THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 212, 12 February 1875, Page 3

THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.

The New York Nation condenses from an English scientific periodical some interesting speculations of Dr Alfred Russell Wallace, on the probable antiquity of the human species. They may well startle, it says, even those who have long since come to the conclusion that 6000 years carry us but a small way back to the original home. In fact, in Dr Wallace’s reckoning, 6000 years are but a day. He reviews the various attempts to determine the antiquity of human remains or works of art, and finds the bronze age in Europe to have been pretty accurately fixed at 3000 or 4000 years ago, the stone age of the Swiss lake dwellings at 5000 or 7000 years, and an indefinite anterior period. The burnt brick found sixty feet deep in the Nile alluvium, indicates an antiquity of 20,000 years ; another fragment at seventy-two feet gives 30,000 years. A human skeleton found at a depth of sixteen feet below four hundred buried forests, superimposed upon each other, has been calculated by Dr Fowler to have an antiquity of 50,000 years. But all these estimates pale before those which Kent’s cavern at Torquay legitimates. Here the drip of the stalagmite is the chief factor of our computations, giving us an upper floor, which divides the relics of the last two or three thousand years, from a deposit full of the bones of extinct mammalia, indicating an Arctic climate. Names cut in the stalagmite more than two hundred j ears ago are still legible; in other words, where the stalagmite is twelve feet thick and the drip still very copious, not more than a hundredth of a foot has been deposited in two centuries —a x’ate of five feet in 100,000 years. Below this, however, we have a thick, much older and more crystaline (i.e. more slowly formed) stalagmite, beneath which again, “ in a solid breccia, very different from the cave-earth, undoubted works of art have been found.” Mr Wallace assumes only 100,000 years for the upper floors and about 250,000 for the lower, and adds 150,000 for the immediate cave-earth, by which he arrives at the sum of half a million years that have probably elapsed since articles of human workmanship were buried in the lowest depths of Kent’s cavern.