THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



PALEOLITHIC MAN IN AMERICA: HIS ANTIQUITY 

 AND ENVIRONMENT. 



By W J McGEE, 



OF THE U. S. GEOLOGICAL SCBVEY. 



DURING the unlettered youtli of the race there were no writ- 

 ten records from which the antiquity of man can be read. So 

 the anthropologist on the one hand, and the geologist on the other, 

 have sought to construct an early human history from prehistoric 

 relics, and from the formations in which they are imbedded or the 

 fossils with which they are associated. Lubbock divided prehis- 

 toric time into four great epochs, viz. : 1. The Paleolithic or rough 

 stone epoch, during which primitive man flourished ; 2. The Neo- 

 lithic or polished stone epoch, during which higher development 

 was reached ; 3. The Bronze age ; and 4. The Iron age.* These 

 divisions, at first supposed to represent successive eras, are now 

 regarded as representing cultural phases rather than periods of 

 time (in fact, all are found among the present population of the 

 world), and they are accordingly valueless as measures of the 

 antiquity of man upon the globe. The geologist classifies later 

 geologic time as Cenozoic or the era of modern life, divides it into 

 Tertiary and Quaternary (or Pleistocene), and subdivides the Ter- 

 tiary into Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene. But no part of the 

 geologic record, as hitherto interpreted, is more indefinite than 

 that of the transition from Tertiary to Quaternary, or from Plio- 

 cene to Pleistocene ; and this indefiniteness is especially unfor- 

 tunate for American anthropology, since it was about this period 

 that the autochthon — the primeval inhabitant of the continent — 

 first appeared. It is, indeed, customary to recognize the geologi- 

 cally recent glacial period, during which northern United States 

 was overspread by an ice-sheet extending southward to the thirty- 

 eighth parallel, as the initial episode of the Quaternary ; but it is 

 becoming apparent that this period is too long and too vaguely 

 defined to satisfy inquirers for a date of man's origin. 



Recent researches in the Great Basin of western America, in 

 the Mississippi Valley, and in the Atlantic slope, have shown (1) 

 that the glacial period consisted of two epochs of humid climate 

 and glaciation (the later comprising two or more sub-epochs) ; 

 (2) that these cold and wet epochs were preceded, separated, and 

 followed by climatal conditions much like those of to-day; (3) 

 that the intervening a-glacial epoch was of considerable dura- 



* " Prehistoric Times," American edition, 18V5, pp. 2, 3. 



