PREHISTORIC MAN.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 764, 22 October 1886, Page 8

PREHISTORIC MAN.

Chambers’ Journal,

The early history of man in every country is shrouded in considerable mystery and uncertainty. When tradition fails us, we have not by any means reached the farthest point in the history of the race. At that point, geology oomes to our assistance with revelations of men of the rudest stage of life living in prehistoric ages under circumstances of great interest. It is to this early stage of which geology speaks, that we here turn attion. The peat-mosses of Denmark supply important data for the early history of man in that country. In these peat 3 are imbedde 1 many relics of a people who dwelt in that region long before the present race had migrated thither. These relics consist chiefly of curiously formed implements and weapons in stone and bronze—hammer, arrow, and spear heads, hatchets and knives, &c. Now, peat is formed slowly. It is the result of the annual growth and decay of numerous marsh-plants—each year’s ma 33 of dead rushes, reeds, and grasses being overgrown by the vegetation of the succeeding year. The formation takes place in marshy hollows ; and dn process of time'consolidates and sinks into the soft soil on which it rests. The growth of each year,’however, adds only a very thin stratum to the formation, and when this is pressed by the strata of subsequent years, it sinks into still smaller compass. The Danish peats attain a thickness of about thirty feet, and they must therefore have been a very considerable time under formation. Imbedded in peat are often found the trunks of trees; indeed, in some instances part of a forest growing in the hollow in which peat was being formed, has been choked by the rank growth of marsh plants, and the soil becoming too moist for the favorable growth of the trees, they, robbed of their strength from these two causes, have, fallen a prey to storms, and become overgrown with peat. Thus single trees or clusters of trees, or even whole forests, may be part of a peat-moss. Now the implements of the prehistoric age found in the upper portion of the Danish peats, aud associated with the remains of beeches, are made of iron. Those that occur farther from the surface in conjunction with remains of oak, are of bronze ; while those that lie near the bottom of the peat, by the side of the ancient firs, are made of stone. Here is evidence of an early race of men existing in three stages of antique civilisation. We have thus evidence of what, for the.sake of clearness, we may term three distinct ages, though there is no real distinction, because one period glided into another as imperceptibly as our old year is followed by the new. The Stone age is the oldest prehistoric era we have any evidence of; but it is subdivided into two periods—the Palaeolithic (ancient stone) and the Neolithic (new stone). The flint weapons of the Neolithic period, manufactured when man had made some little progress in the art of tool-making, are better finished than those of the Palaeolithic period. Those of the earlier period (the Palaeolithic) are so crude and ill-finished that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them and pieces of flint worn and chipped by the forces of nature. Tbe relies of the Danish peats are referable only to the Neolithic period. Before the earliest immigrants of the rude tribes of the Neolithic age had made their homes among the prehistoric firs of Denmark, there had roamed over vast tracts of country, not very far removed from that locality, a race of men, if possible more simple in their modes of life and workmanship—the men of the Palaeolithic age. But between this age and the Neolithic-of the Danish peats a subdivision has been defined. In the caves in the South of France occur ‘ vast quantities of the bones and horns of the reindeer. In some cases separate plates of molars of the mammoth, and several teeth of the great Irish deer (Cervus megaceros) and of the cave lion (Felis spelcea), and an extinct variety of Felis leo, have been found mixed up without and carved antlers of the reindeer.’ This period has been named by French geologists the Reindeer age, because the remains of that animal occur in very great profusion in these French caves. Asa proof of the existence of man at the time when the reindeer and several other animals, now confined to the higher latitudes, roamed as far towards the equator as the south of France, perhaps farther, it is to be noticed that not only are his implements found side by side with the remains of the reindeer in such a manner as to show that they were deposited at the same time, but many of the antlers of that animal are cut and rudely carved, bearing ample evidence of the work of a more or less intelligent race of men. On one of the - bones found in a cave of the Reindeer age, the outlines of the great mammoth have been rudely carved by some ingenious hand, long since laid to rest ; and the long curved tusks and shaggy coat of wool are easily recognisable. But beyond the Neolithic and the Reindeer ages lies the Palaeolithic epoch, reaching back still further into prehistoric times. The tools and implements of man referable to this epoch are found chiefly in the high-level gravels of our valleys, and are of the rudest type. They occur mixed with bones of the horse, bear, tiger, deer, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and extinct species of the hyena, in such a manner as to leave no doubt of their co-existence with these animals. They are ‘ always unground, having evidently been brought to their present form simply hy the chopping off of fragments by repeated blows, such as could be given by a stone hammer.’ It is difficult to form any approximate idea of the vast antiquity of these Palaeolithic gravels. Since they were laid down, and these early prehistoric men lived

in these localities, the rivers over vast tracts of country have slowly cut their way through, in some instances, over a hundred feet of hard rock, and spread the sediment around their mouths or over the bottom of the sea. What a vast amount of time it must have , required to scoop out the valleys of a country to a depth of a hundred feet. We quote Sir Charles Lyell, -who says.:— * Nearly all the known Pleistocene quadrupeds have now been found accom-' panying flint knives or hatchets in such a way as to imply their co-existence with man ; and we have thus the concurrent testimony of several classes of geological facts to the vast antiquity of the human race. The disappearance of a large variety of species of wild animals from every part of a wide continent must have required a vast period of time for its accomplishment; yet this took place while man existed on the earth, and was completed before that early period when the Danish shell-mounds were formed. The . deepening and widening of valleys implies an amount of change of which that which has occurred during the historical period forms scarcely a perceptible part. Ages must have been required to change the climate of wide regions to such an extent as completely to alter the geographical distribution of many mammalia, as well as land and freshwater shells. The three or four thousand years of the historical period do not furnish us with any appreciable measure for cadilating the number of centuries which would suffice for such a series of changes, which are by no means of a local character, but have operated over a considerable part of Europe.’ In these gravels we gather all that is at present known of that earliest period on which history sheds no light. This period probably reaches back into the closing acts of the physical drama of the great Glacial age, when the valleys and plains of the northern hemisphere, down to the fortieth parallel of latitude, were groaning beneath the burden of grinding glaciers and untold depths of snow ; while the rivers were mostly covered with thick ice, and the seas were full of icebergs floating, with infinite collisions, to the southward, or covered with hummocked, suow-covered icefloe, as the artic seas are today. A mid scenes like these, these earliest pioneers of the races of men struggled through their first experiences of the rough world. Could these scenes, through the touch of some magic wand, be reconstructed, and made to pass in dioramio form before our eyes, how interesting they would be ! How closely we should listen to their stories of that far-gone age, could the men who lived while these gravels were being formed, spring to life again and tell us what they saw, and knew, and felt ! What problems might be thus satisfactorily solved ! But such cannot be : the past has successfully buried its dead, and what we know of its history must be through the tortuous courseof induction. But these men were most probably hunters; their business was. to live. And no trapper of modern American fame could want higher or, to us, more in teresting game. Across the snow-clad plains roamed herds of the gigautic mammoth in search of food ; wild savage boars kept cover under the brushwood of the forests ; and packs of hungry wolves, on the scent of prey, filled the clear frosty air with their dismal cry, as their modern representatives in Russia and other countries do today. The magnificent Irish deer—not then extinct, and than which no deer of modern age has antlers half so large, or has half so noble an appearance—gallopped with hounding, graceful step across the plains of Ireland. Bears hybernated through the greater part of the severe, almost endless winter ; and when the climate became suitable, canning b avers followed their life’s work by the side of broad shallow rivers that drained continents, partsof which are now no more. As the climate became warmer when the age of boulder-drift was past, ferocious tigers prowled around man’s rude hut insearch of sweet morsels—veritable ancestors of modern * man eaters in the vicinity of the rivers, the huge hippopotamus and. scale covered crocodile sought their livelihood. Among this variety of animal life, and in the excitement of a hunter’s existence, during the latter part of the great Glacial age, lived these Palaeolithic men, clothing themselves from the bitter cold with the furs of the animals their superior intelligence enabled them to trap, or that came within reach of their curious flint-barbed arrows, and living almost entirely on the game they were able to ‘ bag.’