Page:Darwinism by Alfred Wallace 1889.djvu/484

 absent. There remains only the great Euro-Asiatic continent; and its enormous plateaux, extending from Persia right across Tibet and Siberia to Manchuria, afford an area, some part or other of which probably offered suitable conditions, in late Miocene or early Pliocene times, for the development of ancestral man.

It is in this area that we still find that type of mankind—the Mongolian—which retains a colour of the skin midway between the black or brown-black of the negro, and the ruddy or olive-white of the Caucasian types, a colour which still prevails over all Northern Asia, over the American continents, and over much of Polynesia. From this primary tint arose, under the influence of varied conditions, and probably in correlation with constitutional changes adapted to peculiar climates, the varied tints which still exist among mankind. If the reasoning by which this conclusion is reached be sound, and all the earlier stages of man's development from an animal form occurred in the area now indicated, we can better understand how it is that we have as yet met with no traces of the missing links, or even of man's existence during late tertiary times, because no part of the world is so entirely unexplored by the geologist as this very region. The area in question is sufficiently extensive and varied to admit of primeval man having attained to a considerable population, and having developed his full human characteristics, both physical and mental, before there was any need for him to migrate beyond its limits. One of his earliest important migrations was probably into Africa, where, spreading westward, he became modified in colour and hair in correlation with physiological changes adapting him to the climate of the equatorial lowlands. Spreading north-westward into Europe the moist and cool climate led to a modification of an opposite character, and thus may have arisen the three great human types which still exist. Somewhat later, probably, he spread eastward into North-West America and soon scattered himself over the whole continent; and all this may well have occurred in early or middle Pliocene times. Thereafter, at very long intervals, successive waves of migration carried him into every