According to the history, man falls, and is expelled from Eden, is clothed with skins, and becomes an eater of animal food. Next we find murderous violence, and a consequent separation of the primitive people into two tribes, one of which migrates to a distance from the other and adopts different modes of life. Finally, we have a mixture of the two races, leading to a powerful and terrible race of half-breeds, or metis, who filled the earth with violence.[36]
[Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE GEOGRAPHICAL AND GEOLOGICAL RELATIONS OF THE SITE OF EDEN AS DESCRIBED IN GENESIS]
In one point only have we reason to doubt whether this old history fairly represents the palanthropic age. It notes the invention of musical instruments, the use of metals, the domestication of animals as already existing in the antediluvian period. Of these we have little or no archæological evidence. The only musical instrument of this period known is a whistle made of one of the bones of a deer's foot, and capable of sounding a tetrachord or four notes, and we have no certain evidence of metals or domesticated animals. We must bear in mind that there may have been more civilised races than those of the Cro-magnon type, and that the latter evince an artistic skill which if it had any scope for development may have led to great results. The native metals must have been known to man from the first, though they must have been rare or only locally common; and many semi-barbarous nations of later times show us that it is only a short step from the knowledge of native metals to the art of metallurgy, in so far as it consists in treating those ores that in weight and metallic lustre most resemble the metals themselves. It is also deserving of notice that no other hypothesis than that of antediluvian civilisation can account for the fact that in the dawn of postdiluvian history we find the dwellers by the Euphrates and the Nile already practising so many of the arts of civilised life. In connection with this we may place the early dawn of literature. Without insisting on the documents which the Chaldean Noah, Hasisadra, is said to have hid at Sippara before the Deluge, we have the known fact that in the earliest dawn of postdiluvian history the art of writing was known in Chaldea and in Egypt. This at once testifies to antediluvian culture, and shows that the means existed to record important events.