Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
Now, to examine what the Old World has to show, if anything, similar to
these rudiments of civilization, we must go to the opposite gallery,
where we shall find, in the collections from the river-drift of England
and Southern France, implements equally rude and old-looking, but made
of flint instead of the inferior argillite with which the American
autochthones contented themselves. Next, a little better on the whole
than these, we shall see the relics of stone and bone--the latter not
only whittled and broken, but often ornamentally carved--which came from
caves in England and Southern Europe: some have been dug from beneath
thick layers of stalagmite.
In Europe, then, palaeolithic man is separately considered as the
River-drift man and the Cave man, the former believed to be much the
older people, and known by the series of simplest patterns of stone
implements found in the late Pleistocene river-beds. This River-drift
man wandered over the greater part of Europe and Asia, leading a
nomadic, feral life,--a hunter of very low order, like the modern
Australian. The Cave man, on the contrary, seems to have been restricted
in his range, which of itself is considered indicative of different age
and race, and he was far in advance of the River-drift man in the
variety and workmanship of his weapons and implements. Between both, or
rather between the era of the latter and that of the men who made
implements of polished stone and chipped flint, there is just such a
broad distinction as obtains in the United States between the traces of
palaeolithic and those of neolithic man.
The exact parallelism of the palaeolithic ages in the Eastern and Western
hemispheres is still more or less disputed by anthropologists, but the
general opinion seems to be this: If not two peoples, the River-drift
men and the Cave men were certainly distinct sections of the same race
which found their way into Europe at widely-separated times, the former
having far the higher antiquity. It is believed by Dr. Boyd Dawkins
(from whose celebrated cave-explorations in Great Britain has been
derived a representative series of specimens for the museum) "that the
River-drift man is as completely extinct at the present time as the
woolly rhinoceros or the cave bear" which he fed upon; but all authors
identify the men of the caves with the Eskimos, who there, as well as
here, were forced to retreat by the pressure of a race of new-comers,
superior in prowess and cultivation, whose traces we call _neolithic_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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