Gaston de Saporta

“ It is this primitive exodus, as certain as it is inconceivable, accepted by science as well as by dogma, that we have to explain, or at least to make probable; and that in an age when it is only after the most wonderful discoveries, by the aid of the most powerful machinery for navigation, through the boldest and most adventurous enterprises, that civilized man has been able to flatter himself that he has at last gone as far as infant man went in an age that is so far removed from us as to baffle all calculations. ”

“ Whence could this primitive American race, sister to the one that lived in Europe at the same date, have come, unless we suppose a direct communication between the two continents? The difficulty such men would have in crossing the Atlantic and the certainty which soundings give of the antiquity of the ocean remove all possibility of our believing either that the two continents were formerly joined, or that one of them was discovered by some unknown Columbus navigating the ocean a hundred thousand years before the later one. ”

“ WHY should the study of prehistoric man excite bitter passions? Why should it trouble timorous souls? Its aim, with real scientific inquirers, is simply to attain an objective reality, worthy of the respect of all; and it has had the happy fortune to unite in a common pursuit minds of the most diverse character, having neither the same motives nor the same tendencies, but animated by the pure desire of increasing the domain of knowledge. ”

“ Not only, moreover, did the American man inaugurate on the soil of the New World an original and relatively advanced civilization, but he has left, chiefly in the north, indisputable traces of his presence in the most remote ages. ”

“ Toward the center of the space whose extremes we have marked out must be placed two other centers of civilization, more ancient than either of the two already named, and in the same zone of latitude—Egypt, in the valley of the Nile, and near the Arabian Gulf, and Mesopotamia, near the head of the Persian Gulf. Thus, each continental mass had its particular center of civilization, except Asia, which had two—one in the extreme east, the other near the line which joins it to Europe. ”

“ The importance of the Arctic pole in respect to the production of animals and plants, and to their migrations, and the nullity of the other hemisphere in relation to this feature, result from such a grouping. The essential point is, that there is nothing capricious in such an arrangement of lands and seas, and that there have been, if not always, at least from a very ancient period, emerged lands occupying a considerable part of the northern hemisphere, advancing very far toward the pole, and describing around the Arctic Sea a belt of more or less contiguous countries and islands. ”

“ Men also become differentiated by localization, and the Magdalenean man offers us one of the earliest instances in Europe of this effect. The Solutrean race, whose spear-heads are so finished, and the more recent and more artistic race of the caves of Périgord, whose simple designs and efforts in sculpture we admire, show us the first essays of that spirit of initiative and of relative progress, which, after localization, conducted some of them to material inventions and ideal conceptions, and by these to the region of that supreme culture of all our faculties which we call civilization. ”

“ Man secured animals by hunting, either killing them on the spot or binding them to take home. The mammoth had become a kind of legendary being, hidden in the deepest forests, an object of curiosity, abundant enough to furnish ivory, and to provoke the man of the time to execute drawings of him. In fact, the man of this age had made great progress. The division of industrial labor had become efficient. The cutting of the flints had attained great perfection and delicacy, and a new branch of industry had been added to it; bone was worked, with ivory and reindeer-horn. ”

“ In the long run, however, the action of the physiological and biological events of which Europe became the theatre had an influence on quaternary man; and the Chellean race, passing into that of Moustier, gradually changed its habits, while it learned to fashion other instruments. There need have been nothing abrupt in this evolution, which was the product of the exigencies of a climate gradually growing more severe. At the beginning, the animals, plants, and air were those of Northern Africa, and the conditions for human existence were of the best. ”

“ The neighborhood of the pole was long habitable, and inhabited by man in a time near that in which the vestiges of his industry begin to show themselves alike in Europe and America. In passing thus from the Arctic lands to those bordering on the polar circle, and through the latter into Asia, Europe, and America, man would only have taken the road which a host of plants and animals followed, either before him or at the same time, and under the stress of the same circumstances. ”

“ We are thus in the presence of the problem, always coming up before us, and always escaping us, of the origin of the American man. Evidently it can not be resolved by invoking an accidental colonization of Asiatic wanderers, or a shipwrecked company; but it is one in which we have to deal with primitive populations flowing as in Europe by successive waves, and attesting the continuous presence of man, whose gradual development and extension have followed in America the same course as on the old continent. ”

“ The uniformity of the instruments is a most striking feature. Always the same in design, they were made to serve for more than one use—a merit, probably, in the eyes of the men who chipped them out, but a sign of inferiority in the race which, for thousands of years, knew how to make these and no other tools. ”

“ The coal-beds themselves were an essentially terrestrial formation, peculiar to the recently emerged land of the period. In Belgium and England they rest upon a marine deposit, which forms their floor, and which reappears in the course of the formation, alternating several times with the strata of land growth. We learn from this that the sea was retiring from these spots before the extension of the continental area, leaving a broader strip of land after each fitful inundation, and that the carboniferous vegetation was developed on the ground which the marine waters had just abandoned. ”

“ At this epoch, which was nearly that of Oeningen and the Mollassic Sea, which divided Europe from east to west, a subtropical climate still prevailed in the center of the continent, and the palm-trees extended up into Bohemia, along the northern banks of the great interior sea. By favor of this temperature the monkeys occupied Europe to near the forty-fifth degree, but without going above it, to disappear forever as soon as it became cool enough for men and elephants. ”

“ We must insist on this point, for it brings into light an obstacle which those who have tried to trace out the connection between widely separated races and to determine the course that had been followed by tribes now separated by oceans and vast expanses have hitherto found insurmountable; for, if man is one—to which we are ready to agree—we must assign a single point of departure for his migrations. ”

“ The spread of man throughout Europe and Asia does not offer very great difficulties, for, in consequence of the long distance for which the two continents are joined, Europe is in reality only a dependency of Asia; and occupation of Europe from Asia is conformable to religious traditions. The difficulties are, however, formidable when we come to America, which we find occupied from one end to the other by races whose unity has struck the best observers. ”

“ The world of plants was still young and imperfect. Vegetation was characterized by the abundance of green parts susceptible of rapid growth, and of an almost indefinite development. It was, however, destitute of two characters which have been acquired by the later plants: those of the periodical and gradual increase of parts destined to endure, and of an absolute specialization of the reproductive apparatus. The vegetable kingdom was the first factor in the production of coal, but not the only one ”

“ Man reveals himself in this epoch with an evident industry—primitive, for it presents only a single category of instruments, which are, however, so clearly characterized by their form and size that the most prejudiced mind could not fail to recognize them at once as belonging to the same race. ”

“ To M. de Mortillet, the European Magdalenean race was only a modified prolongation of that of Chelles and Moustier. Mixtures by migration and the co-existence of several races having differently shaped skulls were posterior to the recent quaternary and to the extinction of the mammoth and the retreat of the reindeer to the north. Then came an age in which, the climate having undergone amelioration, the glaciers having retired to the foot of the mountains, and the sea having withdrawn from Northern Europe to within its present limits, a new era was inaugurated. ”

“ It is also easy to conceive that the formation of coal could not have gone on unless the vegetation was adapted to the process 3 and the conditions of the climate were suitable. The coal-plants could never have grown and flourished as they did in the present climates of the North; and our hard-wood trees, with their firm foundations in the ground, and their slow, periodical growth, could never by decaying in the open air have produced the peculiar and rich combinations we find in the coal-beds. ”

“ But when palm-trees were growing near Prague, and camphor-trees grew as far north as Dantzic, man, if he existed then, might have lived without inconvenience beyond or around the Arctic Circle, within equal reach of North America and Europe, which he was destined to people. If it be objected to this view that man now lives in the hottest regions as well as in temperate ones, we answer that that shows simply that he has developed a capacity of adapting himself to them ”

“ This period, long as it appears, is very short as compared with the myriads of ages of geological development that preceded it, and represents only the last and the shortest of the geological periods. The question arises, How has the human race been able to spread itself over the whole surface of the globe? Is it the product of different and independent origins in the several continents, or have all men sprung from a common cradle, a "mother-region"? ”

“ There must have been, then, if not real seasons, intervals of relative calm, in which the decomposition could have taken place, to be succeeded by times of protracted and extremely violent precipitation. The fact that a transportation and deposition of the parts took place is attested by the stratified structure of the coal. In both the coal and the schisto-carbonaceous laminæ, all of the fragments, down to the most delicate isolated organs, are always, with only the rarest exceptions, spread out flat, and cemented one over another, lying together like the leaves of a book. ”

“ It was then that, weak and almost naked, having only just got fire and a few rude arms with which to defend itself and procure food, the human race conquered the world and spread itself from within the Arctic Circle to Terra del Fuego, from the Samoyed country to Van Diemen's Land, from the North Cape to the Cape of Good Hope. ”