Prehistoric Man

Prehistoric Man - Researches into the Origin of Civilization in the Old and the New World

The recent development of archology as a science is due in no slight degree to the simplicity which characterises the prehistoric disclosures of Scandinavia, Ireland, and other regions of Europe lying beyond the range of Greek and Roman influence. But the same element presents itself on a far more comprehensive scale alike in the archology and the ethnology of the western hemisphere. America may be assumed with little hesitation to have begun its human period subsequent to that of the old world, and to have started later in the race of civilisation. At any rate it admits of no question that its most civilised nations had made a very partial advancement when, in the fifteenth century, they were abruptly brought into contact with the matured civilisation of Europe. Hence the earlier stages of human progress can be tested there freed from many obscuring elements inevitable from the intermingling of essentially diverse phases of civilisation on old historic areas. In the days of Herodotus, Transalpine Europe was a greater mystery to the nations on the shores of the Mediterranean than Central Africa is to us. To the Romans of four centuries later, Britain was still almost another world; and the great northern hive from whence the spoilers of the dismembered empire of the Csars were speedily to emerge, was so entirely unknown to them, that, as Dr. Arnold remarks, The Roman colonies along the banks of the Rhine and the Danube looked out on the country beyond those rivers as we look up at the stars, and actually see with our eyes a world of which we know nothing. Nevertheless, the civilisation of the historic centres around the Mediterranean was not without some influence on the germs of modern nations then nursing the hardihood of a vigorous infancy beyond the Danube and the Baltic. The shores of the Atlantic and German oceans, and the islands of the British seas, had long before yielded tribute to the Phnician mariner; and as the archologist and the ethnologist pursue their researches, and restore to light memorials of Europes early youth, they are startled with affinities to the ancient historic nations, in language, arts, and rites, no less than by the recovered traces of an unfamiliar past. But it is altogether different with the New World which Columbus revealed. Superficial students of its monuments have indeed misinterpreted characteristics pertaining to the infantile instincts common to human thought, into fancied analogies with the arts of Egypt; and more than one ingenious philosopher has traced out affinities with the mythology and astronomical science of the ancient East; but the western continent still stands a world apart, with a peculiar people, and with languages, arts, and customs essentially its own. To whatever source the American nations may be traced, they had remained shut in for unnumbered centuries by ocean barriers from all the influences of the historic hemisphere. Yet there the first European explorers found man so little dissimilar to all with which they were already familiar, that the name of Indian originated in the belief, retained by the great cosmographer to the last, that the American continent was no new world, but only the eastern confines of Asia. Such, then, is a continent where man may be studied under circumstances which seem to furnish the best guarantee of his independent development. No reflex light of Grecian or Roman civilisation has guided him on his way. The great sources of religious and moral suasion which have given form to medieval and modern Europe, and so largely influenced the polity and culture of Asia, and even of Africa, were effectually excluded; and however prolonged the period of occupation of the western hemisphere by its own American nations may have been, man is still seen there in a condition which seems to reproduce some of the most familiar phases ascribed to the infancy of the unhistoric world. The records of its childhood are not obscured, as in Europe, by later chroniclings; where, in every attempt to decipher the traces of an earlier history, we have to spell out a nearly obliterated palimpsest. Amid the simplicity of its palography, the aphorism, by which alone the Roman could claim to be among the worlds ancient races acquires a new force: antiquitas seculi, juventus mundi. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 52406
Author: Wilson, Daniel
Release Date: Jun 25, 2016
Format: eBook
Language: English