in the tenth chapter of Genesis.
6. In this early migration the Biblical Hamites, forming one of the groups of men vaguely known as Turanian, first spread themselves over Palestine and Egypt, and founded the early Phœnician, Canaanite, Mizraimite, and Cushite tribes and nations.