Glacial Age

“ If we consider that the Glacial Age in America coincides in time with the same age in Europe, then the last statements would imply that the Paleolithic Age here was later than in Europe; in fact, that Paleolithic man had run his course in Europe before he appeared in America, and some might even go further, and say that he migrated from Europe to America. ”

“ The only races of men that we could expect to find in Europe during the Glacial Age would be Paleolithic tribes, and it is equally manifest that we must find traces of them in beds of this age, or in association with animals that are characteristic of this age, or else we can not assert the existence of man at this time. The valley of the river Somme, in Northern France, has become classical ground to the student of Archæology, since it was there that such investigations as we have just mentioned were first and most abundantly made. ”

“ We shall name, for convenience, the parts of this Pleistocene revolution which include the great subsidence and glaciation, the Glacial Age, that extending from the re-elevation to the modern the Post-glacial.
The Glacial Age proved fatal to a large proportion of the land life of the previous periods. According to Professor Boyd Dawkins, out of fifty-three species known in Britain in the Post-glacial, only twelve are survivors of the Pliocene; and probably the proportions would not be greater in any part of the northern hemisphere. ”

“ The Paleolithic Age was apparently terminated in Europe by the cold of the last glacial epoch. No such natural course put an end to the Neolithic Age, but as the strong have an advantage over the weak, the young over the old, so does a race young, undeveloped, or in the early maturity of its powers, have an advantage over the older and more fixed civilization with which it comes in contact. To understand the causes which introduced into Europe the Bronze Age, we must refer to the Aryan race and to Asia. ”

“ No living species goes back farther than the Pliocene. Few extend farther than the Glacial age. On the same principle it is not to be expected that man, the highest of all animals, should extend far back in geological time.
240
Accepting the Post-glacial age as that of the advent of man, it may be interesting to ask what we know of the condition of our continents when he appeared. In Western Asia, in Europe, except in its more northern portions, and it would now seem also in America, man had been introduced at a time closely following the emergence of the land from the Glacial sea. ”

“ In the Glacial Age, ice, or at least a climate too severe for the free spreading of peoples, extended from the north pole into central Europe and across Russia and Siberia to the great tablelands of central Asia. After the last Glacial Age, this cold north mitigated its severities very slowly, and was for long without any other population than the wandering hunters who spread eastward and across Bering Strait. ”

“ While claiming in support of them the opinions of some eminent scholars, we freely admit that it is not a settled question, but open to very grave objections, especially the date of the close of the Glacial Age, which seems to have been comparatively recent, at least in America. ”

“ If, however, these implements are genuine, they would imply the presence of Palæocosmic or Antediluvian man in America. This would in itself be an important discovery.
239 For the present, therefore, man is geologically a Post-glacial species, and there is nothing unreasonable in supposing that he dates no farther back, since several animals his contemporaries are in the same case; and by supposing him to have originated after the Glacial age we avoid the difficulties attendant on his survival of that great revolution. ”

“ It is yet a much disputed point to what particular portion of the Glacial Age we can trace the appearance of man. We can profitably note the tendency of scientific thought in this direction. But a short time has elapsed since a few scholars here and there began to urge an antiquity for man extending back beyond the commonly accepted period of six thousand years. ”

“ As we have several times remarked, our American scholars, as a rule, do not think many thousands of years have elapsed since the Glacial Age, and yet they are not all agreed on that point. From the depths in the gravel and loess deposits that the stone relics are found, we may suppose that man was present during the entire series of years their formation represents. ”

“ That man may have existed previously no one need deny, but no one can at present positively affirm on any ground of actual fact. It may be necessary here to explain the contentions often made that in Britain and Western Europe man belongs to an interglacial period. When with Dr. James Geikie, the great Scottish glacialist, we hold that there were several interglacial periods, the Glacial age may be extended by including the warm period of the Palanthropic, and the cold at its termination, as one of the interglacial and Glacial periods. ”

“ He advocated also the existence of man in glacial times, and recapitulating views already enumerated in some papers which he had published in the Geological Magazine, he argued that the palæolithic gravels of England were to be regarded as glacial and preglacial, and not, as was widely believed, of interglacial and post-glacial age. ”

“ But aside from the fact that geology points out that a long time went by after the close of the Glacial Age before Neolithic man arrived on the scene, we are largely deprived of its aid in our investigations; for all the various implements and specimens of the household industries, from which we derive our knowledge of these latter ages, are found only in surface deposits; that is, in the modern alluvia and silt of river bottoms, in superficial deposits, in caves, and in peat-bogs ”

“ It is true, moreover, that at points distant from the great ice-fields, like the valley of the Somme and that of the Marne, we have no other means of separating glacial from interglacial times than that afforded by the deposition and erosion of the 'terraces'; in fact, the interpretation of the age of the cultures may be similar to that applied to the age of the mammalian fauna. ”

“ The close of the Glacial period, introducing great physical and climatal changes, some new species of mammalia and man himself, should be regarded as the end of the Pleistocene, and the introduction of what some French geologists have called the Anthropic period, which I have elsewhere divided into Palanthropic, corresponding to the so-called Palæolithic age, and Neanthropic, corresponding to the later stone and metal ages. ”

“ Even some portion of the palæolithic age, and of the more recent gravels and cave-earths may come into the same general period if they were formed when the glacial epoch was passing away. Now throughout all these ages we find no indication of change of species, and but little, comparatively, of migration. We thus get an erroneous idea of the permanence and stability of specific forms, due to the period immediately antecedent to our own being a period of exceptional permanence and stability as regards climatic and geographical conditions. ”

“ The 800 or 1,000 years estimate from the growth of existing vegetation is a minimum which has no bearing whatever on the actual age of these mounds, and we might almost as well attempt to determine, the time of the glacial epoch from the age of the pines or oaks which now grow on the moraines.
The important thing for us, however, is, that when North America was first settled by Europeans, the Indian tribes inhabiting it had no knowledge or tradition of any preceding race of higher civilization than themselves. Yet we find that such a race existed ”

“ According to the discoveries of Professor Wright and others, ancient stone implements have been found beneath the glacial drift, as well as the bones of animals whose descendants are now living, which goes to prove that man, with other species of fauna which now inhabit the earth, existed anterior to the glacial epoch. ”

“ Claims have been made of the discovery of evidences of man in Europe long before the glacial epoch, reaching as far back as the Pliocene and even the Miocene Age. But these claims have not been established beyond question, and the earliest generally acknowledged traces of man are confined to glacial Europe. ”

“ The post-glacial period, which will roughly estimate the age of man, it is now pretty generally agreed, "cannot be more than ten thousand years, or probably not more than seven thousand" in length. [12] In this estimate both Professor Winchell [13] and Professor Salisbury [14] agree, and to its establishment a great body of evidence derived from a variety of calculations concur. If man is of post-glacial origin, then, his advent upon earth need not be dated more than five or six thousand years ago ”

“ The terraces often contain fossils, and this may cross-date the terrace materials with cave deposits. But scientists are often faced with the problem of picking the right glacial or interglacial period on scanty evidence, and the still more difficult problem of setting the period in the terms of our years. There is room here for much disagreement. Glaciologists do not agree as to the age or the length of the various glacials and interglacials (see illustration, page 55) . Some prehistorians accept and use the dates of one glacialist; some choose another’s. ”

“ Since most of the skeletal and cultural remains of man can now be definitely attributed to certain glacial, interglacial, or postglacial stages, vast interest attaches to the very difficult problem of the duration of the whole Ice Age and the relative duration of its various glacial and interglacial stages. ”

“ Granting such figures, we can understand that the glacial must have been the dark age in the earth's history—a terrible blight upon the flourishing faunas and floras existing in tertiary times in northern latitudes. ”

“ I am willing to accept the conclusions of these observers, but while it is true the implements made by man passed through regular process of evolution from the simple form to more complicated and serviceable, yet it is undoubtedly 82true that many tribes living in the past thousand years made use of as crude implements as those of glacial times. ”

“ Some of Professor Prestwich's later views respecting the Glacial period were presented at a meeting of the Geological Society in May, 1887, when, after showing how the discoveries in the valley of the Somme and elsewhere, twenty-eight years before, had led geologists who had previously been disposed to restrict the age of man to exaggerate the period during which the human race had existed, he proceeded to discuss the views of Dr. ”

“ Gaul and Spain, Celtic invasion of, in the Neolithic age, 315.
Gazelle (gazella) , 40.
Geese, 59, 303.
Geikie, James, 115, 117; on climate of Britain, when forests now submerged were living, 255; Palæolithic river-strata are interglacial, 171.
Genera (living) in Meiocenes of Europe, 40. Geographical changes in Britein marked by glacial phenomena, see Climatal and geographical changes; and climatal changes in Pleistocene Europe, 111, 112; changes in the Meiocene age on the Continent, 61.
Geography of north-western Europe, during the Eocene age (map) , 18; in the Meiocene age (map) , 41 ”

“ For while on the one hand geologists are inclining more and more to the opinion that palæolithic man was as old as or older than the last glacial period, anthropologists on the other hand are inclining more and more to the opinion that this pre-glacial and inter-glacial man was really quite as human and quite as capable of civilization as any race now living, except perhaps a few of the most cultivated European stocks. ”

“ The Pleistocene is regarded as being equivalent to what is known as the Glacial period. It began with the deployment of the ice-sheets which, proceeding from their centers of accumulation in British America, laid down in the East the Jerseyan drift and in the West the Nebraskan. The more the Glacial period is studied the more one becomes impressed with the significance of its physical effects on the northern hemisphere and with its influence on the vertebrate life. Doubtless its effects on the world in general are only beginning to be comprehended. ”

“ Nor need we fear that there is not time enough for the rise and decay of so many successive civilizations as this view would imply; for the opinion is now gaining ground among geologists that paleolithic man was really preglacial, and that the great gap—marked alike by a change of physical conditions, and of animal life—which in Europe always separates him from his neolithic successor, was caused by the coming on and passing away of the great Ice age. ”

“ Thus if we suppose these men derived from apes by any process of gradual change, we must look for their brute ancestors, not in the Pliocene or Miocene, but in the Eocene itself. This causes us to recur to the doctrine of critical periods, when many species were introduced together, alternating with periods of decay and extinction. Post-glacial man appears at the end of a time of246 sifting and trial, a time in which a vast number of species succumbed to great physical reverses. ”

“ Glacialists may be ranged in two schools: those who believe that one or more phases of milder climatic conditions broke up the whole Glacial period into alternating epochs of glaciation and “deglaciation”; and those who believe that the intercalated deposits represent rather the localized recessional movements of the ice-sheets within one single period of glaciation. ”