Others believe that we must look back 200,000 years, as James Croll[1657] and Lubbock do, or 800,000 and more, as Lyell did at first, and find the cause in the variable eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, which shall account for all the climatic changes since the dawn of what is called the glacial epoch, accompanying the deflection of ocean currents, as Croll supposes, or the variations in the disposition of sea and land, as Lyell imagines.[1658] This great ice-sheet, however extensive, began for some reason to retreat, at a period as remote, according as we accept this or the other estimate, as from ten thousand to a hundred thousand years.
That the objects of stone, shaped and polished, which had been observed all over the civilized world, were celestial in origin seems to have been the prevalent opinion,[1659] when Mahudel in 1723 and even when Buffon in 1778 ventured to assign to them a human origin.[1660]
In the gravels which were deposited by the melting of this more or less extended ice-sheet, parts of the human frame and the work of human hands have been found, and mark the anterior limit of man’s residence on the globe, so far as we can confidently trace it.[1661] Few geologists have any doubt about the existence of human relics in these American glacial drifts, however widely they may differ about the age of them.[1662]
FROM DAWSON’S FOSSIL MEN.
The outer outline is that of the skull found in the cave of Cro-magnon, in France, belonging, as Dawson says, p. 189, to one of the oldest human inhabitants of western Europe, as shown in Lartet and Christy’s Reliquiae Aquitanicae. The second outline is that of the Enghis skull; the dotted outline that of the Neanderthal skull. The shaded skull is on a smaller scale, but preserving the true outline, and is one of the Hochelaga Indians (site of Montreal). Cuts of the Enghis and Neanderthal skulls are given in Lubbock’s Prehistoric Times, pp. 328, 329. Dawkins (Cave Hunters, 235) thinks the Enghis skull of doubtful age. On the Neanderthal skull see Quatrefages and Hamy, Crania Ethnica (Paris, 1873-75), and Dawkins (p. 240). Huxley gives it a great antiquity, and says it is the most ape-like one he ever saw. Quatrefages, Hommes fossiles, etc. (1884), says it is not below some later men. Southall (Epoch of the Mammoth, 80) says it has the average capacity of the negro, and double that of the gorilla, and doubts its antiquity.
It was in the American Naturalist (Mar. and Ap., 1872) that Dr. C. C. Abbott made an early communication respecting the discovery of rude human implements in the glacial gravels[1663] of the Delaware valley, and since then the Trenton gravels have been the subject of much interest. The rudeness of the flints has repeatedly raised doubts as to their artificial character; but Wilson (Prehistoric Man, i. 29) says that it is impossible to find in flints broken for the road, or in any other accumulation of rocky débris, a single specimen that looks like the rudest implement of the drift. Experts attest the exact correspondence of these Trenton tools with those of the European river drift. Abbott has explained the artificial cleavages of stone in the American Antiquarian (viii. 43). There are geologists like Shaler who question the artificial character of the Trenton implements. From time to time since this early announcement, Dr. Abbott has made public additional evidence as he has accumulated it, going to show, as he thinks, that we have in these deposits of the glacial action the signs of men contemporary with the glacial flow, and earlier than the red Indian stock of historic times.[1664] He summarizes the matter in his “Palæolithic implements of a people on the Atlantic coast anterior to the Indians,” in his Primitive Industry (1882).[1665]
Some discoveries of human bones in the loess or loam of the Mississippi Valley have not been generally accepted. Lyell (Second Visit, ii. 197; Antiq. of Man, 203) suspends judgment, as does Joseph Leidy in his Extinct Mammalia of North America (p. 365).
The existence of man in western Europe with extinct animals is a belief that, from the incredulity which accompanied the discovery by Kemp in London, in 1714, of a stone hatchet lying in contiguity to some elephant’s teeth,[1666] has long passed into indisputable fact, settled by the exploration of cave and shell heaps.[1667] In North America, this conjunction of man’s remains with those of the mastodon is very widely spread.[1668] The geological evidence is quite sufficient without resorting to what has been called an Elephant’s head in the architecture of Palenqué, the so-called Elephant Mound in Wisconsin, and the dubious if not fraudulent Elephant Pipe of Iowa.[1669] The positions of the skeletons have led many to believe that the interval since the mastodon ceased to roam in the Mississippi Valley is not geologically great. Shaler (Amer. Naturalist, iv. 162) places it at a few thousand years, and there is enough ground for it perhaps to justify Southall (Recent Origin, etc., 551; Ep. of the Mammoth, ch. 8) in claiming that these animals have lived into historic times.
A human skeleton was found sixteen feet below the surface, near New Orleans—(which is only nine feet above the Gulf of Mexico), and under four successive growths of cypress forests. Its antiquity, however, is questioned.[1670] The belief in human traces in the calcareous conglomerate of Florida seems to have been based (Haven, p. 87) on a misconception of Count Pourtalès’ statement (Amer. Naturalist, ii. 434), though it has got credence in many of the leading books on this subject. Col. Whittlesey has reported some not very ancient hearths in the Ohio Valley (Am. Ass. Arts and Sciences, Proc., Chicago, 1868, Meeting, vol. xvii. 268).