On the Alps and the highest summits of the White Mountains of New England are found colonies of arctic species of plants and insects. How did they come to be thus separated from their home beyond the arctic circle by a thousand miles and more of temperate climate impossible to cross?
Man. Along with the remains of the characteristic animals of the time which are now extinct there have been found in deposits of the Glacial epoch in the Old World relics of Pleistocene Man, his bones, and articles of his manufacture. In Europe, where they have best been studied, human relics occur chiefly in peat bogs, in loess, in caverns where man made his home, and in high river terraces sometimes eighty and a hundred feet above the present flood plains of the streams.
In order to understand the development of early man, we should know that prehistoric peoples are ranked according to the materials of which their tools were made and the skill shown in their manufacture. There are thus four well-marked stages of human culture preceding the written annals of history:
| 4 The Iron stage. |
| 3 The Bronze stage. |
| 2 The Neolithic (recent stone) stage. |
| 1 The Paleolithic (ancient stone) stage. |
In the Neolithic stage the use of the metals had not yet been learned, but tools of stone were carefully shaped and polished. To this stage the North American Indian belonged at the time of the discovery of the continent. In the Paleolithic stage, stone implements were chipped to rude shapes and left unpolished. This, the lowest state of human culture, has been outgrown by nearly every savage tribe now on earth. A still earlier stage may once have existed, when man had not learned so much as to shape his weapons to his needs, but used chance pebbles and rock splinters in their natural forms; of such a stage, however, we have no evidence.
Fig. 372. Paleolithic Implement from Great Britain
Paleolithic man in Europe. It was to the Paleolithic stage that the earliest men belonged whose relics are found in Europe. They had learned to knock off two-edged flakes from flint pebbles, and to work them into simple weapons. The great discovery had been made that fire could be kindled and made use of, as the charcoal and the stones discolored by heat of their ancient hearths attest. Caves and shelters beneath overhanging cliffs were their homes or camping places. Paleolithic man was a savage of the lowest type, who lived by hunting the wild beasts of the time.
Skeletons found in certain caves in Belgium and France represent perhaps the earliest race yet found in Europe. These short, broad- shouldered men, muscular, with bent knees and stooping gait, low- browed and small of brain, were of little intelligence and yet truly human.