THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN PALEONTOLOGY 



that long preceded him had been swept together into 

 the caves in successive ages, and in some mysterious 

 way intermingled there, was clung to by the conserva- 

 tives as a last refuge. But even this small measure of 

 security was soon to be denied them, for in 1865 two as- 

 sociated workers, M. Edouarcl Lartet and Mr. Henry 

 Christy, in exploring the caves of Dordogne, unearthed 

 a bit of evidence against which no such objection could 

 be urged. This momentous exhibit was a bit of ivory, 

 a fragment of the tusk of a mammoth, on which was 

 scratched a rude but unmistakable outline portrait of 

 the mammoth itself. If all the evidence as to man's 

 antiquity before presented was suggestive merely, here 

 at last was demonstration ; for the cave-dwelling man 

 could not well have drawn the picture of the mammoth 

 unless he had seen that animal, and to admit that man 

 and the mammoth had been contemporaries was to con- 

 cede the entire case. So soon, therefore, as the full im- 

 port of this most instructive work of art came to be 

 realized, scepticism as to man's antiquity was silenced 

 for all time to come. 



In the generation that has elapsed since the first draw- 

 ing of the cave-dweller artist was discovered, evidences 

 of the wide-spread existence of man in an early epoch 

 have multiplied indefinitely, and to-day the paleontolo- 

 gist traces the history of our race back beyond the iron 

 and bronze ages, through a neolithic or polished-stone 

 age, to a paleolithic or rough-stone age, with confidence 

 born of unequivocal knowledge. And he looks confi- 

 dently to the future explorer of the earth's fossil records 

 to extend the history back into vastly more remote 

 epochs, for it is little doubted that paleolithic man, the 

 most ancient of our recognized progenitors, is a modern 

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