Man Before History.

In the history of the Earth, Humanity is perhaps no more than a dream; and when our old world falls asleep in the ice of its winter, the passage of our shadows across its face will perhaps have left upon it no remembrance whatever. The Earth possesses a history of its own, incomparably richer and more complex than that of man. Long before the appearance of our race, for centuries upon centuries, it was successively occupied by diverse inhabitants, by primordial beings, who extended their successive domination over its surface, and disappeared with the elementary modifications of the physics of the globe.

In one of these latter periods, in the Tertiary epoch, to which we may without fear assign a date of several hundreds of thousands of years before us, the site where today Paris displays its splendors was a Mediterranean, a gulf of the universal ocean, above which there rose in France only the Cretaceous terrain of Troyes, Rouen, Tours; the Jurassic terrain of Chaumont, Bourges, Niort; the Triassic terrain of the Vosges, and the primitive terrain of the Alps, of the Auvergne and of the coasts of Brittany. Later the configuration changed. At the time when there still lived the mammoth, the cave bear and the rhinoceros with separated nostrils, one could go by land from Paris to London; and perhaps that journey was made by our ancestors of that time, because there were men here, before the formation of geographic France. Their life differed from ours as much as that of the savages with which we recently occupied ourselves. Some had built their villages upon piles, in the midst of the great lakes; these lacustrine cities, comparable to those of the beavers, were discovered in 1853, when, as a consequence of a long drought, the lakes of Switzerland lowered, laying bare piles, utensils of stone, of horn, of gold and of clay, unmistakable vestiges of the ancient habitation of man; and these aquatic cities were not an exception: in Switzerland alone more than two hundred were found. Herodotus relates that the Paeonians inhabited similar cities upon Lake Prasias. Each citizen who took a wife was obliged to bring three stones from the neighboring forest and to fix them in the lake. As the number of wives was not limited, the floor of the city grew quickly. The huts were in communication with the water by a trapdoor, and the children were tied by the foot to a cord, for fear of accident. Men, horse, cattle, lived together, feeding on fish. Hippocrates reports the same customs of the inhabitants of Phasis. In 1826, Dumont d’Urville discovered analogous lacustrine cities on the coasts of New Guinea. Others inhabited the caverns, the natural grottoes, or constructed a crude refuge against the ferocious animals. Today their bones are found mixed with those of the hyena, of the cave bear, of the tichorhine rhinoceros. A quarryman, in 1852, wishing to know the depth of a hole by which the rabbits escaped the hunters, at Aurignac (Haute-Garonne), drew from that opening bones of great size. Attacking then the flank of the hillock, in the hope of finding a treasure there, he soon found himself in front of a true ossuary. Public rumor, taking hold of the fact, set in circulation accounts of counterfeiters, of murders, etc. The mayor judged it well to have all the bones gathered to take them to the cemetery; and when, in 1860, Mr. Lartet wished to examine these old remains, the gravedigger no longer even remembered the place of the burial. Nevertheless, with the aid of rare vestiges that surrounded the cavern, traces of a hearth, bones broken to extract the marrow, one can assure that the three species referred to above lived at this point of France at the same time as man. The dog was already the companion of man, and without doubt was his first conquest. The food of these primitive men was already very varied. A professor maintains that the proportion between carnivores and frugivores was twelve to twenty. Mr. Florens holds that they nourished themselves exclusively on fruits. But the truth is that, from the beginning, man was omnivorous. The kjokkenmoddings of Denmark preserve for us remains of antediluvian cookery, proving this fact to the point of evidence. They already breakfasted on oysters and fish, they knew the goose, the swan, the duck; they appreciated the wild fowl, the deer, the chamois, the reindeer, which they hunted, of which were found remains pierced by stone arrows. The bison or primitive ox already gave them milk; the wolf, the fox, the dog and the cat served them as the principal dish. The heaths, the barley, the oats, the peas, the lentils gave them their bread and their vegetables; wheat came only later. The hazelnuts, the acorns, the apples, the pears, the strawberries and the raspberries crowned these delicacies of the ancient Danes. The Swiss of the Stone Age took possession of the flesh of the bison, of the elk and of the wild bull, they had domesticated the goat and the sheep. The hare and the rabbit were disdained for some superstitious reason; but, in compensation, the horse had already taken its place in their meals. All these meats were eaten raw and smoking in the beginning, and, a curious observation, the ancient Danes did not use, as we do, the incisor teeth to cut, but to grip, retain and chew the food, so that these teeth were not cutting, like ours, but flattened, like our molars, and the two dental arches rested one upon the other, instead of fitting together. Not all the primitive savages were naked. The first inhabitants of the boreal latitudes, of Denmark, of Gaul and of Helvetia, had to protect themselves against the cold with garments of skins. Later they thought of ornaments. Coquetry, the love of adornments do not date from today, ladies: witness these necklaces formed with the teeth of dog, of fox and of wolf, pierced by a suspension hole. Later the hairpins, the bracelets, the bronze clasps multiplied to infinity, and surprising is the variety and even the good taste of the objects that served the toilette of the young ladies and of the elegant men of that time.

In those remote ages, they buried the dead under sepulchral vaults. The corpses were placed in a crouching position, the knees almost touching the chin, the arms crossed over the breast and brought close to the head. As has been observed, this is the position of the child in the maternal womb. These primordial men certainly were ignorant of it, and it is by a kind of intuition that they likened the tomb to a cradle.

Vestiges of ages that have gone, these great tombs, these mounds, these hills which in past centuries were called “tombs of giants” and which served as inviolable boundaries, are mortuary chambers, under which our ancestors hid their dead. Who were these first men? “It is not only out of curiosity, says Virchow, that we ask who these dead were, whether in life they belonged to a race of giants. These questions interest us. These dead are our ancestors, and the questions that we address to these tombs are bound equally to our own origin. From what race did we come? From what source did our present culture come, and where does it lead us?”

It is not necessary to go back to the creation to receive some light upon our origins; otherwise we would see ourselves condemned to remain forever in a complete night in this respect. On the date of the creation alone more than 140 opinions have been counted, and from the first to the last there is no less than 3,194 years of difference! To add a 141st hypothesis would not clarify the problem. Thus, we shall limit ourselves to clarifying that, from the geological point of view, the last period of the history of the Earth, the Quaternary period, the one that still lasts today, has been divided into three phases: the diluvian phase, during which there were immense partial inundations, 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 sum, the important question, today more or less resolved, was to know whether man dates only from this last epoch, or from the preceding ones. Now, it is now proven that he dates at least from the first, and that our first ancestors have a right to the title of fossils, considering that their bones (the little that remains) lie with those of the ursus spelaeus, of the hyena and of the felis spelaea, of the elephas primigenius, of the megaceros, etc., in a stratum belonging to an order of life different from the present order.

In those distant epochs there reigned a Nature very different from that which today unfolds its splendors around us; other types of plants decorated the forests and the fields; other species of animals lived on the surface of the soil and in the seas.

Who were the first men who awakened in that primordial world? What cities were built? What language was spoken? What customs were in use? These questions are still surrounded for us by profound mystery. But that of which we are certain is that there where we founded dynasties and monuments, several races of men inhabited successively, during secular periods.

Sir John Lubbock, in the work indicated at the beginning of this study, demonstrated the antiquity of the human race by the discoveries relating to the usages and customs of our ancestors, as Sir Charles Lyell had demonstrated it from the geological point of view. Whatever be the mystery that still envelops our origins, we prefer this still incomplete result of positive science to the fables and the romances of ancient mythology.

Camille Flammarion.

[1] This article is taken from the scientific articles that Mr. Flammarion published in the Siècle. We have judged it well to reproduce it, first because we know of the interest of our readers in the writings of this young scholar, and, moreover, because, from the point of view of Science, it touches upon some fundamental points of the doctrine expounded in our work on Genesis. — Publisher's Note: See “Explanatory note,” p. 527.