Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

DID MAN EXIST BEFORE THE DRIFT? 121

CHAPTER II. DID MAN EXIST BEFORE THE DRIFT?

First, let us ask ourselves this question, Did man exist before the Drift ?

Tf he did, he must have survived it ; and he could hardly have passed through it without some remembrance of such a terrible event surviving in the traditions of the race.

If he did not exist before the Drift, of course, no myths descriptive of it could have come down to us.

This preliminary question must, then, be settled by testimony.

Let us call our witnesses :

“The palzolithic hunter of the mid and late Pleistocene river-deposits in Europe belongs, as we have already shown, to a fauna which arrived in Britain before the lowering of the temperature produced glaciers and icebergs in our country ; he may, therefore, be viewed as being probably pre-glacial,” *

Man had spread widely over the earth before the Drift ; therefore, he had lived long on the earth. His remains haye been found in Scotland, England, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Greece ; in Africa, in Palestine, in India, and in the United States.

““Man was living in the valley of the lower Thames before the Arctic mammalia had taken full possession of

* Dawkins’s “ Early Man in Britain,” p. 169. + Ibid., pp. 165, 166.