Outings at Odd TimesAbbott, Charles C. (Charles Conrad)
History
Outings at Odd Times
Abbott, Charles C. (Charles Conrad)
Natural history -- Outdoor books
To this point I feel that I have been handling facts only, and deducing
from them only logical inferences; but now looms up the natural and
ever-interesting question, Who were these people? The origin of any race
is a difficult problem to solve, but none can compare with these misty
vestiges of prehistoric humanity. It seems to me but one inference is
permissible: they who fashioned these rude argillite implements were the
descendants of palæolithic man, and his superior in so far as a
knowledge of the bow and arrow and rude pottery indicates. Beyond this,
perhaps, we can not safely venture. Prof. Haynes has recently observed,
“The palæolithic man of the river gravels at Trenton and his
argillite-using posterity the writer believes to be completely extinct.”
While this at present seems to be the generally accepted conclusion,
there is a phase of the subject that merits consideration. May not this
“argillite-using” man have been a blood-relation of existing Eskimos? To
accept the view of Prof. Haynes that “argillite” man became extinct
infers an interval of indefinite length, when man did not exist on our
central Atlantic seaboard; but if we may judge from the abundant traces
of man that have been left and of the relation as to position that these
three general forms—palæolithic, later argillite, and Indian—bear to
each other, it would appear that, in the valley of the Delaware, at
least, man has not for a day ceased to occupy the land since the first
of his kind stood upon the shores of that beautiful river.
By referring these intermediate people to the existing Eskimos, I would
not be understood as maintaining that these boreal people were directly
descended from the argillite-using folk of the Delaware Valley, but that
both were derived from palæolithic man; in other words, that with the
disappearance of glacial conditions in the Delaware Valley, and the
retirement northward of the continental ice-sheet, if such there were,
the people of that distant day followed in its tracks, and lived the
same life their ancestors had lived when northern New Jersey was as
bleak as is Greenland to-day; but that not all of this strange people
were so enamored of an arctic life, and that many remained and, with the
gradual amelioration of the climate, their descendants changed in their
habits so far as to meet the requirements of a temperate climate. This
explanation, it seems to me, best accords with known facts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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