288 PRIMATES order x 



Downs, Queensland, under circumstances which suggest that it dates back to 

 the period when the giant marsupials, Diprotodon, etc., still lived there. It is 

 typically Australoid, but seems to have had the upper and lower canine teeth 

 slightly interlocking.^ 



Pleistocene Man has not been identified with certainty in North America, 

 but there still can be no doubt that Man was associated there with extinct 

 animals. Unquestionable stone implements have been found in Missouri with 

 a Mastodon skeleton, in Kansas with remains of extinct species of Bison, and at 

 Natchez, Mississippi, lay a human bone near those of Megalonyx, Mylodon and 

 Mastodon. Cope held to the belief that the human relics from North 

 American caves belong altogether to the Recent period, and it is extremely 

 probable that this Man was an immigrant from Asia in company with the 

 Mammoth, and consequently that his arrival in North America happened at 

 a much later time than his first appearance in Europe. 



No reliance can be placed on the discoveries in South America. Here 

 also Man was associated with extinct animals, as Lund has observed in the 

 bone caves of Brazil. In the Pampas formation there also occur the marrow- 

 bones and mandibles of deer, Glyptodon, Mastodon and Toxodon, with stone 

 implements and the skull and entire skeleton of Man. The bones and jaws 

 of animals are found broken open and burnt, sometimes also having been 

 fashioned into useful articles. The fresh state of preservation of the Pampas 

 animals, however, renders a relatively great antiquity for these relics ex- 

 tremely improbable, and they may be compared with animal remains from the 

 European neolithic only. In the Eberhardt Cave, on the Gulf of Ultima 

 Esperanza, the extinct Gri/potherium was apparently kept by Man in a kind 

 of captivity, its skin, hair and excrement still remaining undecomposed. 

 These circumstances permit no doubt to be entertained that the animal in 

 question was contemporaneous with Man, the time of its existence at most 

 probably dating back a few thousand years, and thus coinciding with the 

 historical period of the Old World. 



The probability that Man existed in the latest Tertiary — from the Upper 

 Pliocene on — may be considered, for in this period there appear most of the 

 mammalian genera now existing, yet at present discoveries of human relics 

 in undoubted Tertiary deposits are wholly lacking. The flint chips from 

 the freshwater limestone of the Miocene of Thenay, near Pont-Levoy, Loir- 

 et-Cher, and from the Tertiary of Portugal may as little be ascribed to human 

 industry as the flint chips with which the floor of the Libyan Desert is some- 

 times strewn for miles around. Equally incredible is the notion that the 

 flint chips found by Notling in the Pliocene of Burma were split off" by Man. 

 In Australia, whither Schotensack had sought to transfer the home of Man, 

 supposed human footprints have been discovered in sandstone thought to be 

 of Tertiary age in Victoria, but the exact horizon of this deposit is doubtful. 

 It is still most probable that the genus Homo did not originate in Europe, but 

 in Asia. 



For the classification and terminology of the Pleistocene and Prehistoric 

 periods, Piette - has published the following tabular scheme ; other important 

 items, however, have also been inserted here : 



1 Smith, S. A., Fossil Human Skull from Talgai, Queensland. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc, ser. B., 

 vol. 208, 1918, p. 351. 



- Centralblatt fiir Anthropologie, 1901, p. 65. 



