PREHISTORIC ARCHEOLOGY OF THE EASTERN HEMISPHERE Although very early traces of man's industry have been discov ered at distant points throughout the Eastern Hemisphere—as, for instance, near the Cape of Good Hope and in Egypt in Africa, in Southern India and in Japan in Asia, and in Europe in very many locali ties—there is so much more material of a trustworthy character in the last named continent that we shall confine ourselves principally to a discussion of the relics of art there found.
To understand the light which these relics throw on the history of primitive man, we must attend to the changes which have taken place in the climatic conditions and the fauna of Europe since it first became the abode of man.
Changes in the Climate of Europe.—Even within historic times the climate of Europe has undergone material changes. Prom many expres sions in the classical writers of Greece and Rome it is evident that the temperature of the continent was then generally lower, the annual rainfall was greater, and destructive storms were more frequent. The amelioration which has taken place in the last two thousand years is doubtless owing in a great measure to the removal of the forests and to the cultivation and drainage of the soil. But probably there are also profounder causes at work. This growing mildness of the climate is a phenomenon which has been gradually progressing for many thousand years, from a period when vast lavers of ice from three to six thousand feet in thickness covered the land from the extreme north as far south as the Alps, and on the coast almost to the Irish Sea. To be sure, this does not demand a climate of arctic rigor, as at first we might suppose. Observation of existing gla ciers proves that they do not form so rapidly in a climate of extreme and continuous cold as under conditions of abundant moisture when the tem perature ranges but little above or below the freezing-point. They are produced by heavy snowfalls imperfectly melted by the action of a degree of heat little above freezing. It has been argued very plausibly, there fore, that even at the period to which we refer those parts of the continent not actually covered by the ice-fields might have enjoyed a climate cold and damp indeed, but much more productive and genial than that which obtains to-day in Iceland or Greenland. This explains satisfactorily the fact that we find abundant evidence that a rather highly a and numerous population maintained themselves in Southern and gifted Europe at that distant day.
The Ice Age had been preceded by one which may be located in time at the beginning of the Quaternary or Pleistocene Period, when the cli mate was decidedly milder than it is at present. The indications are that
it was not actually tropical, but moderately warm and moist throughout the whole year—so much so that various animals and plants which now scarcely exist in their native state outside the tropics lived in considerable numbers within the area of what is now France and England.
The Fauna Ancient man has striven successfully with these climatic changes, and has even constantly gained ground in spite of them, such has not been the case with very many other animals apparently better equipped than he to struggle with the harsher aspects of nature. The appearance and disappearance of these lower animals serve to mark the epochs of geologic time, and with this the eras in the unwritten history of the primeval human race; hence their study is one of peculiar interest to the archeologist. Beginning with the oldest deposits of the Quaternary, we shall name and describe some of the most characteristic of these ancient European animals.
Fanna of the Latest and Oldest the uncle fined epoch when the Tertiary merged into the Quaternary there lived in South-western Europe certain animals whose rare remains have attracted the most earnest attention of antiquaries. They were large species of apes, and have received the names 13/y0,6i/hems, or "tree-ape," and Anthropopitheens, or " man-ape." The hones of these creatures have been exhumed from the late tertiary deposits in Spain, in France, in the val leys of the Pyrenees, and in Northern Italy. Some writers maintain that some of these species were intelligent enough to build fires and to flake stones by burning them, thus securing a sharp-edged tool or weapon which they employed in some simple arts. These writers, indeed, straightly claim that this was the zoological precursor, the lineal ancestor, of man, and that therefore we need not seek any other locality for his first advent on the globe than this south-western part of the European con tinent as it existed at that ancient date. Of this opinion it may be said that the finds have been too few, and their character too uncertain, to justify its acceptance as a scientific statement; and yet there is so much of a col lateral character to give it probability that we may consider it as plausible an hypothesis as has yet been offered to explain the descent and assign the earliest habitat of the human species.