Abstract
IN NATURE, vol. xv. p. 87, you have given an outline of a paper by Prof. Hughes, read before the Cambridge Philosophical Society, “in which he criticised the evidence offered to support the view that man existed on the earth during or before the glacial period.” As concerning the question of the antiquity of man in North America, I would first call attention to the remarks on this subject by the late Prof. Jeffries Wyman, the most cautious and careful of archæologists, who writes: 1 “The ancient remains found in California, brought to the notice of the scientific world by Prof. J. D. Whitney, and referred by him to the Tertiary period, &c,” to which is added a footnote, that “the ample evidence collected by Prof. Whitney, but not yet published, substantiates the opinion given above with regard to age. The omission of the Calaveras skull would not weaken the evidence as to the existence of man in the Tertiary period in California.” Inasmuch as the Glacial period occurred at the close of the Tertiary period, if Prof. Whitney's discoveries are conclusive, as to this side of the Atlantic, does it not follow that man must have existed, certainly in Asia, prior to the glacial epoch? We are assured by all ethnologists, that man migrated from Asia to America, and now we are offered proofs of his American sojourn, of a date preceding the occurrence of glacial conditions. Speaking of the Eskimo, Dr. Peschel remarks1: “The identity of their language with that of the Namollo, their skill on the sea, their domestication of the dog, their use of the sledge, the Mongolian type of their faces, their capability for higher civilisation, are sufficient reasons for answering the question, whether a migration took place from Asia to America, or conversely from America to Asia, in favour of the former alternative; yet such a migration from Asia, by way of Behring's Straits, must have occurred at a much later period than the first colonisation of the New World from the Old one.” Again, in speaking of the Red Indians, he remarks2: “It is not impossible that the first migrations took place at a time when what is now the channel of Behring's Straits was occupied by an isthmus. The climate of those northern shores must then have been much milder than at the present day, for no currents from the Frozen Ocean could have penetrated into the Pacific.” This reference to a milder climate must necessarily refer to the genial warmth of Pliocene times; for scarcely under other circumstances can we find time enough to explain the various phases of lost civilisations, especially in South America. Whether or not the supposed traces of glacial and preglacial man in Europe be really such—if the archæology of North America has, so far, been correctly interpreted—then, unless they have been totally destroyed, unquestionable traces of such early man will be ultimately discovered; but if such “finds” should never gladden English archæologists, the earnest workers in America have rendered it certainly true that in Asia, and doubtless in Europe, man did exist during the closing epoch of the Tertiary period, if there is, indeed, no error in the supposition that our American aborigines migrated from the Old World.
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Fresh Water Shell-mounds of Florida." Fourth Memoir of Peabody Academy, Salem, Mass., U.S.A., December 1874, p. 45.
Races of Man," by Dr. Oscar Peschel. New York, 1876, p. 396.
Ibid., p. 400.
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ABBOTT, C. Traces of Pre-Glacial Man in America. Nature 15, 274 (1877). https://doi.org/10.1038/015274b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/015274b0
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