Age of Oldest extraordinarily wide diffusion of the early race can only be explained on the supposition that it occupied the habitable land of all the great continents for a very long period ; and hence we are obliged to place the first appearance of man at a point of time far, very far, beyond the furthest limit of history or tradition. Geol ogists have not hesitated to make calculations as to when this point was. Supposing it to have been at or about the Glacial period—which for many reasons is probable—the inquiry has been put, Did this unparalleled cli matic event in the history of the world leave behind it the conditions for certain progressive changes which have been going on ever since, and which we may take as chronometers of geologic time ? Several such might be named, the most conclusive of them being the gradual erosion of river-valleys ; as, for instance, the action of Niagara Falls in slowly cutting its deep channel westward from Lake Ontario. This we know must have entirely taken place since the close of the Glacial period, for the chain of Great Lakes themselves is one of the effects of glacial action. There are a number of other examples of the same kind in the two hemispheres which offer the data for such calculations. The conclu sions reached by different students of the matter have, however, been discrepant. Some place the close of the Glacial age in North America as recent as thirty-five thousand years ago, while an eminent French geologist calculates that in Western Europe its final recession cannot be less than two hundred and forty thousand years from us. To explain the problems of Ethnology we should be better accommodated with a period of the latter length than of the former. Even that would be but a very small fraction of the duration necessary to explain the transformations of the earth's crust with which Geology deals.
First Habitat of these facts in mind, we are better pre pared to approach the question as to the first habitat of man, and whether he had more than one. His traces are found in remotest ages on the areas of all four continents, but not on the oceanic islands. Many of these were not peopled at all even within the historic period, as the Azores and Cape Verde, Iceland, the Bennudas, and many in the Pacific. All the great island-world of the latter received its population within a few thousand rears, as language and tradition prove. Australia is in the same case, and, moreover, its fauna is in development very much in arrears—more akin to that of the Tertiary epoch than that of any other area. This is
also an objection to supposing that any part of the American continent could have been the birthplace of the race. Its highest mammals, living or fossil, are far behind those of the Old World. For instance, it has never possessed a single monkey with the same number of teeth as man, not one that is without a tail, not one that is classed by naturalists with the anthropoids, or man-like apes. Moreover, the earliest relics of man's industry found in America, though not far from the same Geologic age, are certainly a shade higher and indicate a slightly more developed culture than the oldest from European strata.
At the period we speak of, just anterior to the Glacial epoch, North ern Europe, Northern Asia, and Northern Africa (that portion of it now included in the Sahara Desert) were covered with water. The Persian Gulf, the Caspian and Black Seas, were parts of a broach arm of the sea which connected. the Indian Ocean with what is now the Baltic and the North Sea. A continental area connected what are now the territories of the British Isles, France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Morocco into one region. Its climate was warm and moist ; its fauna and flora were tropical in character ; and among the former man-like apes of large size, taller and stronger than any now in existence, found a congenial home. Their fossil remains have been exhumed of late years near Madrid, in the valleys of the Pyrenees and elsewhere in France, in Tuscany and other localities in the Italian Peninsula. Within this same region have been discovered those fragments of the human skel eton which geologists pronounce the most ancient yet brought to light, and anatomists consider the most primitive in character. It seems there fore probable that man originated somewhere on that former European continent, which, it will be observed, differed very widely from modern Europe in size, outline, and climatic conditions.
As no such connected series of facts has yet been discovered to show a similar development in Eastern Asia or Central Africa, we have no reason to suppose that there was a separate centre of origin in either of those localities. With the light which science at present sheds upon the subject we must conclude that man had but one original abode, and that was in some part of Western ancient Europe (comp. p. 240).