THE ARRIVAL OF MAN IN EUROPE. 9 



THE ARRIVAL OF MAN IN EUROPE. 



BY JOHN FISKE. 



Toward the close of the Pleistocene age, the general outlines of the Euro- 

 pean continent had assumed very much their present appearance everywhere 

 except in the northwest. The British Islands still remained joined to one an- 

 other and to the Gaulish mainland, and occupied the greater part of the area of 

 the German Ocean. According to Mn James Geikie, the connection with Nor- 

 way again became complete, and the Atlantic ridge was again so far elevated as 

 to bring Scotland into connection with Greenland through the Faroe Islands and 

 Iceland. The whole of Britain stood at an average elevation of from 600 to 1000 

 feet above its present level. The Thames, Humber, Tyne, and Forth, must all 

 have flowed into the Rhine, which emptied itself into the North Sea beyond the 

 latitude of the Shetlands. The glaciers of Europe had retreated within the Arctic 

 Circle, or up to the higher valleys of the great mountain ranges; and the climate 

 was beginning to assume its present temperate and equable character. 



At this remote epoch Europe had already been inhabited by human beings 

 during several thousand years. How long before the beginning of the Pleisto- 

 cene period man had arrived in Europe is still open to questi' n; but there is no 

 doubt whatever that he lived in Gaul and Britain as a contemporary of the big- 

 nosed rhinocerous, and before the arrival of the Arctic mammalia which were 

 driven from the north as the glacial cold set in. This race of man — described 

 by Mr. Boyd Dawkins as the " River-Drift-Man" — is probably now as extinct as 

 the cave-bear or the mammoth. Late in the Pleistocene period it disappeared 

 from Europe, and was replgiced by a new race, coming from the northeast, along 

 with the musk-sheep and reindeer, and called by the same eminent writer the 

 *' Cave-Man." Both the Cave-Men and the Red-Drift men were in the stage of 

 culture known as the Palseolithic, or Old Stone Age; that is, they used only stone 

 implements, and these implements were never polished or ground to a fine edge, 

 but were only roughly chipped into shape, and were very rude and irregular in 

 contour. The Palaeolithic Age, referring as the phrase does to a stage of cul- 

 ture, and not to any chronological period, is something which has come and 

 gone at very different dates in different parts of the world. It may be conven- 

 ient to remember that in northwestern Europe it seems to have very nearly coin 

 cided with the Pleistocene period, provided we also bear in mind that the coin- 

 cidence is purely fortuitous. 



The implements of the River-drift men, found in Pleistocene river-beds, are 

 very rude, and imply a social condition at least as low as that of the Australian 

 savages of the present day. "They consist," says Mr. Dawkins, "of the flake; 

 the chopper or pebble roughly chipped to an edge on one side; the hdche or oval- 

 pointed implement, intended for use without a handle ; an oval or rounded form 



