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Daniel Sir Wilson. Prehistoric Man
Prehistoric Man
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER II. THE PRIMEVAL TRANSITION
CHAPTER III. THE QUARRY
CHAPTER IV. BONE AND IVORY WORKERS
CHAPTER V. FIRE
CHAPTER VI. THE CANOE
CHAPTER VII. TOOLS
CHAPTER VIII. THE METALS
CHAPTER IX. ALLOYS
CHAPTER X. THE MOUND-BUILDERS
CHAPTER XI. SEPULCHRAL MOUNDS
CHAPTER XII. SACRIFICIAL MOUNDS
CHAPTER XIII. SYMBOLIC MOUNDS
CHAPTER XIV. NATIVE AMERICAN CIVILISATION
CHAPTER XV. ART CHRONICLINGS
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Daniel Sir Wilson
Researches into the Origin of Civilization in the Old and the New World
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To whatever cause we attribute such phenomena, much is gained by being able to study them apart from the complex derivative elements which trammel the study of European philology. Assuming for our present argument the unity of the human race, not in the ambiguous sense of a common typical structure, but literally, as descendants of one stock: in the primitive scattering of infant nations, the Mongol and the American went eastward, while the Indo-European began his still uncompleted wanderings towards the far west. The Mongol and the Indo-European have repeatedly met and mingled. They now share, unequally, the Indian peninsula and the continent of Europe. But the American and the Indo-European only met after an interval measurable by thousands of years, coming from opposite directions, and having made the circuit of the globe.
The Red-Man, it thus appears, is among the ancients of the earth. How old he may be it is impossible to determine; but with one American school of ethnologists, no historical antiquity is sufficient for him. The earliest contributions of the New World to the geological traces of man were little less startling, when first brought to light, than any that the European drift has since revealed. The island of Guadaloupe, one of the lesser Antilles, discovered by Columbus in 1493, furnished the first examples of fossil man, and of works of art imbedded in the solid rock. They seemed to the wondering naturalist to upset all preconceived ideas of the origin of the human race. But more careful investigation proved the rock to be a concretionary limestone formed from the detritus of corals and shells. The skeletons are probably by no means ancient, even according to the reckoning of American history; though supplying a curious link in the palæontological treasures both of the British Museum and the Jardin des Plantes. Dr. Lund, the Danish naturalist, has described human bones, bearing, as he believed, marks of geological antiquity, found along with those of many extinct mammals, in the calcareous caves of Brazil. Fossil human remains have also been recovered from a calcareous conglomerate of the coral reefs of Florida, estimated by Professor Agassiz to be not less than 10,000 years old;[4] and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia treasures the os innominatum of a human skeleton, a fragment of disputed antiquity, dug up near Natchez, on the Mississippi, beneath the bones of the megalonyx.[5]
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