In the history of Earth, humanity may be only a dream, and when our old world falls asleep in the ice of its winter, the passage of our shadows on its forehead may not have left any memory there. Earth has, in its own right, a history incomparably richer and more complex than that of man. Long before the appearance of our race, for centuries of centuries, it was alternately occupied by various inhabitants, by primordial beings, that extended their successive domination over its surface, and disappeared with the elementary modifications of the physics of the planet.
In one of the last periods, in the Tertiary era, to which we can safely assign a date, several hundred thousand years ago, the site where Paris today displays its splendors, was a Mediterranean, a gulf of the universal ocean, above which rose in France alone the Cretaceous terrain of Troy, Rouen, Tours; the Jurassic terrain of Chaumont, Bourges, Niort; the Triassic terrain of the Vosges, and the primitive terrain of the Alps, Auvergne and the coasts of Brittany. Later, the configuration changed. At the time when the mammoth, the cave bear, the rhinos with partitioned nostrils still lived, one could go from Paris to London by land; and this journey was perhaps made by our ancestors of that time, because there were men here before the formation of geographic France.
Their lives were as different from ours as that of the savages we talked about recently. Some had built their villages on stilts in the middle of the great lakes; these lake towns, comparable to those of beavers, were discovered in 1853, when after a long drought, the lakes of Switzerland fell to an unusual low level, uncovering poles, stone, horn, gold and clay utensils, unmistakable vestiges of the ancient inhabitation of man; and these aquatic towns were no exception: more than two hundred have been found in Switzerland alone. Herodotus relates that the Paeonians
[2] lived in similar towns on Lake Prasias. Each citizen who took a wife was obliged to bring three stones from the neighboring forest and fix them in the lake. As the number of women was not limited, the floor of the city grew quickly. The cabins were in communication with the water by a trap, and the children were tied to a rope by the foot, for fear of accident. Men, horses, cattle, lived together, feeding on fish. Hippocrates reports the same customs with the inhabitants of Phase. In 1826, Dumont d'Urville discovered similar lake towns on the coasts of New Guinea.
Others inhabited caves, natural caves, or formed a crude refuge from ferocious beasts. Today we find their bones mixed with those of the hyena, the cave bear, the tichorrhine rhinos. In 1852, a digger wishing to assess the depth of a hole through which rabbits escaped hunters, in Aurignac (
Haute-Garonne), found large back bones from this opening. Then attacking the side of the mound in hopes of finding a treasure there, he soon found himself in front of an authentic ossuary. Public rumor, taking hold of the fact, circulated accounts of counterfeit money, assassinations, etc. The mayor thought it advisable to have all the bones collected and taken to the cemetery; and when in 1860 Mr. Lartet wanted to examine these old remains, the digger did not even remember the place of their burial. With the help of the rare remains that surrounded the cave, traces of a hearth, split bones to extract the marrow, it was possible, nevertheless, to ensure that the three species named above lived on that part of France, at the same time as the man. The dog was already man's companion, and it was, undoubtedly, his first conquest.
The food of these primitive men was already much varied. A professor claims that the proportion between carnivorous and frugivorous was twelve to twenty. Mr. Flourens prefers to believe that they fed exclusively on fruit. But the truth is that, from the beginning, man was omnivores.
[3] The Danish Kjokkenmoddings have preserved debris of antediluvian cooking, proving this fact up to the evidence. They were already eating oysters and fish, knew the goose, the swan, the duck; appreciated the heather cock, the stag, the roe deer, the reindeer, that they hunted and whose remains were found pierced with stone arrows. The urus or primitive ox already gave them the milk; the wolf, the fox, the dog and the cat served as main courses. Acorns, barley, oats, peas, lentils gave them bread and vegetables; wheat did not come until later. Hazelnuts, beechnuts, apples, pears, strawberries and raspberries completed these dishes of the ancient Danes. The Swiss of the Stone Age had, moreover, appropriated the flesh of the bison, the elk, the wild bull, and had domesticated the goat and the sheep. The hare and the rabbit were despised for some superstitious reason; but, on the other hand, the horse had already taken its place in their meals. All these meats were originally eaten raw and steaming, and curiously, the ancient Danes did not use their incisors like us to slice, but to grasp, to hold and to chew their food; so that those teeth were not sharp like ours, but flattened like our molars and the two dental arches rested on each other instead of interlocking.
Not all primitive savages were naked. The first inhabitants of northern latitudes, of Denmark, Gaul and Helvetia, had to protect themselves from the cold with skins and furs. Later, they thought of ornaments. Coquetry, the love for adornment are not new, ladies: witness these necklaces formed with the teeth of a dog, a fox or a wolf, pierced with a hole for suspension. Later, hairpins, bracelets, bronze staples multiplied ad infinitum, and one is astonished at the variety, and even the good taste of the objects used for the toilet of the young ladies and courtiers of that time.
During these remote ages, the dead were buried under sepulchral vaults. The corpses were placed in a crouched posture, knees almost in contact with the chin, arms folded over the chest and close to the head. That is, as it was noticed, the position of the child in its mother's womb. These primordial men were certainly unaware of it, and it was by a kind of intuition that they associated the tomb to a cradle.
Vestiges of the vanished ages, these long tumuli, these mounds, these hills that in past centuries were called "tombs of the giants" and that served as inviolable limits, are the funeral chambers under which our ancestors hid their dead. Who were these first men? “
It's not just out of curiosity,” says Virchow, “
that we ask who these dead were, if they belonged to a race of giants, when they lived. These questions affect us. These dead are our ancestors, and the questions we ask these tombs also relate to our own origin. What race do we come from? From what beginnings did our current culture come and where is it leading us?”It is not necessary to go back to creation to receive some light on our origins; otherwise we would have to be condemned to remain always in complete darkness in that respect. On the date of creation alone we counted more than 140 opinions, and from the first to the last there is no less than 3,194 years of difference! Adding the 141
st hypothesis would not clarify the problem. We will, therefore, confine ourselves to establishing that, from a geological point of view, the last period in the history of earth, the Quaternary period, that still lasts today, was divided into three phases: the diluvial phase, during which there were immense partial floods, and vast deposits and accumulations of sand; the glacial phase, characterized by the formation of glaciers and by a greater cooling of the globe; finally the modern phase. In short, the important question, more or less resolved today, was whether man dates only from this later period or from earlier ones.
However, it is now proven that it dates at least from the first, and that our first ancestors rightfully deserve the title of fossils, since their bones (the little that remains) lie with those of the Ursus spelæus, of the hyena and Felis spelæa, Elephas primigenius, Megaceros, etc., in a layer belonging to an order of life different from the present order.
In those distant times a very different nature reigned from what today displays its splendors around us; other types of plants decorated the forests and the countryside, other species of animals lived on the surface of earth and in the seas. Who were the first men who awoke in this primordial world? What cities were built? What language was spoken? What habits were in use? These questions are still shrouded in a deep mystery for us. But what is certain today is that in the place where we founded dynasties and monuments,
several races of men successively inhabited during the secular periods.
Sir John Lubbock, in the work mentioned in the beginning of this study, has demonstrated the antiquity of the human race, by the discoveries relating to the uses and habits of our ancestors, as Sir Charles Lyell had demonstrated from a geological point of view. Whatever mystery still envelops our origins, we prefer this still incomplete result of positive science to the fables and novels of ancient mythology.
Camille Flammarion
[1] This article is taken from the scientific articles that Mr. Flammarion published in the
Century. We thought it to be our duty to reproduce it, first of all because we know the interest that our readers have in the writings of this young scientist, and also because it touches, from the point of view of science, to some of the fundamental points of the doctrine, exposed in our work
Genesis.
[2] Ancient Greek Northern Macedonia (T.N.)
[3] Organisms that eat a variety of other organisms, including animals, plants and fungi – NatGeo (T.N.)
