United States or French Guiana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The only question into which we may enter with any fullness is that of the relation of human development to this grave perturbation of the condition of the globe. The problem is sometimes wrongly conceived. The chief point to be determined is not whether man did or did not precede the Ice-Age.
"The truth about Arthur Balfour," said George Wyndham, "is this: he knows there's been one ice-age, and he thinks there's going to be another." Little as the general public may suspect it, the charming, gracious, and cultured Mr. Balfour is the most egotistical of men, and a man who would make almost any sacrifice to remain in office. It costs him nothing to serve under Mr.
It is also said that we cannot on these principles understand the repeated advance and retreat of the ice-sheet. This objection, again, seems to fail. It is an established fact that the land sank very considerably during the Ice-Age, and has risen again since the ice disappeared. Here we have the possibility of an explanation of the advances and retreats of the glaciers.
I invite you to accompany me in the spirit first of all to the cave of Gargas near Aventiron, under the shadow of the Pic du Midi in the High Pyrenees. Half-way up a hill, in the midst of a wilderness of rocky fragments, the relics of the ice-age, is a smallish hole, down which we clamber into a spacious but low-roofed grotto, stretching back five hundred feet or so into infinite darkness.
Thus M. Rutot believes that during the ice-age each big freeze was followed by an equally big flood, preceding each fresh return of milder weather. One of these floods, he thinks, must have drowned out the neat-fingered race of St. Acheul, and left the coast clear for the Mousterians with their coarser type of culture. Perhaps they were coarser in their physical type as well.
In discussing the development of plants and animals during the Tertiary Era we have already perceived the shadow of the approaching Ice-Age. We found that in the course of the Tertiary the types which were more sensitive to cold gradually receded southward, and before its close Europe, Asia, and North America presented a distinctly temperate aspect. This is but the penumbra of the eclipse.
It will be closed by a fresh upheaval of the earth and disturbance of life-conditions in the Chalk period, and followed by a Tertiary Era, in which the earth will approach its modern aspect. At its close there will be another series of upheavals, culminating in a great Ice-age, and the remaining stretch of the earth's story, in which we live, will form the Quaternary Era.
Let him, for instance, travel back in thought to the Europe of many thousands of years ago, shivering under the effects of the great ice-age, yet populous with human beings so far like ourselves that they were alive to the advantage of a good fire, made handy tools out of stone and wood and bone, painted animals on the walls of their caves, or engraved them on mammoth-ivory, far more skilfully than most of us could do now, and buried their dead in a ceremonial way that points to a belief in a future life.
The 200,000 years for the ice-age depends chiefly on Croll's theory of secular variation of the earth's orbitular eccentricity; but we are told it is open to the "objection that it requires us to assume a periodical succession of glacial epochs" of which two or three "must have occurred during each of the great geological epochs. This is opposed to geological evidence."
While Europe was shivering in the last stage of the Ice-Age, and the mammoth and reindeer browsed in the snows down to the south of France, this region would enjoy an excellent climate and a productive soil. We may confidently assume that there was a large and stirring population of human beings on it during the Magdalenian cold.
Word Of The Day