FOSSIL MAN.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 771, 10 December 1886, Page 7

FOSSIL MAN.

We take the following interesting and instructive article from the Spectator : <

The latest chapter in the Great Stone 1 Look, the genesis and development of man, seems to have concentrated on itself during some years past the popular interest in geology. The works of Lyell, Geikie, Boyd Dawkins, Lubbock, Evans, have passed through repeated editions, have begotten compendiums, have been boiled down into institute lectures ; the discussion on preglacial man in the British Association was perhaps the most exciting feature in thia year’s meeting j and the visit of Sir VF. Dawson to England, as its President has called attention .to the work, better known hitherto in Canada than at home, in which, from a rather unexpected point of view, he presents his own conclusions on the subject. , The inquiry is, as tbo Montreal Principal. reminds us, still in its infancy. Scarce fifty years have passed since MeEnery showed to Buckland. the chipped flint exhumed from Brixham Cave along with mammoth bones; and the two clergymen, with a candonr rare at that date in their profession, accepted and proclaimed the upset to received chronology which the discovery involved, the immense though shadowy antiquity which it demanded from the human Tace, the establishment of the search for primitive man upon », scientific instead of a conjectural basis. From that time, every year has presented a. host of well-authenticated facts for comparison and inference ; the position, the material, the structures of the relics found have been deciphered by practiced interpreters ; and though the date of man’s first entry on tha globe recedes farther into the past with every fresh discovery, the limit of evidence as regards his earliest habits derived from the ! implements he has bequeathed to us may not improbably have been reached. Scientific research into the general history of . mankind has established two leading principles—first, that notwithstanding isolated instances of lapse and degradation, the developments of race, of language, of civilisation, show gradual and uniform progress from a state rude and simple to a state elaborate and refined ; secondly, that since the earliest historical or pictographicat records of our kind five thousand years again the monuments of Babylonia and Egypt exhibit a highly advanced stage of culture, speech, and physical beauty, a vast extent of prehistoric time must be demanded for the attainment of so high a level. And further,, looking, as Sir W. Dawson bids us look, to modern causes for the explanation of ancient effects, we may assume that the three conditions of life now extant on our globe—tho savage, the barbaric, the civilised, the condition of the Brazilian forest-dweller, of thei New Zealander, of the European—represent the ascending scale by which our ancestors climbed from prehistoric rudeness to historic; civilisation. These principles are strikingly illustrated, and this assumption justified, by geological investigation, which has been abla to classify the retreating ages of prehistoric; man as the Bronze Age, the Neolithic oc

new-stone Age, the Palaeolithic or dld-stone Age—a period in which bronze was known, but iron was not discovered ; a period in . which metal was unknown, and the tools or •implements in use were of hard stone, finely ground and edged; a period in which dints chipped roughly, yet chipped by the hand of man, were the only weapons known. These eloquent relics, regarded formerly as elfbolts or moon-stones, now eagerly sought and preserved, are derived from two sources —river gravels and caves. We stand by a tiny streamlet at the bottom of a deep ravine in Cumberland or Devonshire. There was a time, we know, when the valley was filled np to the level of the surrounding land, and the predecessor of the .stream below ran a hundred and fifty feet above our head. Slowly the water carved for itself an ever-narrowiug channel, the sharper tooth of its mid-stream leaving behind it, as it deepened, the successive margins of its gravelly bed. Flood after flood washed'into its swollen waters and lodged upon its submerged sides implements of' the rude tribes which lived upon its banks, and the bones of the huge animals which they hunted and destroyed, burying them in the mud which each subsiding cataclysm deposited as it shrank. Man comes to-day. and digs into the hillside, In the upper •slopes he finds rude flints, with remains of the

mammoth and the mastodon ; lower down, the polished celt, along with relios of the hyaena, lion, elephant ; lower again, r the arrow, saw, pierced hammer-head of atone,; mingled with the reindeer horn and- the tooth of the arctic fox ; lowest of all, with bones of recent animals, otter, deer, and ox, appear the sickle, spear-head, or shield-boss, which attest the Age of Bronze. We unseal an ancient cave which has been for ages closed and lost. We dig through mould charged with human bones, remains of pig and sheep, weapons of stone and bronze. Below it is a mass of stalagmite yielding no remains. .Under that, again we find a hard red mud, containing reindeer bones •: and polished implements. This rests upon - a second thicker bed of stalagmite, aDd boring it, we find another earthy stratum, mingled with erratic blocks of grit, attesting.glacial action, yielding the extinct cave-bear's-hones, with the rudest human implements. The section which we have made * drops sense distinct and clear.' In times long past, before the glacial drift had ceased, man inhabited the cave. Driven from his home by ice-sheet or by flood, he left his weapons strewed around, and mud poured into the cave, laden with bones of animals, deceased or slain, which it had gathered in. its flow. The disturbance passed ; the mud hardened into breccia, lime-drops from the roof splashing their film upon its surface slowly built up. the crystalline stalagmite. Another generation of men found out the cave and haunted it, not knowing that the floor of their new home was the roof of an ancestral tomb. They, too, in time were driven out, their relic 3 left behind, embedded in earth, sealed bv stalagmite, succeeded by fresh inmates, till the cave is found to-day, a prehistoric museum, preserved, arranged, labelled by the Great Teacher’s hand. Even this is not the whole. A comparison of ossiferous caves and gravels yields still minuter evidence as to the ascending development of the races they embalm. They show a period during which no relics except rude chipped flints are found; their owner wielded them to dig for- roots, to break -the! ice, to slay his neighbor or to wound his prey. By-ani-bye are seen .flint scrapers, such as the Australian uses _ now to soften the skins he wraps around his naked form, and with them rude bone pins—the creature had learned to dress ! Anon wo find charred bone 3 with the remains of fire—the creature had learned to cook ! Presently we exhume pierced shells and pigments made of hematite—the idea of ornament had followed on . the idea of dress ! And so upward, through kitchen-midden and lake-dwelling, we trace the birth and growth of pottery, of agriculture, of house-building, of domestic animals, of woven cords, nets, mats, and garments ; till the Stone Age yields to the Bronze, Stonehenge and the Cromlechs are reared, the Bronze Age passes into the Iron Age, and written history begins.