The first of these lines of investigation leads us to the science of “pre-historic archæology.” We shall discover that a study of this branch of learning is indispensable not only in this connection, but to solve many other questions in ethnography. Here its answer is unexpected. We have been taught by long tradition and venerable documents to look for the first home of primeval man “somewhere in Asia,” as Professor Max Müller generously puts it. He is inclined to think that from the highlands of that continent the tribes dispersed in various directions, some going to the extreme north, and then southward into Europe. Others would have it that the species itself came into life in the boreal regions, in that epoch when a mild climate prevailed there.
Such dreams meet no countenance from pre-historic archæology. The oldest remains of man’s arts, the first rude flints which he shaped into utensils and weapons, have not been discovered in Asia, and do not occur at all in the northern latitudes of either continent. They have been exhumed from the late tertiary or early quaternary deposits of southern England, of France, of the Iberian peninsula, and of the valleys of the Atlas in northern Africa. They have been searched for most diligently but in vain in Scandinavia, Germany, Russia, Siberia, and Canada. Not any of the older types of so-called “palæolithic” implements have been reported in early deposits in those countries.[37] But in the “river drift” of the Thames, the Somme, the Garonne, and the Tagus, quantities of rough stone implements have been disinterred, proving that in a remote epoch, at a time when the hippopotamus and rhinoceros, the African elephant and the extinct apes, found a congenial home near the present sites of London, Paris and Lisbon, man also was there. These relics, especially those found in Portugal, Central Spain and Southern France, are the very oldest proofs of the presence of man on the earth yet brought to light.
Where, now, do we find the remains of the highest of the lower animals? By a remarkable coincidence, in the same region. Of all the anthropoid apes yet known to the palæontologist, that most closely simulating man is the so-called _Dryopithecus fontani_, whose bones have been disinterred in the upper valleys of the Garonne, in Southern France. Its height was about that of a man, its teeth strongly resembled those of the Australians, and its food was chiefly vegetables and fruits. Other remains of a similar character have been found in Italy.[38]