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McCabe, Joseph, 1867-1955

"The Story of Evolution"

This distribution suggests a centre in the Indian Ocean,
where there was much more land in the Tertiary Era than there is
now. We await further exploration in that region and Africa.
There is nothing improbable in the supposition that man wandered
into Europe in the Tertiary, and has left in the Eoliths the
memorials of his lowly condition. The anthropoid apes certainly
reached France. However that may be, the Ice-Age would restrict
all the Primates to the south. It will be seen, on a glance at
the map, that a line of ice-clad mountains would set a stern
barrier to man's advance in the early Pleistocene, from the
Pyrenees to the Himalaya, if not to the Pacific. He therefore
spread westward and southward. One branch wandered into
Australia, and was afterwards pressed by more advanced invaders
(the present blacks of Australia) into Tasmania, which seems to
have been still connected by land. Another branch, or branches,
spread into Africa, to be driven southward, or into the central
forests, by later and better equipped invaders. They survive,
little changed (except by recent contact with Europeans), in the
Bushmen and in large populations of Central Africa which are
below the level of tribal organisation.


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