Man and His Ancestor Author:Charles Morris Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill RELICS OF ANCIENT MAN If now, instead of seeking for evidences of man's ancestry within the human body, in survivals of ancient anatomical structures, ... more »we seek for them within the crust of the earth, we find ourselves confronted with evidences of a great antiquity of the human race, partly in implements of human manufacture, partly in ancient or fossilized bones of primitive man. These indicate not only great remoteness of origin, but also a very gradual advance from the lowest stage of inventive ability to the high level now attained. These relics of primitive man are divided by Dana into ten varieties, (i) Buried human bones; (2) stone arrow and lance heads, hatchets, pestles, etc.; (3) flint chips, left in the manufacture of implements; (4) arrow heads and other implements made of bone and deer horn; (5) bones, teeth, and shells bored or notched by human hands; (6) cut or carved wood; (7) bone, horn, ivory, or stone graven with figures, or cut into the shapes of animals ; (8) marrow bones broken longitudinally to obtain the marrow for food; (9) fragments of charcoal and other indications of the use of fire; (10) fragments of pottery. Relics of the kinds above cited have been found at intervals for many years past, but their age and significance were doubted, and only within some forty years has the great antiquity of man upon the earth been generally acknowledged by scientists. The most important early find of ancient implements was made by Boucher de Perthes in 1841 and subsequently, in the high level gravels of the valley of the Somme, in Picardy, France. In deep layers of these gravels, which were deposited at a period when the river occupied a wider and higher channel than at present, he found rude flint weapons and tools, bearing plain evidences of human wor...« less