It is also from this area apparently that all the arts have spread. The crowding and the culture development were coincident. What was the cause of it? If we can arrive at a satisfactory understanding of the cause, it seems to me that we have the solution of the whole matter. The explanation appears to be that the continent was peopled before the beginning of the glacial epoch, and the crowding into the narrow regions, and consequently the development of culture there, were due to the encroachment from the north of the great cold. Wright says: “Just before the beginning of the ice age, a temperate climate corresponding to latitude 35 on the Atlantic coast extended far up toward the north pole, permitting Greenland and Spitzbergen to be covered with trees and plants similar in most respects to those found at the present time in Virginia and North Carolina. Here indeed in close proximity to the north pole were then residing, in harmony and contentment, the ancestors of nearly all the plants and animals which are now found in the north temperate zone.” It is not unreasonable to suppose, then, that man was also here, though as yet the scientific evidence is perhaps not sufficient to prove it. If he circled the globe in the Northern regions at that time, and was also occupying Central portions, the cold drove all south and together with changes of land levels cut off the American division from the other world.[390] Migration legends are useless in determining the origin of the Amerinds, for they can only relate to the _comparatively recent changes_ of location before which, for a long period, the people drifted up and down and across the continent under the influences I have suggested. However man first originated, or where, he was doubtless distributed, like the flora and fauna, at some exceedingly remote period, over the whole world, by causes not now understood, but one of which was probably a greater continuity of land surfaces than exists to-day.[391] Some of the earlier-world people were possibly more advanced than we have been willing to concede, and there was, from a very early day, a differentiation of tribes. Some were making respectable weapons and tools of stone while others were using clubs. Too much stress has been placed upon the European classification of stone implements. It may exhibit conditions that existed in Europe, but it has nothing to do with a standard of measurement for the world. When Moses was leading his enlightened people, the European was a painted savage. The period of time in which man used stone implements is enormous; that in which he has used metal tools, comparatively insignificant. It stands to reason, therefore, that during this long use of stone, tribes attained to varying degrees of culture, and varying degrees of perfection in stone tools. There never could have been a single period of time when all tribes the world round made a certain quality of implements, then another period when they all made