The Story of Ab: A Tale of the Time of the Cave ManWaterloo, Stanley
Science
The Story of Ab: A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man
Waterloo, Stanley
Prehistoric peoples -- Fiction; Science fiction
And Old Mok was right. They talk of us as the descendants of an Aryan
race. Never from Aryan alone came the drifting, changing Western being of
to-day. But a part of him was born where bald plains were or where were
olive trees and roses. All modern science, and modern thoughtfulness, and
all later broadened intelligence are yielding to an admission of the fact
that he, though of course commingling with his visitors of the ages, was
born and changed where he now exists. The kitchen-midden--the name given
by scientists to refuse from his dwelling places--the kitchen-middens of
Denmark, as Denmark is to-day, alone, regardless of other fields, suffice
to tell a wondrous story. Imagine a kitchen-midden, that is to say the
detritus of ordinary living in different ages, accumulated along the side
of some ancient water course, having for its dimensions miles in length,
extending hundreds of yards back from the margin of this creek, of tens
and tens of thousands of years ago, and having a depth of often many feet
along this water course. Imagine this vast deposit telling the history of
a thousand centuries or more, beginning first with the deposit of clams
and mussel shells and of the shells of such other creatures as might
inhabit this river seeking its way to the North Sea. Imagine this deposit
increasing year after year and century by century, but changing its
character and quality as it rose, and the base is laid for reasoning.
At first these creatures who ranged up and down the ancient Danish creek
and devoured the clams and periwinkles must have been, as one might say,
but little more than surely anthropoid. Could such as these have migrated
from the Asiatic plateaus?
The kitchen-middens tell the early story with greater accuracy than could
any writer who ever lifted pen. Here the creek-loving, ape-like creatures
ranged up and down and quelled their appetites. They died after they had
begotten sons and daughters; and to these sons and daughters came an added
intelligence, brought from experience and shifting surroundings. The
kitchen-middens give graphic details. The bottom layer, as has been said,
is but of shells. Above it, in another layer, counting thousands of years
in growth, appear the cracked bones of then existing animals and appear
also traces of charred wood, showing that primitive man had learned what
fire was. And later come the rudely carved bones of the mammoth and woolly
rhinoceros and the Irish elk; then come rude flint instruments, and later
the age of smoothed stone, with all its accompanying fossils, bones and
indications; and so on upward, with a steady sweep, until close to the
surface of this kitchen-midden appear the bronze spear, the axhead and the
rude dagger of the being who became the Druid and who is an ancestor whom
we recognize. From the kitchen-midden to the pinnacle of all that is great
to-day extends a chain not a link of which is weak.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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