The Geological Evidence of The Antiquity of Man

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luvial Plain

n Egypt before

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Anti

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the Mis

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Occupation of the Shore

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LUVIAL PLAIN

uggested to the Royal Society by Mr. Leonard Horner, and which were partly carried out at the expense of the Society. The practical part of the undertaking was entrusted by Mr.

the valley, a larger outlay was called for than had been originally contemplated. This expense the late viceroy, Abbas Pasha, munificentl

men inured to the climate and able to carry on the sinking of shafts and borings during the hot month

these consisted of no fewer than fifty-one pits and artesian borings, made where the valley is 16 miles wide from side to side between the Arabian and Libyan deserts, in the latitude of H

mud of the present day, except near the margin of the valley, where thin layers of quartzose sand, such a

ly on the great alluvial plain during the season of inundation. The tenuity of this layer must indeed be extreme, if the French engineers are tolerably correct in their estimate of the amount of sediment formed in a century, which they suppose not to exceed on the average 5 inches. When the waters subside, this thin layer of new soi

borings have been made in deltas, as in those of the Po and Ganges, to the depth of several hundred feet below the sea level it has been found, contrary to expectation, that the deposits passed through were fluviatile throughout, implying, probably, that a general subsidence of those deltas and alluvial formations has taken place. Whether there has been in like manner a sinking of the land in Egypt, we have as yet no means of proving; but Sir Gardner Wilkinson infers it from the positi

pottery were extracted almost everywhere, and from all depths, even where they sank 60 feet below the surface towards the central parts of the valley. In none of these cases did they get to the bottom of the alluvial soil. It has been objected, among other criticisms, that the Arabs can always find whatever their employers desire to obtain. Even those who are too well acquainted with the sagacity and energy of Hekekyan Bey to suspect him of having

n one side and filling up old channels on the other. It has also been asked whether the delta with t

account of these

he "Philosophical T

185

had been thrown down by the river in ancient channels, it would have been stratified, and would not have corresponded so closely with inundation mud, we learn from Captain Newbold that he observed in some excavati

e that this notion is altogether erroneous, and that he has under his charge in the British Museum, first, a small rectangular baked brick, which came from a Theban tomb which bears the name of Thothmes, a superintendent of the granaries of the god Amen Ra, the style of art, inscription, and name, showing that it is as old as the 18th dynasty (about 1450 B.C.); secondly, a brick bearing an inscriptio

clusion, according to Mr. Horner, is very vague, and founded on insufficient data; the amount of matter thrown down by the waters in different parts of the plain varying so much that to s

g 2 or 3 feet below the level of the Mediterranean, in the parallel of the apex of th

osophical Trans

sit of sediment in the delta at 2 1/4 inches in a century;* were we to take 2 1/2

'Egypte "Histoire N

9

up at a time when the apex of the delta was somewhat farther south, or more dista

of Nile mud which had accumulated there since the time when that statue is supposed by some antiquaries to have been erected. Could we have obtained possession of such a measure, the rate of deposition might be judged of, approximately at least, whenever similar mud was observed in other places, or below the foundations of those same monuments. But the ancient Egyptians are known to have been in the habit of enclosing with

ad been shut out for centuries appeared sunk, and could be looked down into from the surrounding grounds, which had been raised by the gradual accumulation over them of sediment annually thrown down. If the waters at length should break into such depressions, they must at f

S OF THE VALL

ientific investigation by Messrs. Squier and Davis of the "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley",* no one suspected that the plains of that river had been occupied,

Contributions"

rial-places, were of the Mexican or Toltec race. Some of the earthworks are on so grand a scale as to embrace areas of 50 or 100 acres within a simple enclosure, and the solid contents of one mould are estimated at 20 million of cubic feet, so that four of them would be more than equal in bulk to the Great Pyramid of Egypt, which compri

for among the buried articles some are made of native copper from Lake Superior, and there are also fou

ncroach on the lower terraces which support them, and again to recede for the distance of nearly a mile, after having undermined and destroyed a part of the works. When the first European settlers entered the valley of the Ohio, they found the whole region covered with an uninterrupted forest, and tenanted by the Red Indian hunter, who roamed over it without any fixed abode, or any traditionary connection with his more civilised predecesso

s in North America

d the surrounding forest. "We may be sure," observed Harrison, "that no trees were allowed to grow so long as the earthworks were in use; and when they were forsaken, the ground, like all newly cleared land in Ohio, would for a time be monopolised by one or two species of tree, such as the yellow locust and the black or white walnut. When the individuals which were the first to get possession of the ground had died out one

SANTOS I

embedded in a solid rock at Santos in Brazil, to which I

me 1 pa

r. Meigs that the River Santos has undermined a large mound, 14 feet in height, and about 3 acres in area, covered with trees, near the town of St.

tions of the Amer

1828 pa

s emergence for the growth on it of a forest of large trees. But after reading again, with more care, the original memoir of Dr. Meigs, I cannot doubt that the shells, like those of eatable kinds, so often accumulated in the mounds of the North American Indians not far from the sea, may have been brought to the place and heaped up with other materials at the time when the bodies were buried. Sub

THE MIS

many years it may have required for the river to bring down from the upper country so large a quantity of earthy matter-the data for such a computation being as yet incomplete-we may still approximate to a minimum of the time which such an operation must have taken, by ascertaining experimentally

teen feet from the surface, beneath four buried forests superimposed one upon the other, the workmen are stated by Dr. B. Dowler to have found some charcoal and a human skeleton, the cranium of which is said to belong to the aboriginal type of the Red Indian race. As the discovery in question had not been made when I saw the excavation in progress at the gas-works in 1846, I cannot form an opinion as to the value of the chronological calculations which have led Dr. Dowler to ascribe to this skeleton an antiquity of 50,000 years. In seve

r. W. Usher in Nott

ind" pa

EEFS OF

irection. This growth is still in full activity, and assuming the rate of advance of the land to be one foot in a century, the reefs being built up from a depth of 75 feet, and that each reef has in its turn added ten miles to the coast, Professor

ott and Gliddon

ccordance with his mode of estimating the rate of growth of those reefs, to be about 10,000 years old, some fos

SITS OF SEA

e last 4000 or 5000 years can neither be insignificant in volume or extent. They lie hidden, for the most part, from our sight; but we have opportunities of examining them at certain points where newly-ga

t period have become accessible to human observation, I have adduced the s

of Geology" I

clay, partly of volcanic matter, and contain fragments of sculpture, pottery, and the remains of buildings, together with great numbers of shells, retaining in part their colou

evel of the ground, are frequent, in which freshwater shells of species now inhabiting the lakes and rivers of that region are embedded, together with the remains of pottery, often at the dept

Lorenzo, near Lima, Mr. Darwin found, at the altitude of 85 feet above the sea, pieces of cotton-thread, plaited rush, and the head of a stalk of Indian corn, the whole of which had evidently been embedded with the shells. At the same height, on the neighbouring mainland, he found other signs corroborating the opinion that the ancient bed of the sea had there also been uplifted 85 feet since the region was first peopled by the Peruvian race. But similar shelly masses are also met with at much

red, except some slight additions to the deltas of rivers, or the loss of narrow strips of land where the sea had encroached upon its shores. But modern observations have tended continually to dispel this delusion, and the geologist is now convinced that at no given era of the past have the boundaries of land and sea, or the height of the one and d

AN PERIOD OF THE CENTR

est coasts of the central part of Scotland, there are lines of raised beaches, contai

Margins" 1848 and pa

s of the Wernerian

C. Macl

feet being considered as the more ancient, and owing its superior elevation to a continuance of the upheaving movement.

5, informs us that in the course of the eighty years preceding that date, no less than seventeen canoes had been dug out of this estuarine silt, and that he had personally inspected a large number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in silt under the streets of Glasgow, one in a vertical position with the prow uppermost as if it had sunk in a storm. In the inside of it were a number of marine shells. Twelve other cano

rt of the British As

gow, Past and

e property of Bankton in 1853, being 18 feet in length, and very elaborately constructed. Its prow was not unlike the beak of an antique galley; its stern, formed of a triangular-shaped piece of oak, fitted in exactly like those of our day. The planks were fastened to the ribs, partly by singularly shaped oaken pins, and partly by what must have been square nails of some kind of metal; these h

rly Journal of the

8 1862 p

implies that they belong to the same era, for in the beds of all great rivers and estuaries, there are changes continually in progress brought about by the deposition, removal, and redeposition of gravel, sand, and fine sediment, and by the shifting of the channel of the main currents from year to year, and from century to century. All these it behoves the geologist an

o the bottom just beneath low-water mark; another might experience a similar fate on the following day, but in the middle of the channel. Both would become silted up on the floor of the estuary; but as that floor would be perhaps 20 feet deeper in the centre than towards the margin of the river, the one canoe might actually be twenty feet deeper in the alluvium than the other; and on the upheaval of the alluvial deposits, if we were to argue merely from the depth at which the remains were embedded, we should pronounce the canoe found at the one locality to be immensely older than the other, seeing that the fine mud of the estuary is deposited very slowly and that it must therefore have taken a long period to form so great a thickness as 20 feet. Again, the tides and currents of the estuary,

rly Journal of the

8 1862,

rs to have taken place gradually and by intermittent movements, for Mr. Buchanan describes several narrow terraces one above the other on the site of the city itself, with steep intervening slopes composed of the laminated estuary formation. Each

t cannot be assigned to the stone period, but must ha

land and sea, in the central district of Scotland, since the construction of the Roman or Pictish wall (the "Wall of Antonine"), which reached from the Firth of Forth to that of the Clyde. The two extremities

acknowledged that the wall terminated upon an eminence called the Chapel Hill, near the village of West Kilpatrick, on the Clyde. The foot of this hill, Mr. Geikie estimates to be about 25 or 27 feet above high-water mark, so that a subsidence of 25 feet could not lay it under water. Antiquaries have s

th, lead to similar inferences. In the first place, it has long been known that there is a raised beach containing marine shells of living littoral species, at a height of about 25 feet, at Leith, as well as at other places along the coast above and below Edinburgh. Inveresk, a few miles below that city, is the site of an ancient Roman port, and if we supp

d although some silt carried down in suspension by the waters of the Forth may account for a part of the gain of low land, we yet require an upward movement of about 20 feet to explain the growth of the dreary expanse of mud now stretching along the shore and extending outwards, where it attains its greatest breadth, well-nigh two miles, across w

gh New Philosophica

61

se of Stirling, a low tract of land consisting of loamy and peaty beds, in which several skeletons of whales of large size

Philosophical Jour

Wernerian Soci

ich a hole, about an inch in diameter, had been perforated. Another whale, 85 feet long, was found at Du

osophical Journal"

o at an elevation of between 20 and 30 feet above the sea. Near two of these whales, pointed instruments of deer's horn were found, one of

Wernerian Society"

below Stirling, shows that the upheaval by which the raised beach of Leith was laid dry extended far westward probably as

inferred from the Celtic name of Inch being attached to many hillocks, which rise above the general level of the alluvial plains, implying that these

traced up to a height of 14 feet above the sea by Mr. W.J. Hamilton at Elie, on the

the Geological So

e 2

estuary of the Forth, the conversion of sea into land has always been referred to the silting up of estuaries, and not to upheaval. Thus Horsley insists on the difficulty of explai

nia" page

f 25 feet took place not only since the first human population settled in the island; but long after metallic implements had come into use, and

und on the coast in the parish of Dundonald, lying 50 feet above the sea-level, on the surface of the boulder-clay or till, and covered with gravel containing marine shells. If we suppose the upward movement to have been uniform in central Scotland before and after the Roman era, and assume that as 25 fe

land may not have been uniform, and its direction not always upwards, and there may have been long stationary periods, one of which of more

OF COR

ral human skulls and works of art, buried in an estuary deposit, were found in mining gravel for tin at Pentuan, near St. Austell, the skulls lying at the depth of 40 feet from the surface, and

s, and ships, buried in ancient river-beds in England, and in

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ks of art implying a rude state of civilization, and some vessels built before the introduction of iron, and even the remains of an ancient hut, the marine strata containing it, which had been formed during a previous depression, having been upraised, so that the upper beds are now 60 feet higher than the surface of the Baltic. In t

ascend to the height of 200 feet; and beds of clay and sand of the same age attain elevations of 300 and even 600 feet in Norway, where they have been usually described as "raised beaches." They are, however, th

mammalia were known, they would, in all likelihood, be found to be referable, at least in part, to extinct species; for, according to Loven (an able living naturalist of Norway), the species do not constitute such an assemblage as now inhabits corresponding latitudes in the North S

t of which the evidence is here brought to light. There are also other independent reasons for suspecting that the antiquity of these deposits may be indefinitely great as compared to the historical period. I allude to their present elevation above the sea, some of them rising, in Norway, to the height of 600 feet or more.

s" 9th editio

considerable area of the former bed of the North Sea, had been uplifted vertically to that amount, and converted into land in the course of the last 5000 years. A mean rate of continuous vertical elevation of 2 1/2 feet in a c