Evolution (Biology); Glacial epoch; Human beings -- Origin; Human evolution
I cannot doubt that these large erratics of Upsala were brought into
their present position during the Recent period, not only because of
their moderate elevation above the sea-level in a country where the land
is now rising every century, but because I observed signs of a great
oscillation of level which had taken place at Sodertelje, south of
Stockholm (about 45 miles distant from Upsala), after the country had
been inhabited by Man. I described, in the "Philosophical Transactions"
for 1835, the section there laid open in digging a level in 1819,
which showed that a subsidence followed by a re-elevation of land, each
movement amounting to more than 60 feet, had occurred since the time
when a rude hut had been built on the ancient shore. The wooden frame
of the hut, with a ring of hearthstones on the floor, and much charcoal,
were found, and over them marine strata, more than 60 feet thick,
containing the dwarf variety of Mytilus edulis, and other brackish-water
shells of the Bothnian Gulf. Some vessels put together with wooden pegs,
of anterior date to the use of metals, were also embedded in parts of
the same marine formation, which has since been raised, so that the
upper beds are more than 60 feet above the sea-level, the hut being thus
restored to about its original position relatively to the sea.
We have seen in the account of the Danish kitchen-middens of the Recent
period that even at the comparatively late period of their origin the
waters of the Baltic had been rendered more salt than they are now. The
Upsala erratics may belong to nearly the same era as these. But were
we to go back to a long antecedent epoch, or to that of the Belgian and
British caves with their extinct animals, and the signs they afford of a
state of physical geography departing widely from the present, or to the
era of the implement-bearing alluvium of St. Acheul, we might expect
to find Scandinavia overwhelmed with glaciers, and the country
uninhabitable by Man. At a much remoter period the same country was in
the state in which Greenland now is, overspread with one uninterrupted
coating of continental ice, which has left its peculiar markings on the
highest mountains. This period, probably anterior to the earliest traces
yet brought to light of the human race, may have coincided with the
submergence of England, and the accumulation of the boulder-clay of
Norfolk, Suffolk, and Bedfordshire, before mentioned. It has already
been stated that the syenite and some other rocks of the Norfolk till
seem to have come from Scandinavia, and there is no era when icebergs
are so likely to have floated them so far south as when the whole of
Sweden and Norway were enveloped in a massive crust of ice; a state
of things the existence of which is deduced from the direction of the
glacial furrows, and their frequent unconformity to the shape of the
minor valleys.
GLACIAL PERIOD IN SCOTLAND [25].
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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