July i, ign.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
9 
self began. Years ago Dr. Du Bois found in 
some deposits in Java the top of a skull, a thigh 
bone and a tooth or two, so human in aspect, 
and yet so ape-like in aspect, that no one has 
been able to say whether Pithecanthropus was 
an ape-like man or a man-like ape. 
It is well established that man has existed on 
the earth for a very long time. The old idea, 
put forth by early students of the Old Testa¬ 
ment, provided for but six thousand years of 
human existence, four thousand from man’s crea¬ 
tion in the Garden of Eden to the birth of Christ, 
and two thousand since then, but man goes back 
much further than this, and lived on the earth 
at the same time with many ancient animals that 
have long been extinct. 
Evidences of man’s existence are of two sorts, 
his individual remains—his bones—and objects 
which bear evidences of his handiwork. The 
latter are far more common, for to be long pre¬ 
served, bones must meet with certain, especially 
favorable, conditions. Manufactured articles of 
stone or horn, or drawings or engravings on 
horn, bone, stone or ivory are much more likely 
to be preserved than are human bones, and so 
are much more abundant than human bones. 
The early man chipped knives, arrow points 
and spear heads from stone and rubbed down 
bits of bone to make awls or other piercing in¬ 
struments. Being more or less sedentary in habit 
he lived for a long time in one place, and bring¬ 
ing his food home to the camp, devoured it 
there, throwing away the refuse, which in the 
course of years made great heaps among which, 
from time to time, his tools and implements, 
perhaps his carvings and pieces of his pottery 
and certainly the bones which he split for the 
marrow they contained, would gradually accumu- 
RED FRESCO REPRESENTING STAG IN THE ACT OF RIS¬ 
ING. ROCK SHELTER OF CALAPOTA AT 
CRETAS IN LOWER ARAGON. 
late. In the shell heaps of the coast Indians of 
the southern United States — the accumulated 
refuse of the camps of people who lived on the 
shellfish that they drew from the neighboring 
waters — many interesting relics of early people 
have been found which throw not a little light 
on their ways of life. 
Early man had long ago discovered the secret 
of fire and cooked his food. Therefore, when 
one of his abiding places is found and digging 
is done about it, layers of burned earth and 
charcoal are found, often successive layers, one 
above another, showing that for many years 
people occupied this site and cooked their fires 
in the same place, or nearly in the same place. 
Then perhaps they moved away and for a gen¬ 
eration or two camped elsewhere, and later re¬ 
turning to the old camping ground again built 
their fires in the same place, but on top of an 
accumulation of dust and earth, which separates 
the later hearth from the earlier one. 
Students of early man, when considering the 
stone implements that he has left behind him, 
have referred them to three classes, which are 
termed neolithic, palaeolithic and eolithic, three 
words which represent different stages of cul¬ 
ture—different degrees of excellence in the im- 
13 3 4 6 
FLINT IMPLEMENTS FROM THE CAVERN OF LES 
COTTES (VIENNA). 
plements. Of the three classes the neolithic im¬ 
plements are the latest and most highly finished, 
while those of eolithic type are the very roughest, 
often hardly more than pebbles chipped off on 
one side so as to form the roughest kind of a 
cutting or sawing edge. These chipped stones 
are called artifacts—something made by art, 
something that is not a product of nature. The 
earliest artifacts—those of eolithic man—may not 
prove the existence of man at the time they 
were made, but they do prove the existence of 
some animal, human or brute, that knew enough 
to fashion stones into implements. 
In 1876 , there became extinct the Tasmanians 
—a race which had been found living very well, 
when the white people first discovered Tasmania, 
or as it used to be called. Van Dieman’s Land. 
These people were then in a culture stage which 
corresponded to the eolithic. When the white 
people reached the shores of America, many of 
our Indians used implements which the archae¬ 
ologists wou’d call palaeolithic, while others were 
in the neolithic stage—the age of polished stone. 
I 11 America there have been found few or no 
remains of human beings which are acknowl¬ 
edged to be of vast antiquity. In other words, 
none of the human bones found are very differ¬ 
ent from the bones of the Indians of to-day. 
On two or three occasions a skull has been 
found which has created much excitement in 
scientific circles, but a careful study of it and 
a comparison with other, remains has usually 
shown that of itself it furnishes no satisfactory 
evidence of any great antiquity. 
In the Old World quite a different state of 
things exists. There, chiefly in caverns, though 
sometimes buried deep in the soil, are found 
skulls so different from those of the man of 
to-day that they have been called different 
species. For a long time naturalists called all 
existing races—white men, negroes, Indians and 
Chinamen —Homo sapiens, which being roughly 
interpreted, means knowledgable man, but of 
these ancient skulls found in Europe, several 
have been so different from any of the skulls 
of modern man, and also so different from three 
or four other ancient skulls, that a different 
name has been given to each. Usually these 
ancient skulls have been found by themselves, 
but with them on one or two occasions have been 
found weapons of very primitive type. On other 
occasions and in other places, almost complete 
skeletons have been found with various weapons 
and implements, but these last skeletons more 
or less closely resemble existing man, and we 
are still in the dark as to the culture of the 
earliest men whose skulls are known. Of these 
later men much has been learned from their im¬ 
plements, from the remains of their food, but 
above all from their works of art. 
In the recently issued report of the Smith¬ 
sonian Institution, Dr. George Grant McCurdy, 
of Yale University, has a paper of extraordinary 
interest, dealing with Recent Discoveries Bear¬ 
ing on the Antiquity of Man in Europe. He 
tells of the continuous investigations carried on 
within the past ten years as to the antiquity 
of man and describes the two principal situa¬ 
tions in which human relics are found there. 
These are of two sorts: valley deposits and de¬ 
posits in caverns and rock shelters. 
Explorations carried on at Saint-Acheul have 
revealed a great number of implements, flint 
chips and the cores from which chips have been 
knocked off, and all these are of a very early 
type—palaeolithic. Among the animals found 
with these earliest implements were an elephant, 
a large horse and a bison. A section of the 
soil in this place shows that from being palaeo¬ 
lithic at the lower levels, the implements changed 
in character until nearer the surface of the earth 
they were no longer palaeolithic, but neolithic. 
In another place at Willendorf, on the left bank 
of the Danube, a section of the soil shows nine 
HEAD OF A HORSE. CAVERN OF ALTAMIRA, SPAIN. 
layers of human relics, the lowermost character¬ 
ized by a very crude industry with charcoal and 
a few bones, the animals preyed upon being the 
reindeer and the bison. Passing upward through 
the various layers, the stone implements con¬ 
stantly improve in beauty and show greater skill 
in manufacture, until in the ninth layer from the 
bottom the implements are highly finished. Here 
was found a female statuette of stone of extra¬ 
ordinary beauty—not in itself, but when con¬ 
sidered as an artistic product of the man of those 
early days. Some features of this statuette seem 
to point to the race which it represents, since the 
hair is kinky, suggesting that of a negro. An¬ 
other figure of about the same period represents 
a human female lying on the ground near the 
