Evolution (Biology); Glacial epoch; Human beings -- Origin; Human evolution
In the state of New York, the mastodon is not unfrequently met with
in bogs and lacustrine deposits formed in hollows in the drift, and
therefore, in a geological position, much resembling that of Recent
peat and shell-marl in the British Isles, Denmark, or the valley of
the Somme, as before described. Sometimes entire skeletons have been
discovered within a few feet of the surface, in peaty earth at the
bottom of small ponds, which the agriculturists had drained. The shells
in these cases belong to freshwater genera, such as Limnaea, Physa,
Planorbis, Cyclas, and others, differing from European species, but
the same as those now proper to ponds and lakes in the same parts of
America.
I have elsewhere given an account of several of these localities which
I visited in 1842,* and can state that they certainly have a more modern
aspect than almost all the European deposits in which remains of the
mammoth occur, although a few instances are cited of Elephas Primigenius
having been dug out of peat in Great Britain.
(* "Travels in North America" volume 1 page 55 London 1845;
and "Manual of Geology" chapter 12 5th edition page 144.)
Thus I was shown a mammoth's tooth in the museum at Torquay in
Devonshire which is believed to have been dredged up from a deposit
of vegetable matter now partially submerged beneath the sea. A more
elevated part of the same peaty formation constitutes the bottom of
the valley in which Tor Abbey stands. This individual elephant must
certainly have been of more modern date than his fellows found fossil in
the gravel of the Brixham cave, before described, for it flourished when
the physical geography of Devonshire, unlike that of the cave period,
was almost identical with that now established.
I cannot help suspecting that many tusks and teeth of the mammoth, said
to have been found in peat, may be as spurious as are the horns of
the rhinoceros cited more than once in the "Memoirs of the Wernerian
Society" as having been obtained from shell-marl in Forfarshire and
other Scotch counties; yet, between the period when the mammoth was
most abundant and that when it died out, there must have elapsed a long
interval of ages when it was growing more and more scarce; and we may
expect to find occasional stragglers buried in deposits long subsequent
in date to others, until at last we may succeed in tracing a passage
from the Pleistocene to the Recent fauna, by geological monuments, which
will fill up the gap before alluded to as separating the era of the
flint tools of Amiens and Abbeville from that of the peat of the valley
of the Somme.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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