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Updated: June 11, 2025
The countries of the anthropomorphous apes are the tropical regions of Africa, and the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, lands which may be said to be quite unknown in reference to their Pliocene and Pleistocene mammalia.
She flipped through the stiff, distending pages -Mammals of the Pleistocene. She stopped at a pair of saber-toothed cats, lurking hungrily near a tar-pit. 'What about these? Have you seen them? 'Yes, but it is not a good likeness. Her mind raced so that she hardly heard him. Was it possible? Had life reverted to its primitive, violent stages before Man, evolution in reverse?
That big tertiary proboscidean did not live quite long enough, it is true, to be hunted by the cavemen of the Pleistocene age, but he survived at any rate as long as the Pliocene our day before yesterday and he often fell very likely before the fire-split flint weapons of the Abbé Bourgeois' Miocene men.
Now we have a good knowledge of man as he was in the later stage of the Ice-Age at least a million years later and may thus institute a useful comparison and form some idea of the advance made. In the later stages of the Pleistocene a race of men lived in Europe of whom we have a number of skulls and skeletons, besides vast numbers of stone implements.
Had there been a total absence of all organic remains, we might have imagined the former presence of the sea, and the destruction of such remains might have been ascribed to carbonic acid or other decomposing causes; but the Pleistocene and implement-bearing strata can be shown by their fossils to be of fluviatile origin.
The Glyptodon was a mailed edentate, eight feet long, resembling the little armadillo. These edentates survived from Tertiary times, and in the warmer stages of the Pleistocene ranged north as far as Ohio and Oregon. The great proboscidians of the Glacial epoch were about the size of modern elephants, and somewhat smaller than their ancestral species in the Pliocene.
Schmerling disentombed from the Belgian caverns; but the fact of their occurring in a Pleistocene alluvial deposit in the open plains, would be one of the first examples of such a phenomenon. The top of the hill of Caberg is not so high above the Meuse as is the terrace of St. Acheul with its flint implements above the Somme, but at St. Acheul no human bones have yet been detected.
Of its early history we know nothing, for the only related forms which have yet come to light are of no great antiquity, being confined to the Pleistocene of Europe as far south as France, and are not distinguishable from existing species.
On the Alps themselves the Pleistocene population still lingers, their successful adaptation to the cold now preventing them from descending to the plains. The animal world in turn was winnowed by the Pleistocene episode. The hippopotamus, crocodile, turtle, flamingo, and other warm-loving animals were banished to the warm zone.
To make this interesting fact clearer we must attempt to measure the progress made in the Pliocene and Pleistocene. We may assume that the precursor of man had arrived at the anthropoid-ape level by the middle of the Miocene period. He is not at all likely to have been behind the anthropoid apes, and we saw that they were well developed in the mid-Tertiary.
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