Ethnology : in two parts, I. Fundamental ethnical problems. II. The primary ethnical groups / by A.H. Keane.

  • Augustus Henry Keane
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Ethnology : in two parts, I. Fundamental ethnical problems. II. The primary ethnical groups / by A.H. Keane. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    might remember that nobody need be pin Papa del Papa stesso. Yet some of these writers would have us beUeve that Sabre-tooth, for instance, was still prowling about the Roman castra, or at least the early British camping-grounds, and that the hippo- potamus was floundering amid the Lincolnshire fens a short time before the new era, rather than admit that their associate man lived in pleistocene times. I think, says Mr T. K. Callard, the time has now fairly come to ask calmly the question, whether finding the works of man in association with Rhinoceros tichorinus and mammoth, instead of proving man's great antiquity, does not rather prove the more recent extinction of these mammals'; and again : The legitimate inference is that he [the Woolly Rhinoceros] was contemporaneous with the potters, Roman, pre-Roman, or Samian; also that he lived when the modern sheep browsed in Creswell dale'. Mr Callard is at least logical, for he feels that unless the natural history of the Hominidae can be made to harmonise altogether with the Mosaic account, a few thousand years more or less cannot matter either way; and that is so. Here are brought together specimens, so to say, of such objects as are indicated at p. 55 in a general way Value of im- . . ... plements de- 3.S characteristic of paleeolithic times. Their locahty, the'h-'proven- associations and position, together with the names ance. of the finders or witnesses, are briefly recorded, so Stalagmite ^^^^ Student may be able to judge for himself of beds not _ ■' . necessarily a their value as evidence. In doing so it will be test of age. ^^^^ mind three points: (i) that from position in or under undisturbed boulder-clays and drift of all kinds there is no appeal; such finds must be pre-glacial, that is, inter-glacial (p. 67); (2) that position in cave-earth under thick stalagmite beds does not of itself alone necessarily imply great age; stalagmite growth is irregular, as it depends on variable con- ditions, amount of rainfall, and quantity of vegetable humus on the roof yielding carbonic acid with which the percolating water dissolves the limestone particles, thus forming the carbonate of lime, which in the cave takes the form of stalactites above and 1 The Contemporaneity of Man with the Extinct Mammalia, &c., pp. 9 and II.
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