Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/140

112 France. Malta, Sicily, and Crete must have been the higher portions of a continent, now submerged, when the pigmy hippopotamus lived in all three; and the Apennines, the mountains of Sardinia, Greece, Asia Minor, and the Atlas, must have been connected by land with the mountains of Crete and the Cyclades to allow of the distribution of the living ibexes. For all these animals to have arrived at the places where they are found, it is necessary that the whole Mediterranean area should be lifted up 400 fathoms above its present level, which would result in its being reduced to the two deep land-locked seas of Fig. 24, divided from each other by the belt of land reaching from Cape Bon (Tunis) to Malta, Sicily, and Calabria. It may further be remarked that, while a large portion of the present Mediterranean was dry land, the Sahara was occupied by a prolongation of the Atlantic far into the region south of the Atlas mountains.

From these considerations it is evident that Pleistocene Europe must be looked upon as intimately connected with Africa on the south and with Asia on the east, and that it offered no barriers to the migration of Asiatic and African animals as far to the west as Britain and Ireland.

The range of the northern and southern mammalia over Pleistocene Europe is indicated respectively by the horizontal and vertical dotted lines in the above Map (Fig. 24), and from their examination it will be seen that Europe is divided into three distinct zones; 1st, the northern, into which the southern animals never