Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/315

Rh between human skulls and bones found in different places and under circumstances showing vast antiquity.

Human bones had been found under these circumstances as early as 1835 at Canstadt near Stuttgart, and in 1856 in the Neanderthal near Düsseldorf; but in more recent searches they have been discovered in a multitude of places, especially in Germany, France, Belgium, England, the Caucasus, Africa, and North and South America. But comparison of these bones showed that even in that remote Quaternary period there were great differences of race, and here again came in an argument for the yet earlier existence of man on the earth; for long previous periods must have been required to develop such racial differences. Considerations of this kind have given a new impulse to the belief that man's existence dates back at least into the Tertiary period. The evidence for this earlier origin of man has been ably summed up not only by its brilliant advocate, Mortillet, but by a former opponent, one of the most conservative of modern anthropologists, Quatrefages; and the conclusion arrived at by both is, that man did really exist in the Tertiary period. The acceptance of this conclusion is also seen in the recent work of that most able investigator, Alfred Russel Wallace, who, cautious and conservative as he is, places the origin of man not only in the Tertiary period, but in an earlier stage of it than most have dared assign; even in the Miocene.

The first thing raising a strong presumption, if not giving proof, that man existed in the Tertiary, was the fact that from all explored parts of the world came in more and more evidence that in the earlier Quaternary man existed in different, strongly marked races and in great numbers. From all regions which geologists had explored, even from those the most distant and different from each other, came this same evidence—from northern Europe to southern Africa; from France to China; from New Jersey to British Columbia; from British Columbia to Peru. The development of man in such numbers and in so many different regions, with such differences of race and at so early a period, must have required a long previous time.

This argument seemed to be strengthened by discoveries of bones bearing marks apparently made by cutting instruments, in the Tertiary formations of France and Italy, and by the discoveries of what were claimed to be flint implements by the Abbé Bourgeois in France, and of implements and human bones by Prof. Capellini in Italy.

On the other hand, some of the more cautious men of science are content to say that the existence of man in the Tertiary period is not yet settled. As to his existence throughout the Quaternary epoch no new proofs are needed. Even so determined a supporter