Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/600

582 period, but that it was of a type as low as the lowest, perhaps below the lowest, now known.

Research was now redoubled, and, as a result, human skulls and complete skeletons of various types began to be discovered in the ancient deposits of many other parts of the world, and especially in France, Belgium, Germany, the Caucasus, Africa, and North and South America.

But soon began to emerge from all these discoveries a fact of enormous importance: The skulls and bones found at Cro Magnon, Solutré, Furfooz, Grenelle, and elsewhere, were compared, and it was thus made certain that various races had already appeared and lived in various grades of civilization, even in those enormously remote epochs; that even then there were various strata of humanity ranging from races of a very low to those of a very high type; and that upon any theory, certainly upon the theory of the origin of mankind from a single pair, two things were evident: first, that long, slow processes during vast periods of time, must have been required for the differentiation of these races, and for the evolution of man up to the point where the better specimens show him, certainly in the early Quaternary and perhaps in the Tertiary period; and, secondly, that there had been from the first appearance of man, of which we have any traces, an upward tendency.

This second conclusion—the upward tendency of man from low beginnings—was made more and more clear by bringing into relations with these remains of human bodies and of extinct animals the remains of human handiwork. As stated in the last chapter, the river-drift and bone-caves in Great Britain, France, and other parts of the world, revealed a progression, even in the various divisions of the earliest Stone period; for, beginning at the very earliest strata of these remains, on the floors of the caverns, associated mainly with the bones of extinct animals, the cave bear, the hairy elephant, and the like, were the rudest implements;