HOLMES DISTRIBUTION OF THE HUMAN RACE. I I 



In a general view, it is manifest that for tlie origin of the 

 human family we must go back nearly (if not quite) to the begin- 

 ning of the Miocene period. M. Topinard places the marls and 

 spear-heads of Thenay in the Lower Miocene ; and he considers 

 the existence of Man in this stage of the Miocene formations to be 

 a "clearly revealed scientific fact." The condition of things in the 

 Eocene, or Cretaceous, period was not such as to render it proba- 

 ble that any form or type of creature that could be called human 

 then existed. But in the Miocene the geographical configura- 

 tions of land and sea, the character of the fauna and flora and 

 other physical conditions, and the large developement of the Ape 

 family into species (some of which in size exceeded the human 

 stature), may render it highly probable (if not quite certain) that 

 the complete transition to the human form had then taken place. 

 The Miocene Dryopithecus is found to exhibit, not only anthro- 

 poid characters, but a dentition intermediate between that of man 

 and the apes. It is somewhere in this period that Dr. Darwin* 

 has placed his synthetic type of the earliest progenitors, partly 

 human and partly ape-like in form, from whom have descended 

 in branching lineal descent the human streams, running parallel 

 with other contemporaneous lines of descent w^hich have deviated 

 in other directions, or which have, in later times, either become 

 wholly extinct, or only reached as yet such forms as those of the 

 Orang and Gorilla. And, in a purely zoological point of view, 

 he finds no reason to doubt that the very first deviations, leading 

 to the Catarhine Apes in one direction and to human forms in 

 another, began as far back as the Eocene. It is very certain that, 

 in the course of these vast periods of geological time, innumera- 

 ble tribes, peoples, and varieties or races, have become extinct. 

 Some peoples are known to have become extinct within the his- 

 torical period, and others are fast disappearing. Indeed, these 

 Palaiolithic men of the flint implements must be regarded as an 

 extinct people, if 'not an extinct race. The ancient Mound- 

 builders of the Mississippi valley and the stone-builders of Central 

 America may be said to be extinct, though they were doubtless 

 branches of the whole American stem, which still survives in the 

 existing peoples of the red race. 



That man existed on the western coasts of North America, in 



* The Descent of Man. New York, 187!. 



