GEOGRAPHICAL IMPORTANCE OF ANIMALS. 77 
deposited in juxtaposition witli fossil bones, and evidently at 
the same time and by the same agency which buried these 
latter—not to speak of alleged human bones found in the same 
strata—proves that the animals whose former existence they 
testify were contemporaneous with man, and possibly even 
extirpated by him.* I do not propose to enter upon the 
thorny question, whether the existing races of man are genea¬ 
logically connected with these ancient types of humanity, and 
I advert to these facts only for the sake of the suggestion, that 
man, in his earliest known stages of existence, was probably 
a destructive power upon the earth, though perhaps not so 
emphatically as his present representatives. 
The larger wild animals are not now numerous enough in 
any one region to form extensive deposits by their remains; 
but they have, nevertheless, a certain geographical importance. 
at Pera, by the naked eye alone, shows the observer that it consists almost 
exclusively of the comminuted bones of his fellow man. 
* It is asserted that the bones of mammoths and mastodons, in many 
instances, appear to havo been grazed or cut by flint arrow-heads or other 
stone weapons. These accounts have often been discredited, because it 
has been assumed that the extinction of these animals was more ancient 
than the existence of man. Recent discoveries render it highly probable, 
if not certain, that this conclusion has been too hastily adopted. Lyell 
observes : “ These stories * * must in future be more carefully inquired 
into, for we can scarcely doubt that the mastodon in North America lived 
down to a period when the mammoth coexisted with man in Europe.”— 
Antiquity of Man, p. 354. 
On page 143 of the volume just quoted, the same very distinguished 
writer remarks that man “ no doubt played his part in hastening the era 
of the extinction ” of the large pachyderms and beasts of prey; but, as 
contemporaneous species of other animals, which man cannot be supposed 
to have extirpated, have also become extinct, he argues that the disap¬ 
pearance of the quadrupeds in question cannot be ascribed to human 
action alone. 
On this point it may be observed that, as we cannot know what precise 
physical conditions were necessary to the existence of a given extinct or¬ 
ganism, we cannot say how far such conditions may have been modified 
by the action of man, and he may therefore have influenced the life of 
such organisms in ways, and to an extent, of which we can form no 
just idea. 
