AN OUTLINE DEVELOPMENT OF HIGHWAY 

 TRAVEL, ESPECIALLY IN AMERICA 



By Carl W. Mitman 



Head Curator, Department of A7-ts and Industries, United States National 



Museum 



[With 12 plates] 



For the past several hundred years Mother Earth has been the 

 subject of a great amount of scientific study. The geologists have 

 determined, for one thing, that long ago she experienced several 

 periods of intensely cold weather and that great portions of her 

 surface were covered with enormous thicknesses of snow and ice. 

 The last of these cold periods, or Ice Ages, reached its peak in 

 Europe and Asia about 40,000 years ago; then the weather began 

 to moderate by infinitesimal degrees, and by about the year 8000 

 B. C, after 30,000 years of slow melting, the ice disappeared except 

 around the North and South Poles. Again, the biologists and an- 

 thropologists have found that a number of breeds of animals, as 

 well as man, whose life began hundreds of thousands of years before 

 the Ice Ages, were hardy enough to survive the intense cold, and 

 that in spite of the great hardships he had to endure, man developed 

 physically and mentally and was a far superior being after the Ice 

 Ages than before. 



Some idea of the appearance of the people living during and fol- 

 lowing the last Ice Age may be had from the family group pic- 

 tured in plate 1. It is hard to believe that such brutish-looking 

 individuals possessed any mentality whatever, and yet they were 

 the most intelligent creatures inhabiting the earth at that time, 

 some 20,000 to 40,000 years ago. They cooked their meat ; they knew 

 how to tie things together with strands of grass and other natural 

 fibers; and they possessed stone tools of their own manufacture, 

 including hammers, axes, Iniives, saws, and drills. Mother Nature, 

 too, gave them great physical strength, and with the help of a 

 stone-headed bludgeon the men were able to protect themselves and 



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