Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/95

] garden of Eden in which the first traces of man were to be sought. Meiocene Europe was fitted to be the birthplace of man, in its warm climate and in the abundance of food. There is, however, one most important consideration which renders it highly improbable that man was then living in any part of the world. No living species of land mammal has been met with in the Meiocene fauna. Man, the most highly specialised of all creatures, had no place in a fauna which is conspicuous by the absence of all the mammalia now associated with him.

Were any man-like animal living in the Meiocene age, he might reasonably be expected to be not man but intermediate between man and something else, and to bear the same relation to ourselves as the Meiocene apes, such as the Mesopithecus, bear to those now living, such as the Semnopithecus. If, however, we accept the evidence advanced in favour of Meiocene man, it is incredible that he alone of all the mammalia living in those times in Europe should not have perished, or have changed into some other form in the long lapse of ages during which many Meiocene genera and all the Meiocene species have become extinct. Those who believe in the doctrine of evolution will see the full force of this argument against the presence of man in the Meiocene fauna, not merely of Europe but of the whole world.

On the other hand, it is maintained by very high authorities—Dr. Hamy, M. de Mortillet, and others—that man inhabited France as early as the middle of the Meiocene age. This conclusion is founded partly on the