Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/121

] on the earth. It is to my mind to the last degree improbable that man, the most highly specialised of the animal kingdom, should have been present in such a fauna as this, composed of so many extinct species. They belong to one stage of evolution, and man to another and a later stage.

The same objections may be made to the so-called fossil man of Denise in France, in the Museum of Le Puy, found in volcanic tufa, and who is supposed to have fallen a victim to showers of ashes from a Pleiocene volcano. In this case, as in the rest, we cannot be certain that the deposit has been undisturbed since its first formation, nor is its precise geological horizon well ascertained.

As the evidence stands at present the geological record is silent as to man's appearance in Europe in the Pleiocene age. It is very improbable that he will ever be proved to have lived in this quarter of the world at that remote time, since of all the European mammalia then alive only one has survived to our own days. Nevertheless, the arrival of one solitary living species marks the dawn of that order of nature to which man belongs, and in which, in the succeeding Pleistocene age, he formed the central and most imposing figure.