MAN COEVAL WITH EXTINCT ANIMALS. THE CAVE-PEOPLE.
HEAPS.-LAKE-DWELLINGS OF SWITZERLAND.

SCANDINAVIAN SHELL- HABITS OF THE PRIMITIVE MAN.. TWO STONE AGES. RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN STONE RELICS OF Two HEMISPHERES. -AMERICA THE OLDEST CONTINENT. - A ZONE OF PYRAMIDS. - TRADITIONS OF A LOST CONTINENT. SHELL-HEAPS IN UNITED STATES. A PRE-HISTORIC HUNT IN MISSOURI. - HUMAN REMAINS IN GOLD-DRIFT OF CALIFORNIA. SUPERIOR ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN AMERICA.

THE period and the conditions of the early existence of man have, within the last half century, been the subject of fresh and interesting investigation. The recognition of human relics in certain geological relations has established the fact that there once prevailed in Europe a barbarism essentially like that belonging to the lower type of savages of our own time. This primeval state of man in man in Eu that portion of the world existed too long ago to be included within the historic period; and, so far as careful observation has been made, similar evidence of the antiquity of the race is found in the

Antiquity of

rope.

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imperishable signs of human habitation and the rude arts of savage life in all other parts of the globe.

Northern Europe at one period was buried in an Arctic winter for many centuries. On the summits of lofty mountain ranges, great glaciers of ice and snow were piled, which advanced by slow degrees, and covered land and sea. When at length this long and dreary period drew toward its close, the glaciers receded, and the earth became habitable, then, although a period of intense cold was long continued, there appeared many great and strange animals, now known

only by their fossil remains. Among them, wandering in herds over the region which afterwards was shaped into the present continent of Europe, feeding upon the vegetation of a virgin world, were the elephant, with long hair and mane, a rhinoceros clad in fur, a gigantic elk ten feet in height, with antlers measur

ing eleven feet from tip to tip, the cave-bear, the cave-lion, and other ferocious beasts after their kind, hiding themselves and their prey in dens and caverns. In caves and gravel drifts in France, in Belgium, and in England, man has left the indubitable witnesses of his life, in association with the bones of these extinct animals, of which whole races perished while he survived through periods of successive submersions and upheavals of land, of floods from slowly receding glaciers, of alterations in climate due, perhaps, to the changing relative positions of the earth to the sun, perhaps to the relative areas of land and sea in different portions of the globe at different periods. These people who first appeared, or the first, at least, who are known to have appeared, in Europe, were mere naked savages with an instinct to kill and to eat, to creep under a rock as a shelter from the cold and the rain; who in the course of time learned that fire would burn and cook, that there was warmth in the skin of a beast, that a sharpened stone would kill and would scrape much better than a blunt one. From generation to generation they lived and died in the caves where they have left the evidences of their

The cavemen.

REMAINS IN SHELL-HEAPS.

3

existence; and it is a curious and interesting mark of their progress that some of these troglodytes in the south of France made tolerable carvings in bone and

ent in man as the power to laugh and the faculty of articulate speech; and they prove also that these artists were familiar with the animals. they sketched, of which one is known to the modern world only by its fossil remains, and another, though still extant, is able to live only in latitudes of extreme cold.

On the coast of Denmark there are immense shell-heaps called Kjökken-Möddings-kitchen middings or kitchen-refuse - heaps

Remains in shell-heaps.

differing little, if at all, from similar heaps on other coasts, all over the world, except that they have been dug into, turned up, sifted, studied, inch by inch, atom by atom, with that sagacity, patience, and minuteness which

distinguish modern science. In these are found, mingled with stone implements, bones of various beasts and birds and shells of different fish, the bones of a certain species of grouse, a bird known to have fed upon the buds of the pine tree. But the pine tree does not grow, and has not grown within the historic period, in Denmark. It is found, however, in the peat-bogs, thirty feet beneath the present surface of the soil. Above these buried pines are the trunks of the oak and white birch that followed the pine forests, flourished for centuries, and then in their turn died out. On the upper surface of the bogs grows the beech, the common forest tree of Denmark now, as it has been so far back as either history or tradition goes. Thus forest after forest of different species, to which the climate and the soil were adapted, has come and gone since the people of the Kjökken-Möddings fed upon this bird, the capercailzie, which lived upon the buds of those buried pines.

Nor are these men of the caves and of the Kjökken-Möddings the only representatives of the ancient race or races who left their relics in their actual habitations. In the years 1853-54, two successive dry seasons reduced the waters of the lakes of Switzerland to a lower point than was ever known before. It was discovered, first by accident and afterward by careful search, that dwellings built upon piles had once

stood in these lakes near their shores. Continued systematic and patient examination of the sites of these habitations proves that some of them belonged to an ancient people, and that, as their relics show, they lived in them, from century to century, from the earliest appearance of man down, probably, to the historic period.

With these last discoveries the case seems complete. In the dark caves of various regions, for whose possession these early men doubtless contended with the cave-lion, the cave-bear, and the cave-hyena; by the sea-shore in the Kjökken-Möddings of Denmark; in the huts of the Lake region where they put water between themselves and all danger from wild beasts or other enemies, their history is read in the simple implements of the infancy and childhood of the race.

Implements

When the human creature learned that he could avail himself of his hands in a way and with an intelligent purpose to which of the prim- no other animal had attained, and of which mere paws and claws seemed incapable, his first use, probably, of that discovery was to hurl a stick or a stone at an enemy or a wild beast in

itive man.