The Book of History (Vol. 1 of 18): A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times to the PresentVarious
History
The Book of History (Vol. 1 of 18): A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times to the Present
Various
World history
The connection which in earlier geological periods had united
Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America in the greatest homogeneous
zoogeographical kingdom, the Arctogæa, was broken during the Tertiary
and Drift Periods, so that several zoogeographical provinces were
formed. The connection with North America was the first to be broken,
so that even in the last two divisions of the Tertiary Period, the
Miocene and Pliocene Epochs, the Old and the New Worlds stood in the
relation of independent zoogeographical provinces to one another.
Now, it is of the greatest importance to note that during the Drift
Period North America again received some Northern immigrants from
the Old World, according to Von Zittel “probably viâ Eastern Asia.”
Consequently, during the Drift Period communication existed, at least
temporarily, between Asia and North America in the region of Bering
Strait, sufficient to allow the mammoth and some companions to migrate
from the one continent to the other. In Kotzebue Sound mammoth remains
are found in the “ground-ice formation,” together with those of the
horse, elk, reindeer, musk-ox and bison. Mammoth remains are also known
to have been found in the Bering Islands, St. George in the Pribylov
group, and Unalaska, one of the Aleutian Islands. In that period the
mammoth arrived in the New World as a colonist driven from the Old.
It spread widely over British North America, Alaska, and Canada; it
has also been found in Kentucky. A relatively recent union of the
circumpolar regions of the Northern Hemisphere--of Europe, Asia, and
North America--is also proved by the occurrence of animals that we
recognise as companions of the mammoth, but which, surviving the
Glacial Period, are still distributed over the whole region, such as
the reindeer, elk, and bison. The absence in Asia of several animals
specially characteristic of the European Drift (the hippopotamus, ibex,
chamois, fallow-dear, wildcat, and cave-bear) explains also their
absence in the North American Drift fauna. It is particularly strange
that the cave-bear did not reach Northern Asia. It is otherwise the
most frequent beast of prey of the Drift Period, and hundreds of its
carcases often lie buried in the caves and clefts it once inhabited.
In Southern Russia numerous remains of it are found, whereas in the
English caves it is rarer, the cave-hyena predominating here. Apart
from the exceptions just mentioned, J. F. Brandt considers North
Asia and the high Northern latitudes to be the region in which the
European, North Asiatic, and North American land fauna had concentrated
during the Tertiary and Drift Periods, and whence their migrations and
advances took place according as it grew older. As the northern fauna
spread over more southern latitudes during the Drift Period, they
took possession of the habitats of the species there belonging to the
Tertiary Period, drove them back into tropical and subtropical regions,
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