ICE AGE MEN

Gisborne Times, Volume LXIII, Issue 10066, 3 August 1925, Page 3

ICE AGE MEN

A WONDERFUL RELIC

WOODEN BRIDGE FOUND

POSSIBLY 50,000 YEARS OLD

BERLIN, July 12

A perfectly preserved oaken foot bridge, forty yards long, consisting of planed p.anks fastened with oaken clamps, believed to have been constructed by men of tlio Ice Age, across a marshy river-bed, lias been unearthed in a mine shaft at Dortmund. Archaeologists are of opinion that it is fifty thousand years old. It is the most important prehistoric discovery for years, and proves the intelligence and skill of the Ice Age men, whose only implements were tile teeth of the mammoth.

The '‘Great lee Age” or "Glacial Period” is a most important episode in the geologists' history, or rather series ot episodes. There is an enormous mass of evidence that at a time which in the geological sense is quite recent, falling within the last million years, the northern half of the North American Continent and the northwestern half of Europe, the southern part of South America, and the South island of New Zealand, and possibly other areas, were covered by glacial sheets similar to those wh'cli now exist only in the polar regions, as in Greenland and on the Antarctic continent, and of enormous thickness, amounting over large areas to thousands of feet. New Zealand shows most striking evidence of heavy glaciation in the southern mountain regions. The "West Coast fiords, for instance, are typical g’acier valleys, and the glaciers at .Mount Cook are merely vest'ges of enormous glaciers that in the distant past carved the great valley-system of which they now occupy only the heads. The ancient glaciers have left their signatures scattered over the area they covered, especially in the rock faces which were planed and scored by the moving 'ice, in the “erratic blocks” of stone which, fore’gn to their present pos’tion, have been transported for great distances, and in the old' moraines or-pilot of biak&n rock carried along bv the. ice and when left it disappeared. The Ice Age. during which the surface of the earth was subjected to the most powerful mechanical influences of which the geologist is aware, caused the most profound changes in'topography and to a. great extent affected the subsequent distribution or animal and vegetable life. It is evident from the discovery of artificial objects that the human race existed during the’glacial per'od, and shared a nightmarish ex’stence with, among other animals, the mammoths, which were very numerous.