PRIMEVAL MAN 245 



dwellers who furnished the first (and perhaps 

 until the advent of the white man the only im- 

 portant) immigration to America. These im- 

 migrants, the ancestors of all the tribes of In- 

 dians, spread from Alaska to Terra del Fuego. 

 Over most of the territory in both Americas 

 they remained at the hunting stage of savage 

 life, although they generally supplemented their 

 hunting by a certain amount of cultivation of 

 the soil, and although in places they developed 

 into advanced and very pecuhar culture com- 

 munities. 



When these savages reached North America 

 it is likely, from our present knowledge, that 

 the terrible and magnificent Pleistocene fauna 

 had vanished, although in places the last sur- 

 vivors of the mastodon, and perhaps of one or 

 two other forms, may still have fingered. What 

 were the causes of this wide-spread, and com- 

 plete, and — geologically speaking — sudden ex- 

 termination of so many and so varied types of 

 great herbivorous creatures, we cannot say. It 

 may be we can never do more than guess at 

 them. It is certainly an extraordinary thing 

 that complete destruction should have suddenly 

 fallen on all, literally aU, of the species. Camels 

 and horses, after they had dwelt on this conti- 

 nent for miUions of years, since ahnost the dawn 



