A significant note is added: 'Afterwards were the families of the Canaanites scattered abroad.' How could this be? Their line of migration and settlement led directly to the great sea, and was hemmed in by that of the Japhetites on the north and of the Cushites on the south; but they made the sea their highway, and soon there was no coast from end to end of the Mediterranean, and far along the European and African shores of the Atlantic, that was not familiar with the Phoenician Canaanite. But it may be said these Phoenicians were a Semitic people. They certainly spoke a Semitic language allied to the Hebrew, but what right have we to attribute Semitic languages solely to the descendants of the Biblical Shem? Even if these languages originated with them they may have spread to other peoples, as we know they replaced the old Turanian speech of Babylonia, just as the Arabic has extinguished other languages in Egypt itself. In whatever way the Phoenicians acquired a Semitic tongue, in physical character they were not Semitic, but closely allied to the Hittites, the Philistines, and the people of Mitzor, or Egypt. The Egyptian sculptures prove this, and the celebrated Capuan bust of Hannibal reminds us of the features of the old Hyksos kings of Egypt, who were no doubt of Hamite or Turanian stock.
Finally, what relation does the record in Genesis x. bear to the prehistoric peoples of the neanthropic age? These must have been in the main the advanced colonists and straggling adventurers of the leading lines of migration. We find such people recorded in the Pentateuch, and also in the caverns and shelters of Phoenicia, as preceding the Canaanites in Syria; and such nomads and hunters must have streamed out into Europe and Africa in advance of the more settled and slowly advancing agricultural peoples. At first they must have been few, rude, and users of stone implements only, living chiefly by hunting and fishing; but some of them may have taken with them domestic animals and seeds of grains, and so have established here and there civilised communities. In later times, new colonists and commerce introduced among them bronze and iron and more advanced arts. Thus these early neanthropic peoples belonged to one or other of the great lines of migration indicated in our old record; though by virtue of physical changes and dialectic differences induced by isolation and new conditions of life, and which in such circumstances would arise with a rapidity unexampled in later times, as well as the want of historical annals, it has in many cases become difficult or impossible precisely to trace their affinities. Even in Palestine, at the time of the Exodus, peoples of this kind (Horites, Avvites, &c.)[82] were known, whose affinities had been lost; and it is not necessary to suppose that these were remnants of antediluvians, since what we know in modern times of the wanderers on the outskirts of great migrations sufficiently accounts for their existence.