12 Transactions of the Kansas 



NOTES ON THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 



By Dr. A H Thompson, Topeka. 



The question of the origin and the antiquity of man has been aptly named '" the 

 great question ot the nineteenth century." Its paramount importance is at once 

 aclinowledged , and as science strides forward in every other department, we 

 cannot but wonder thai this, the problem of the past of our own species, a question 

 lying so near to us, has been so long hidden from us. But it seems that the time 

 has come in these latter years, when scientific investigation and progress in this 

 department will no longer be kept in abeyance, but that it must be carried into 

 parallel and symmetric advancement with other branches of natural science. 

 The promise ot this is given in the unexampled activity of investigation and the 

 progress made in discoveries within the last score of years, and the prospect of 

 still more rapid advancement m the near tuture. 



Our knowledge of the antiquity of man upon the earth has been advanced 

 slowly on account of the difliculties and stupendous obstacles against which it 

 was compelled to labor. The greatest of these, and that which more than all else 

 has retarded its development, has been the tliralldom of Bishop Usher's chronol- 

 ogy. For centuries every discovery tending to the elucidation of the question, was 

 made to fit this procru.«tean bed, and from this slavery the science has but barely 

 escaped. Many things have contributed to the overturning of old ideas, and the 

 unprejudiced reception of the new. Among the latter the most prominent are the 

 great discoveries of human remains in the formations of preceding geological 

 epochs, until in our day the question of the antiquity of man has become an 

 almost purely geological problem. We have advanced so much in this knowledge 

 that the oldest historic remains become but as the tale of yesterday in the compara- 

 tive age of our species. We go back thousands of years, as m Assyria and Egypt, 

 and find a developed civilization and the capability of making written records; and 

 then beyond that we must see other thousands of years during which that civiliza- 

 tion was developed. Buried cities are frequently discovered of whose origin or 

 history we have no suspicion ; yet the relics of human creation there found often 

 indicate a high cultivation and advancement in the arts of civilized life. These 

 too, we know, point to a long period of time during which these forgotten 

 empires were developed, flourished and decayed. But we know further that all 

 the remains of the oldest civilizations have had their origin during the cuirent 

 geological epoch, and that this epoch alone is older by a hundred fold than the 

 most ancient civilized remains extant. We pass beyond the historic period and the 

 unknown buried cities into the period of the remains of man as a savage, so-called, 

 the primitive age. We pass first the iron, then the bronze period, then into the 

 stone age. In this age we pass through the neolithic into the paleolithic period — 

 the oldest and longest of all. In the stone age we find the beginning of our own 

 geological epocb, and that this period laps over into the quaternary — the pleistocene. 

 In the caves and drifts of the quaternary we find man the contemporary and 

 hunter of the reindeer, the cave bear and the mammoth, and the numerous 

 other animals of the arctic, temperate and sub-tropical fauna, so-called, there 

 found. But we pursue him still further and find the indications of his being m 

 the pliocene, and the probability of finding him in the miocene. We find indeed 

 that not (inly early post-glacial but luter-glacial man is a fact scarcely to be ques- 



