ROCKY MOUNTAIN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 2/ 
The ancient human remains that have been found 
in America and Europe render it almost certain that 
although man may not have been contemporary with 
the first animals in existence, he was at least a co-pos- 
sessor of the world with many now extinct, such as 
the cave bear, the mammoth, and many others the re- 
mains of which are found associated often with imple- 
ments and deeply buried in gravel-beds and alluvial 
deposits of unquestionable antiquity.* 
The question of the region of the earth where man 
first appeared has incidentally been alluded to. The 
testimony of history upon this point is almost uni- 
formly in favor of the biblical account which locates 
it in Asia. Some ancient nations occasionally spoke 
of themselves or were regarded by others as sprung 
from the soil on which they lived — the Athenians, for 
example, sometimes denominating themselves ^*Au- 
tochthenes" or Earth-born," and the primeval inhab- 
itants of Italy being by the Romans and Etrurians de- 
nominated as ''Aborigines;" yet it is an undoubted fact 
that the traditions of all nations point to the great 
tableland of Central Asia as the cradle of the human 
race. By some investigators the original seat of the 
human family is located in Armenia, on the western 
border of this table-land; by others in Pameer, Bamian, 
^ See Lyell, Lubbock, Baldwin, and Foster. The latter, in his work 
entitled Prehistoric Races of the United States," p. 79, gives a scale 
of geological periods and the oldest human remains and implants found 
up to 1873. The flint-flakes found in the Gravel-beds of Colorado and 
Wyoming Territories, which belong to the Miocene period, are as 
early as any in Europe. A human skull was discovered in Calaveras 
County, California, imbedded in strata belonging to the Pliocene 
period, and also many articles belonging to the Stone age. 
