Human fossil

“ When I assert that human bones have never been found among fossil organic remains, (I must [115] be understood to speak of fossils or petrifactions, properly so called) , or, in other words, in the regular strata of the surface of the globe; for in peat-bogs (tourbières) , and alluvial deposits, as in burying-grounds, human bones might as well be found as bones of horses, or other common species. ”

“ Perhaps the best way to appreciate this will be to suppose that man has become extinct, and that in some future geological period his fossil remains are studied by some new race of intelligent beings, and compared with those of the lower animals his contemporaries. Let us suppose that they have disinterred a human skull or the bones of a human foot. From the foot they would learn that man is not an arboreal animal, but intended to walk erect on the ground. ”

“ Fossil Human Skeletons.—About forty years ago, great interest was excited by the unexpected discovery of several human skeletons, male and female, in hard limestone, on the north-east coast of the Isle of Guadaloupe; and a specimen found on board a French vessel, captured by one of our cruizers, and presented to the British Museum, afforded English naturalists an opportunity of investigating the nature and age of this first known example of the bones of Man in a fossil state. ”

“ Nor were all of the geologists quite agreed that the contemporaneity of these human fossils with the animals whose remains had been mingled with them had been fully established. The bare possibility that the bones of man and of animals that long preceded him had been swept together into the eaves in successive ages, and in some mysterious way intermingled there, was clung to by the conservatives as a last refuge. ”

“ From such remarkable claimants we turn to consider fossil bones of undoubted human nature. Of such examples some have been regarded as differing from all other human types to such an extent as to justify their segregation in a distinct species or even genus. ”

“ Since 1848, numerous fossil remains of man have been found, first, at Gibraltar, and later in Germany, Belgium, France, England, the Caucasus, Africa, and North and South America. These bones, which range from fragments of skulls, jaws and teeth to entire skeletons, represent various stages of human development from ape-like creatures to modern man. ”

“ The older the rock, the simpler the plant and animal life it contains. Thus fossils can give a clue to the age of the rock strata.
Fossils can teach history. They tell us about plants and animals that are now extinct—the dinosaur, for example. They can also tell of ancient climates. Coral found in rocks in Greenland suggests it must have once been warm. Remains of fir and spruce trees have been found in the tropics.
How are fossils formed? Teeth, bone and wood don't last long in their original state. However, buried materials decompose, leaving a film of carbon as a fossil. ”

“ The next question is, how the facts of palæontology agree with these most important results of comparative anatomy and ontogeny. The fossils are the true historical 'medals of creation,' the palpable evidence of the historical succession of all those innumerable organic forms which have peopled the globe for many millions of years. Here the question arises, If the known fossil specimens of Mammalia, and particularly of Primates, give proof of these Pithecometra-theses, do they confirm directly the descent of man from ape-like creatures? ”

“ Surrounding these fossils were objects that would mean nothing to the ignorant, but to the eye of science they were a revelation. They laid bare the secrets of dead ages. These musty Memorials told us when Man lived, and what were his habits. For here, side by side with Man, were the evidences that he had lived in the earliest ages of creation, the companion of the other low orders of life that belonged to that forgotten time. Here was the fossil nautilus that sailed the primeval seas; here was the skeleton of the mastodon, the ichthyosaurus, the cave-bear, the prodigious elk. ”

“ Let this be as it may, I wish one of you children might become a novelist, but you never will, you will be farmers just like all us New England mountaineers.
"Learned men have discovered, by digging in the rocky surface of the earth, that under certain conditions, oysters or other animals, will turn to stone. They call [71] them fossils. Scientists have also learned that each kind, wherever found, represents the age in which the animal lived. So, the fossil, you see, is an animal which died and turned to stone, perhaps millions of years ago. ”

“ Their lithological characteristics and the total absence of all organic remains point to the Archaean period. The failure to discover signs of life in them is, of course, merely negative evidence, and the finding of a single fossil would at once upset it. ”

“ It is true that by the aid of geology many buried skeletons of the past may be brought to the surface and examined, and thus light may be thrown on the various classes to which [105] the skeletons in the time of the living animal belonged. Fossil remains certainly help us to a very great extent in trying to study the evolutionary past of our globe ”

“ For one which is accidentally buried so as to resist the destructive forces of air and water, millions are resolved into their primitive elements, and are annihilated as structural forms. And yet, because in portions of the vast deposits of rock the remains of certain ancient forms are discovered, it is asked that the Darwinians should furnish a perfect progressive sequence of fossils to elucidate the theory, and prove it beyond dispute. Recent discoveries have brought to light human remains in caves, where they are associated with bones of extinct animals. ”

“ But hardly more than two centuries have elapsed since this fundamental problem was first exhaustively treated; it was only in the last century that the archaeological value of fossils—their importance, I mean, as records of the history of the earth—was fully recognised; the first adequate investigation of the fossil remains of any large group of vertebrated animals is to be found in Cuvier's "Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles," completed in 1822 ”

“ Every one practically acquainted with paleontology is aware that it is not every tooth nor every bone which enables us to form a judgment of the character of the animal to which it belonged, and that it is possible to possess many teeth, and even a large portion of the skeleton of an extinct animal, and yet be unable to reconstruct its skull or its limbs. It is only when the tooth or bone presents peculiarities which Ave know by previous experience to be characteristic of a certain group that we can safely predict that the fossil belonged to an animal of the same group. ”

“ The evidence is clear that untold generations of living forms, now preserved as fossils, inhabited the earth, disported themselves, and passed away long before the advent of man. The knowledge of this fossil life, on account of its great diversity, is an essential part of biology, and all the more so from the circumstance that many forms of life, remains of which are exhibited in the rocks, have long since become extinct. No history of biology would be complete without an account of the rise and progress of that department of biology which deals with fossil life. ”

“ It would be a great error to suppose that these organic remains were fragmentary relics. Our museums exhibit fossil shells of immeasurable antiquity, as perfect as the day they were formed, whole skeletons without a limb disturbed—nay, the changed flesh, the developing embryos, and even the very footsteps of primeval organisms. Thus the naturalist finds in the bowels of the earth species as well defined as, and in some groups of animals more numerous than, those that breathe the upper air. ”

“ Believing that all mineral fossils were never living animals at all, but the types simply of animals that were to be, stamped instantaneously upon the rocks as prophetic symbols of a work of creation to be afterward accomplished, he is prepared to hear without surprise that man should some day be found as a fossil. ”

“ It has been determined by collecting and systematically studying the remains of this ancient life that they bear testimony to a long, unbroken history in which the forms of both animals and plants have been greatly altered. The more ancient remains are simple in structure, and form with the later ones, a series that exhibits a gradually increasing complexity of structure. The study of the fossil series has brought about a very great extension of our knowledge regarding the age of the world and of the conditions under which life was evolved. ”

“ By Othniel Charles Marsh, Professor of Paleontology in Yale College, New Haven, Conn.
Fossil anatomy is generally regarded as one of the driest of subjects; but, when the vestiges of old bones become the keys to the history of the world and the mysteries of the universe, their study acquires an intense interest. ”

“ The truth of this wonderful story of evolution, of the progressive improvement of living forms with the advance of time, is proved by several lines of evidence. One of these lines of evidence is found in the fossil remains of the life of earlier times. Fossils are relics of forms that lived in the long ago. Dying, they were buried in sediment by the hand of time, and to-day they are found in rock formations, where they have been preserved from the destructive power of the ages. ”

“ In looking over the records of paleontology, its history may conveniently be divided into four periods, well marked by prominent features, but, like all stages of intellectual growth, without definite boundaries.
The first period, dating back to the time when men first noticed fossil remains in the rocks, and queried as to their nature, is of special historic interest. ”

“ Yet countless millions of creatures are annually dying, ready and willing to become fossils. Fossils, however, they do not become, simply because other creatures eat them up. For this reason alone, not one in ten thousand of any particular terrestrial species is likely to become fossil, because to some creature or another it is almost sure to be good eating, and therefore in the living state or the dead, sure to be ravenously seized upon and devoured.
Some forms of marine life are indeed represented by a wonderful number of specimens or fragments of specimens. ”

“ Besides, were we to consider it in this view, the recent and fossil remains would be found to throw a mutual light upon each other, and the naturalist would not be so often at a loss to class every new fossil acquisition, of which the recent specimen is not to be found, especially whenever the fossil has any thing seemingly æquivocal in its formation, so as on a superficial imspection to render the matter doubtful, whether the body belongs to the animal or vegetable kingdoms, or indeed to either of them. ”

“ But the first steps taken in the immemorable ages, the others followed in quick succession, so that the earliest fossil remains which we find in rocks formed on the sea-bottom, a hundred million or more years ago, show that the earth was richly peopled with a lowly life. ”

“ The most prominent characteristic of this period was, a long and bitter contest as to the nature of fossil remains. Were they mere "sports of Nature," or had they once been endowed with life? Simple as this problem now seems, centuries passed before the wise men of that time were agreed upon its solution.
Sea-shells in the solid rock on the tops of mountains early attracted the attention of the ancients, and the learned men among them seem to have appreciated in some instances their true character, and given rational explanations of their presence. ”

“ Witness also the preservation, in the rocks, of the fossil remains of extinct creatures, as if he who made them was unwilling that the evidence of their existence should perish, and purposely treasured them through all the revolutions of the earth, that through them men might magnify his name. ”

“ FOSSILISATION.—The term "fossilisation" is applied to all those processes through which the remains of organised beings may pass in being converted into fossils. These processes are numerous and varied; but there are three principal modes of fossilisation which alone need be considered here. In the first instance, the fossil is to all intents and purposes an actual portion of the original organised being—such as a bone, a shell, or a piece of wood. ”

“ His studies led him to infer that the fossils contained in the oldest rocks are very different from any of the species of the present time; that the newer the formation, the more do the remains approach in form to the organic beings of the present creation, and that in the very latest formations, fossil remains of species now existing occur. ”

“ As we cannot now look upon the primitive world as representing a wholly different condition of things, from which no transition exists to the organic life of the present time, the designation of fossil, as applied to a bone, has no longer the sense it conveyed in the time of Cuvier. ”

“ This fact, as our collection of fossils proves, should lead us to suppose that the fossil remains of the animals whose living analogues we know are the less ancient fossils. The species to which each of them belongs had doubtless not yet time to vary in any of its forms.
“We should, then, never expect to find among the living species the totality of those that we meet with in the fossil state, and yet we cannot conclude that any species can really be lost or extinct. ”

“ I strongly imagine that if it were not for the peculiar appearance that fossilised animals have, any of you might readily walk through a museum which contains fossil remains mixed up with those of the present forms of life, and I doubt very much whether your uninstructed eyes would lead you to see any vast or wonderful difference between the two. ”