Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/269

] belong not merely to animals now living in America, such as the elk, reindeer, and the bison, but also to the mammoth and the horse. The western portion of arctic America at this time belonged to the same zoological province as northern and central Europe and Asia, and was not then isolated from those regions by a tract of sea. We may therefore conclude that the man who hunted the mammalia living in Europe at this time is likely to have hunted them also in Asia and in America. Nor is the probability of his identification with the Eskimos of the present day weakened by the great distance which separates the Palæolithic caverns of Europe from the arctic regions of North America. The musk sheep, now only found in the country of the Eskimos, has been traced by its fossil remains through Russia into Germany, and as far to the south-west as the Pyrenees. Its survival in North America is to me a parallel fact to the probable survival of the Cave-men as the modern Eskimos of the same region.

All these points of connection between the Cave-men and the Eskimos can, in my opinion, be explained only on the hypothesis that they belong to the same race. To the objection that savage tribes, living under the same conditions, might independently invent the same implements, and that, therefore, the correspondence in question does not necessarily imply a unity of race, the answer may be made, that there are no savage tribes known which use the same set of implements without being connected by blood. The ruder and more common instruments, such as flakes, and in a lesser degree scrapers, are of little value in classification, but where a whole set agrees, intended for various uses, and some of them rising above the most common wants of savage life, the