The Elements of Geology

by William Harmon Norton

In North America there have been reported many finds of human relics in valley trains, loess, old river gravels buried beneath lava flows, and other deposits of supposed glacial age; but in the opinion of some geologists sufficient proof of the existence of man in America in glacial times has not as yet been found.

These finds in North America have been discredited for various reasons. Some were not made by scientific men accustomed to the closest scrutiny of every detail. Some were reported after a number of years, when the circumstances might not be accurately remembered; while in a number of instances it seems possible that the relics might have been worked into glacial deposits by natural causes from the surface.

Man, we may believe, witnessed the great ice fields of Europe, if not of America, and perhaps appeared on earth under the genial climate of preglacial times. Nothing has yet been found of the line of man’s supposed descent from the primates of the early Tertiary, with the possible exception of the Java remains just mentioned. The structures of man’s body show that he is not descended from any of the existing genera of apes. And although he may not have been exempt from the law of evolution,--that method of creation which has made all life on earth akin,--yet his appearance was an event which in importance ranks with the advent of life upon the planet, and marks a new manifestation of creative energy upon a higher plane. There now appeared intelligence, reason, a moral nature, and a capacity for self-directed progress such as had never been before on earth.

The Recent epoch. The Glacial epoch ends with the melting of the ice sheets of North America and Europe, and the replacement of the Pleistocene mammalian fauna by present species. How gradually the one epoch shades into the other is seen in the fact that the glaciers which still linger in Norway and Alaska are the lineal descendants or the renewed appearances of the ice fields of glacial times.

Our science cannot foretell whether all traces of the Great Ice Age are to disappear, and the earth is to enjoy again the genial climate of the Tertiary, or whether the present is an interglacial epoch and the northern lands are comparatively soon again to be wrapped in ice.

Neolithic man. The wild Paleolithic men vanished from Europe with the wild beasts which they hunted, and their place was taken by tribes, perhaps from Asia, of a higher culture. The remains of Neolithic man are found, much as are those of the North American Indians, upon or near the surface, in burial mounds, in shell heaps (the refuse heaps of their settlements), in peat bogs, caves, recent flood-plain deposits, and in the beds of lakes near shore where they sometimes built their dwellings upon piles.

The successive stages in European culture are well displayed in the peat bogs of Denmark. The lowest layers contain the polished stone implements of Neolithic man, along with remains of the Scotch fir. Above are oak trunks with implements of bronze, while the higher layers hold iron weapons and the remains of a beech forest.

Neolithic man in Europe had learned to make pottery, to spin and weave linen, to hew timbers and build boats, and to grow wheat and barley. The dog, horse, ox, sheep, goat, and hog had been domesticated, and, as these species are not known to have existed before in Europe, it is a fair inference that they were brought by man from another continent of the Old World. Neolithic man knew nothing of the art of extracting the metals from their ores, nor had he a written language.