The passing of the great race; or, The racial basis of European historyGrant, Madison
History
The passing of the great race; or, The racial basis of European history
Grant, Madison
Ethnology -- Europe
Evidence of the location of the early evolution of man in Asia and in
the geologically recent submerged area toward the southeast is afforded
by the fossil deposits in the Siwalik hills of northern India; where the
remains of primates have been found which were either ancestral or
closely related to the four genera of living anthropoids and where we
may confidently look for remains of the earliest human forms; and by the
discovery in Java, which in Pliocene times was connected with the
mainland over what is now the South China Sea, of the earliest known
form of erect primate, the _Pithecanthropus_. This ape-like man is
practically the “missing link,” being intermediate between man and the
anthropoids and is generally believed to have been contemporary with the
Günz glaciation of some 500,000 years ago, the first of the four great
glacial advances in Europe.
One or two species of anthropoid apes have been discovered in the
Miocene of Europe which may possibly have been remotely related to the
ancestors of man but when the archæological exploration of Asia shall be
as complete and intensive as that of Europe it is probable that more
forms of fossil anthropoids and new species of man will be found there.
Man existed in Europe during the second and third interglacial periods,
if not earlier. We have his artifacts in the form of eoliths, at least
as early as the second interglacial stage, the Mindel-Riss, of some
300,000 years ago. A single jaw found near Heidelberg is referred to
this period and is the earliest skeletal evidence of man in Europe. From
certain remarkable characters in this jaw, it has been assigned to a new
species, _Homo heidelbergensis_.
Then follows a long period showing only scanty industrial relics and no
known skeletal remains. Man was slowly and painfully struggling up from
a culture phase where chance flints served his temporary purpose. This
period, known as the Eolithic, was succeeded by a stage of human
development where slight chipping and retouching of flints for his
increasing needs led, after vast intervals of time, to the deliberate
manufacture of tools. This Eolithic Period is necessarily extremely hazy
and uncertain. Whether or not certain chipped or broken flints, called
eoliths or dawn stones, were actually human artifacts or were the
products of natural forces is, however, immaterial for man must have
passed through such an eolithic stage.
The further back we go toward the commencement of this Eolithic culture,
the more unrecognizable the flints necessarily become until they finally
cannot be distinguished from natural stone fragments. At the beginning,
the earliest man merely picked up a convenient stone, used it once and
flung it away, precisely as an anthropoid ape would act to-day if he
wanted to break the shell of a tortoise or crack an ostrich egg.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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