The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studiesWilson, Daniel, Sir
History
The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studies
Wilson, Daniel, Sir
America -- Antiquities; Atlantis (Legendary place); Ethnology -- America; Indians of North America -- Antiquities
Viewed simply as examples of imitative art among a people still in the
rudest Stone age, the drawings are significant and instructive. They
furnish evidence of observation and artistic capacity, and consequently
of intellectual powers capable of very different results from anything
that could be realised in the absence of all knowledge of metallurgy, or
of anything beyond the crudest appliances for developing mechanical
skill. The conditions of climate probably forbade any attempt at
agriculture. They were hunters, fowlers, fishers, subsisting mainly, if
not wholly, by the chase. They not only successfully pursued the wild
horse, the reindeer, and other swift-footed herbivora, but assailed the
cave-bear, the cave-lion, and other formidable carnivora, as well as the
huge rhinoceros and the mammoth. They also made excursions to the
sea-shore, and no doubt left there shell mounds similar to those which
have been explored with such interesting results on the Danish coast;
and which have their New World equivalents on the seaboards of
Massachusetts, Georgia, and Florida, where at certain seasons the
Indians resorted to feast on the shell-fish. From their drawings and
carvings we not only learn this, but also that they were not unfamiliar
with the whale, the seal, and other marine fauna. The presence of the
whale and seal in the same latitude as the reindeer need not surprise
us. The occupation of Europe by palæolithic man contemporary with the
_Elephas primigenius_ and other extinct mammalia, belongs to an era when
the relative levels of sea and land, and the relations of the Atlantic
coast-line to the ancient continent, differed widely from their present
conditions. If the genial current of the Gulf Stream then reached the
shores of Europe, its influence extended over areas very diverse from
those now affected by it. But the range of the fauna of that Palæolithic
era was a wide one. Tusks of the mammoth and antlers of the reindeer
occur in the Scottish boulder-clay; and the discovery of skeletons of
the whale far inland in the carse of Stirling, accompanied in more than
one case by implements made of perforated stag’s horn, tells of the
presence of the Greenland whale on the ancient Scottish sea coast, while
the stag haunted its forests, and the Allophylian savage paddled his
canoe in estuaries marked for us now by old sea-margins that preceded
the last great rise of the land. Skulls and horns of the elk occur in
the Scottish peat-bogs, seemingly indistinguishable from those of the
_Cervus alces_, or North American moose.[86] As to the reindeer, not
only are its remains found in Scottish mosses and the underlying marl,
but they have been dug up in the ruined brochs, as at Cill-Trolla,
Sutherlandshire, and Keiss in Caithness. The favourite haunts of the
Greenland whale are in seas encumbered with floating ice; and when they
were stranded in the estuary of the Forth by a tide rising on a
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