Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/410

402 size (1m, 63), dolichocephaly of 74 and especially a short face, broad and disharmonic, of a character absolutely analogous to the conformation of the crania of Cromagnon. They are not blonds.

"Another race of large size (1m, 69, about), very dolichocephalic, mesorhine to 75, etc., were probably the descendants of the men who worked the silver in this region, and they represent the most ancient ethnic layer existing in the country." He adds that in Tunisia, as in Europe, there was a gradual transition from the Chelléan to the Mousterian epoch, and also down through the Magdalenian epoch to the Neolithic. Flint implements were still used during the Roman occupation, though the nomadic Getulæ or Numidians used metal purchased of the Phœnicians and Romans.

It is now tolerably well settled that at the time of the paleolithic or old stone epoch in Egypt and Nubia, the Nile was much larger and wider than now, as the paleolithic axes and scrapers, precisely like those of France, have been found on the river gravels out on the desert as high as 400 feet above the present level of the Nile. On the other hand, the polished axes or celts, the arrow-heads and flint knives and scrapers of the neolithic epoch found under the temples and in the sand about the towns built within historic times, though extending back 2,500 to 4,000 years, preceded the bronze period, which may have begun about 1,500 years Since the opening of the neolithic epoch in Egypt, the Nile has assumed its present size, the country having become dry and rainless. There are everywhere, as we ascend the Nile to the first cataract, evident traces in the eroded hills on either bank of the Nile of a rainy and cooler climate during paleolithic times.

And everywhere in Morocco, Algeria and Tunis, and on the edge of the Sahara Desert, we saw evidences of an originally moist, rainy, cooler climate. Old lake-bottoms, on the Tell, where the rivers, now dry, had widened into lakes; conical hills, outstanding pinnacles and ancient water-worn courses extending down the sides of the now dry and barren cliffs or slopes, told the story of a climate more favorable than now for the sustenance of a comparatively large population; one fond of uplands, forest clad, cool and shady in the summer, and whose farms suffered less from the parching heats of summer. During the tertiary period, at least until the pliocene, the Sahara was a Mediterranean sea; northern Africa belonged then more to Europe than to central and southern Africa.

Rabourdin asserts that the desert of the central Sahara was formerly a fertile and inhabited country, and afforded pasturage for cattle. Herodotus states that the cattle had larger and thicker hides. There are rock pictures representing cattle with large horns.

Weisgerber states that according to local traditions the Sahara was formerly not a desert; that there were springs, streams and a luxuriant