Evolution (Biology); Glacial epoch; Human beings -- Origin; Human evolution
Norway and Sweden appear to have passed through all the successive
phases of glaciation which Greenland has experienced, and others which
that country will one day undergo, if the climate which it formerly
enjoyed should ever be restored to it. There must have been first a
period of separate glaciers in Scandinavia, then a Greenlandic state of
continental ice, and thirdly, when that diminished, a second period of
enormous separate glaciers filling many a valley now wooded with fir
and birch. Lastly, under the influence of the Gulf Stream, and various
changes in the height and extent of land in the arctic circle, a melting
of nearly all the permanent ice between latitudes 60 and 70 north,
corresponding to the parallels of the continental ice of Greenland,
has occurred, so that we have now to go farther north than latitude 70
degrees before we encounter any glacier coming down to the sea coast.
Among other signs of the last retreat of the extinct glaciers, Kjerulf
and other authors describe large transverse moraines left in many of the
Norwegian and Swedish glens.
CHRONOLOGICAL RELATIONS OF THE HUMAN AND GLACIAL PERIODS IN SWEDEN.
We may now consider whether any, and what part, of these changes in
Scandinavia may have been witnessed by Man. In Sweden, in the immediate
neighbourhood of Upsala, I observed, in 1834, a ridge of stratified
sand and gravel, in the midst of which occurs a layer of marl, evidently
formed originally at the bottom of the Baltic, by the slow growth of
the mussel, cockle, and other marine shells of living species intermixed
with some proper to fresh water. The marine shells are all of dwarfish
size, like those now inhabiting the brackish waters of the Baltic; and
the marl, in which myriads of them are embedded, is now raised more than
100 feet above the level of the Gulf of Bothnia. Upon the top of this
ridge (one of those called osars in Sweden) repose several huge erratics
consisting of gneiss, for the most part unrounded, from 9 to 16 feet in
diameter, and which must have been brought into their present position
since the time when the neighbouring gulf was already characterised by
its peculiar fauna. Here, therefore, we have proof that the transport of
erratics continued to take place, not merely when the sea was inhabited
by the existing Testacea, but when the north of Europe had already
assumed that remarkable feature of its physical geography, which
separates the Baltic from the North Sea, and causes the Gulf of Bothnia
to have only one-fourth of the saltness belonging to the ocean.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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