H.—ANTHROPOLOGY 141 
been obtained. There can be no doubt that during the latter part of the 
Pleistocene period, when extensive northern ice still reduced the normal 
temperature of more southern latitudes, man who made stone implements 
by the technique which is still practised by the modern North American 
Indians, was very widely distributed over the continent. 
It is generally supposed that a few of the typically Pleistocene mammals 
survived in North America to a later geological date than any in Europe. 
The remains of the Ohio mastodon, for example, occur in post-Pleistocene 
swamp deposits ; and dried mummies of the little ground sloth Nothro- 
therium have been found in southern caves with coprolites, which show 
that it fed on the same vegetation as that which still exists in the neigh- 
bourhood. It seems, therefore, very difficult to determine the geological 
age of the earliest man in North America as compared with the successive 
late phases of stone-age man in the Old World. The only hope centres 
in satisfactory discoveries of human remains and implements in the 
deposits on the fluctuating edge of the northern ice sheet. 
SoutH AMERICA. 
Some of the typically Pleistocene mammals in the southern part of 
South America also appear to have survived until comparatively recent 
times. Man was almost certainly associated with them, but nothing is 
known to distinguish this race from modern South American Indians. 
The supposed ancestors of the human family reported by Florentino 
Ameghino from the Tertiary rocks of Argentina, are due to erroneous 
interpretation of the fossils, as already pointed out by Hrdlitka and others. 
The first fossilised remains of man in the South American continent 
were discovered exactly a hundred years ago in the caves of Minas Geraes, 
Brazil, by the Danish naturalist, Dr. Peter Wilhelm Lund, whose centenary 
has just been celebrated by the scientific men of Brazil in Lagoa Santa and 
Bello Horizonte. Under the direction of Prof. Anibal Mattos, three 
volumes have been published in Bello Horizonte, giving an account of 
Lund’s researches, with a Portuguese translation of his scientific papers. 
At first Lund hesitated to conclude that the human skeletons which he 
found in the caves were as old as the bones of extinct mammals with which 
they were associated: he thought they might be burials or otherwise 
accidentally introduced into the old deposits. In the end, however, after 
much experience of many diggings, he became convinced that, although 
the fossil skeletons were very like those of the existing Botocudos, they 
must have belonged to man who was contemporary with the mammals 
which afterwards became extinct. 
Some years ago the late Dr. Francisco P. Moreno, Dr. Rudolph Hauthal 
and I, described the discovery of the dried skin and other remains of an 
extinct ground sloth (Neomylodon or Grypotherium), with fragments of 
other extinct mammals, in a cave in Last Hope Inlet, Patagonia. Here 
again, the presence of fires, cut and worked bone, and masses of hay cut 
for food for the ground sloth, led us to infer that man lived in Patagonia 
with the various Pleistocene mammals which are now extinct. 
