PRIMITIVE MAN.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVI, Issue 84, 8 April 1905, Page 9

PRIMITIVE MAN.

I THE FOOTPRINTS OF PRIMITIVE J SAX IN MONUMENTAL STONE. j I (By Professor J. Maanillan Brown.) NO. L (ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)' By history we generally mean the j written annals of the races and nations of men, but that is the most ephemeral of ail records. A few centuries will see the best of our books the victim of paperdestroying insect and vegetable parasites; whilst a few thousand years will accomplish tne decay of the toughest parchment. We forget that there is a record of man's movement* and developments fa-.-more enduring than anything he can write or print. It i« the record kept by the fingers of the wind on the bosom of the earth. A city i=. deserted, and year in and year out the sand is blown across its features, till at last it vanishes benoath a softly rounded hill. And some I mounds like that of Ilissarlik. on the Plains of Troy, sectioned by Dr. Schliemann. have been found the palimpsest or re-written record of half-a-dozen or more civilisations, each unconscious of the time-obliterated footprints of those that have gone before it. There is no historian like Mother Earth, that, with her fitful helpers, the ! elements, keeps silently within her : bosom the memory of millions of rears. Long before man appeared she was treasuring up ineffaevably in the rock- the annals of the evolution of her children: and the geologist, onc-e her Benjamin, man, bad begun to penetrate beneath the surface in search of metals and coal. sought curiously for time and order in the rocks and their records: whilst the anthropologist found trace* of man tens of thousands of years before the date at which his own legends placed his origin. And tind after find has pushed back the date from tms of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. And the . discovery of a skull, an upper molar tooth, and .a thingbone that are distinctly human, in a Tertiary or early Quaternary bed in East Java has pushed it back into nearly a million years ago. But the traces of man's work in cavedwelling, and rudely-chipped flint aud spearhead take- us only into the hundreds of thousand.-, of to what is called the Quaternary epoch, thp la«t geological age of the earth, the age in which all the alluvial deposits have been formed: whilst the polished stone weapons and implements of neolithic man, or man of the new stone age. take us no farther back than tens of thousands of years. Now. of the records of this later or more rapidly progressive stone age. none have been so enduring or impressive in effect on the imagination of cultivated man as the great unmortared stone that have kept their heads erect through ten* of thousands of years in many parts of the world. They have been the wonder of all the generations •of historic men. And around them mystery after mystery has been woven by the imagination of succeeding races, each attributing them to its predecessors, and adding a supernatural or religious : atmosphere to the legend of their orijrin. If we look into the regions where I these colossal stones abound, we shall find a dearly marked track across the face of the earth. They are most numerous on the southern shores of the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic coast of Europe. And we may conclude that Mauritania, or the North" of Africa, jis the probabie home of the race that J displayed such marvellous engineering j skill without metal weapons. wheeljlS j machines, or draught animals, whilst the eastern shore of the Atlantic Ocean \va.s their first and easiest line of inigrn- ! Hop. They abound in Portugal and . Brittany, the British Islands, and Scanidinaria. They are not found in Central - Europe, or any where away from the coasts of its oceans and seas except across the Russian and Asiatic steppes, where they stand as single stones-, or circles of stones, on the kurgans or mound-graves. And the line of these extends through Southern Siberia, past Lake Baikal and through Mongolia and Manchuria. In the valley of the Yalu truncated pyramids take their place a= they do at several other points on the megalithic track. As on the Atlantic coast of Europe, so on to the Paj.ilic coast of Asia, the path of these colossal monuments is not broken by the ocean. It continues into Japan as in the West it passes into thft British Isles. But there was no endles? archipelago to tempt the handler of giant etones westward from h-urope to America, and the titanic-stone path breaks off on the- Irish, coast. It is otherwise in Japan. To the south stretched a series of stepping-stones into Polynesia, at first minute as in the tßoniin Islands, afterwards in large groups as in the Ladrones and the CaroKn«a farther south. And in the former of these two groups there exist avenues of huge unmortared stone-pyramids I topped with s-tone-hemispheres* whilst j in the latter there exist the colossal ' walls of a long-desorted Venice built j of great basaltic hexagons piled one I on another withuot cement. i Thereafter the megalithic route across ' the Pa-dfic is broken and incontinuous. | Not till Samoa is reached, away to the south-east, do wr pick it up again. Tne Faleolupo. or House of the Fairy, behind Apia, is an ellip-e of giant stone i columns,, no mean rival of our Stone- J henge. For between lay the coral ' croups of the Marshalls and the Gil- j berts. the islands of which have not permanence of roleanic structure, but are the work of the coral insect, at the j mercy of storm and billow. In the Ton- I gan group, to the south of Samoa, we' have again the size and the permanenev of ancient land, and here we have the | gigantic truncated pyramids which are | railed tho tombs of the Tui-Tongas, and I the colossal trilithon or gateway composed of three giant stones. It is useless seeking for such ancient structures , in the low coral groups like the Pau- > motas and the Austral Archipelago. ! The track is again resumed away to I the east in Huahine, one of the Society ' group, where a dolmen or colossal stonealtar exists, and in Tahiti, a gigantic truncated pyramid and great stone platforms. To the north-west, in Hawaii, are the huge temples of Waikiki and Punepa, whilst to the south and south-east we have tho minute Rapa, Pitcairn and Easter Islands, lying in somewhat the same latitude. 27 to 28 south of the Equator, fir two former separated by more th a thousand niles of ocean, the two latter by some meen hundred miles; and in e"ach of i :hem there are unmortared stone i nonuments. To complete the megalithc story of the Pacific, we have two | specimens of this ancient type of stone structure in the North Island of New Zealand, one a miniature Stonelienge, tfith huge blocks standing six or =even eet above the ground, at Keriken, tie j

! Bay of Islands, and another n-ar A'- 3 :- ---; muri. to the north of TliiP"" , . con-is , . !■•._• 'of 50 great stones sot erect m the I earth. j Bnt there is also a megalitliio r -- ! r.-e- ---| through Southern Europe ami Ar-ia. Tin , j great stones are *«m*n»(i spar.-dy ; along the countries on th* ri'Ttherr \ shore of the Mediterranean and thi» ■Black Sea. through Syria. Armenia am I Irania. along the Persian (iulf. through Northern India, over the Kha*i and j Maga Hills into Rurmah, thence along j the Malay Peninsula into Snr.i.iTn ariii I Java. And that i.-land i« irs tmninus. For. eastward? to Ponape. in the (.'aiulines, and agnin ncros.-i Melanesia ;in;l Xew Guinea to Samoa, there ;- a tract iof from four to iivi> thousand mica without a tract? r>: this siorie record. We may t;ike it for a fact of prehistoric history that the nicgnlithie people came the northern rmirr rrora Europe and from the North Pacific into Polynesia. A striking rliing about tho northern mejralithic track i< that it does not i denly break oil" at the first group or is- ! lauds otF shore, n> it d<-'-s in tlv west. :It nevr-r crossed the Atlantic-. tor we ; find no such stone structures on the At- : lantic coast, of America, nunr, in r;ict, J unless w e count the Indian mounds in I the shape of animal- an<l the cliiT-dwrll- ( ings as belonging to this typi> ot nri-hi-I tecture. The track westward ti-nni- • nates in Ireland. The track eastward , crosses the Pacific and rrappears after :an ocuan travel of two thousand four : hundred miles in Peru, and in UY-ntral , America. There it stop*, in the penin- [ sula of Yucatan and its offshoot th-? ; Anahuac plateau in the north, and at i Lake Titicaca far up in the Andes, in. 1 the couth. If these facts indicate anything they : indicate that a section of mankind in ; early neolithic times, say from ten w I fifteen thousand years air<i, uiicrratrd ; northwards from the north of Africa, along the Atlantic coast, and was stopi ped by tlv? uiii>]anded ocean from eroing farther west than Ireland, hat "that eastward it was able to find its v.-ny re the Pacific coast, and thenep across it ,by thp stepping-stones of Micronesia to i the south of Japan, and of Polynesia fo i the south-east v,i that route on to the coast of Central and South America. We may also conclude that it was the same race. For a skill like this power of handling enormous slabs of stone :i primitive times must have be?n in truth a mystery, the possession of on* type of men. It is not a stage in th<« evolution of all races. \V P have of these structures in the land? of mgroids either in Central and Southern ! Africa, or in Australia, or in the recrion of the Papuans. Xor haw we anr of ' them in any purely Mongoloid region, ; such as China or Central Asia, or in the central and western parts of north I and south America. The only part* j inhabited by Mongols, or Mongoloids. ! that possess them are the steppes o! i Western Asia. Southern Siberia, MonI jrolia, Manchuria. Korea. Japan, and ! the Malay Peninsula. Central America. ; and Peru. And the existence of long- | headed, wavy-haired and line lighti complexioned peoples in parts iof all these regions, points to the fact that the Mongoloid layer is a Jat-r one ; intrusive upon Caucasian strata of hu- ' inanity. Wherever, in fact, this mepilithie route takes its course, we may" ! lay it; down as an axiom that the Caucasian division of mankind has appear- . cd. In short, we may say thai: it is * ' Caucasian track across the eartn. i It may be accepted as a general prin- ! cipt- tlial the only section of mankind ; that lias become maritime i> Cauj casian: and by maritime I mean not ! merely venturing into boats, hut set- ! ting out on long vwyages in wnli-pquip- : perl ships. The negroes and negroids : have never developed the tendency to ; cross oceans. . The Mongols and Moni goloids are by nature land-migranta. j And the oniy exceptions to this rule are : the Japanese and the Malays, and they ■ undoubtedly have absorbed, when came to the sea-coast, a Caucasian spt- ; going people, and acquired their tijn- | dency and skill. Tlie Phoenicians, tha Carthaginians, the Greeks, the Scandinavians, the Anglo-Saxons, the Arabs are all Caucasian. ' Now a feature of the megalithic tracte ,is that it hugs the sea-coast, oseept in : crossing Western Asia and Northern Asia, and doubtless there was a line of inland seas from the Caspian through the Sea of Aral and Lake Baikal in primitive times, to account for the" exception. Wherever, therefore, we find tfrese colossal unmortared stone monuments, whether mounded or uncovered, whether in circles or avenues, solitary columns or truncated pyramids, we may accept it as a law that Caucasians have found their way. Of course, this leads to the singular conclusion that one at least of the elements in the Polynesian race, including the Maoris, is Caucasian, and also that an element in Central American and Peruvian civilisation is ( luca.sian. When the observations and inferences of anthropology and i:thnoiogy have been considered, this will not S3ern strange. ~So. 11.. "The Meaning of the Colossal Stone Record" will appear in our issue of Wednesday next.