The Meeting-Place of Geology and HistoryDawson, John William, Sir
Religion
The Meeting-Place of Geology and History
Dawson, John William, Sir
Deluge; Prehistoric peoples
The original men who peopled the northern continents after the first
glacial period were of small stature, agile, and well formed, with mild
and pleasing countenance and heads of the medium (mesitocephalic) type.
They were dwellers in a warm climate and subsisted on fruits. As
population increased and men became hunters and fishermen, and wandered
widely over the world, a large-boned, coarse-featured, and savage type
of man arose, such as we find in the older caves and gravels, and
weapons of kinds not needed in primitive times were invented. In this
state of affairs, when the coarser and stronger races had made
themselves masters of the world, and had perhaps partially intermixed
with the older and more peaceful peoples, a great diluvial catastrophe
occurred, which swept away the greater part of men. The survivors were
of the old and unmodified stock, and it was they who repeopled the new
world, finding possibly here and there some survivors of the former
population, or themselves locally relapsing into a similar state. In
this case all the seeming paradoxes and contradictions which have
perplexed archæologists would be easily explained. We might even find
occasional captives of the primitive small race among the interments of
the old giants, and we might find new races of superior physical power
arising in the new world and again intruding on the feebler race.
In closing our notice of this period we may proceed to connect it with
actual history in the British Islands. When the Romans invaded Britain
they found in it two races of men physically very distinct, one of them
the aborigines, who had made their way to the island as its first
population after the close of the mammoth age, the others apparently a
later intrusion. They are known to English antiquaries from their modes
of burial as the men of the long and the round barrows or funeral
mounds. The first of these are beyond doubt the kinsmen of our little
men of the Trou de Frontal, in Belgium. They are thus described by
Greenwell and Taylor[29]:
[29] Greenwell, _British Barrows_; Taylor, _Origin of the Aryans_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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