Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

i8INTRODUCTIONdevices merely shows up as a development and improvementof that of their predecessors, to whom in point of time theysurely stand nearer than any other known race ?The objection is pertinent.But, startling as the statementmay seem, there now exist, or have within the last centuryexisted, races, who in the actual material, and in the mode offashioning, of their weapons are, in the opinion of experts,nearer akin to and resemble more closely Palseohthic thandid Neolithic man.Speaking of the Eskimos, Cartailhac simply summarises theevidence of many authorities, when he writes " the likenessesin the above points are so striking that one sees in them thetrue descendants of the Troglodytes of Perigord,"Professor Boyd-Dawkins goes farther. He finds theEskimos so intimately connected with the Cave Men in theirmanners and customs, in their art, especially in their methodof representing animals, and in their implements and weapons,that " the only possible explanation is that they belong tothe same race : that they are representatives of the Troglodytes,protected within the Arctic circle from those causes bywhich their forbears had been driven from Europe and Asia.They stand at the present day wholly apart from other livingraces, and are cut off from all by the philologer and thecraniologist." ^Food supply probably effected the migration of the Eskimos,or rather of their ancestors from Europe. ^ At the close of thelast ice age, as the ice cap retreated Northwards, the reindeerfollowed the ice, and the Eskimo followed the reindeer.Of the aborigines of Tasmania Professor E. B. Tylortestifies : "If there have remained anywhere up to moderntimes men, whose condition has changed little since the earlyStone Age, the Tasmanians seem such a people. Many tribesof the late Stone Age have lasted on into modern times, but itappears that the Tasmanians by the workmanship of their^ Emile de Cartailhac et H. Breuil, La Caverne d'Altamira, Paris, 1906,p. 145. Professor Boyd-Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, London, 1880,p. 233. But their technique in flaking, etc., suggests a later date.^ The route was probably by Russia, Siberia, and across the land now cutby the Behring Straits.