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Brelade, is a cave, in which we dug down through some twenty feet of accumulated clay and rock-rubbish, presumably the effects of the last throes of the ice-age, and came upon a pre-historic hearth. There were the big stones that had propped up the fire, and there were the ashes. By the side were the remains of a heap of food-refuse.
As it is the general belief that he was evolved in the Tertiary, it is clear that he existed in some part of the earth before the Ice-Age. Whether he had already penetrated as far north as Britain and Belgium is an interesting point, but not one of great importance. We may also now disregard the remains of the Java Ape-Man.
This summary statement will convey some idea of the extraordinary phase through which the earth passed in the early part of the present geological era. But it must be added that a singular circumstance prolonged the glacial regime in the northern hemisphere. Modern geologists speak rather of a series of successive ice-sheets than of one definite Ice-Age.
One is the rise of the land; the other is the thinning of the atmosphere. These are closely related agencies, and we found them acting in conjunction to bring about the Permian Ice-Age. Do we find them at work in the Pleistocene? It is not disputed that there was a very considerable upheaval of the land, especially in Europe and North America, at the end of the Tertiary Era.
A few bones tell of a race living, in semi-human shape, in the region of the Indian Ocean; a few crude stones are held by many to indicate that a more advanced, but very lowly race, wandered over the south of Europe and north of Africa before the Ice-Age set in. The starting-point or cradle of the race is not known.
Below that, again, was a mass, six to eight feet deep, of the characteristic yellow clay with far-carried fragments of rock in it that is associated with the great floods of the ice-age. The land must have been above the reach of the tide for the glacial drift to settle on it.
A full description of the effect of the great Ice-Age would occupy a volume. The modern landscape in Europe and North America was very largely carved and modelled by the ice-sheet and the floods that ensued upon its melting. Hills were rounded, valleys carved, lakes formed, gravels and soils distributed, as we find them to-day.
But man's prerogative is to dominate his world by the aid of intelligence of a high order. When he defied the ice-age by the use of fire, when he outfaced and outlived the mammoth and the cave bear, he was already the rational animal, homo sapiens. In his way he thought, even in those far-off days.
The Permian revolution, to which the Pleistocene Ice-Age comes nearest in importance, wrought such devastation that the overwhelming majority of living things perished. Do we find a similar destruction of life, and selection of higher types, after the Pleistocene perturbation? In particular, had it any appreciable effect upon the human species?
Putting all these kinds of evidence together, then, we get a notion, doubtless rather meagre, but as far as it goes well-grounded, of a hunter of the ice-age, who was able to get the better of a woolly rhinoceros, could cook a lusty steak off him, had a sharp knife to carve it, and the teeth to chew it, and generally knew how, under the very chilly circumstances, both to make himself comfortable and to keep his race going.
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