Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1922-12-12
NO. 42.-A STRANGE SURVIVAL IN
AMERICA

And in these thousands of years during
which man was making his way step by ster
from the barbarism of the heliolithic culture
to civilization at these old-world centers
Wnat was happening in the rest of the world
To the north of these centers, from the
Rhine to the Pacific, the Nordc and Mon
goIlan peoples as we have told were also
learning the use OF metals; possibly they
were the discoveries of metals; but while
the civilizations were settling down these
men or the great plains were becoming mi
gratory and developing from a slow wander.
ing life toward a complete seasonal nomad.
ism.
To the south of the civilized zone, in cen.
trai and southern Africa, the negro was
making slower progress and that it would
seem, under the stimulus of invasion by the
whittier tribes from the Mediterranean re-
glons, bringing with them in succession cul.
tlvat1on and the use of metals.
Ihese white men came to the black by two
routes; across the Sahara to the west as
Berbers and Tuaregs and the like, to mix
with the negro and create such quasi-white
races as the Fulas; and also by way of the
Nile, where the Baganda (-Gandafolk) of
Uganda for example, may possibly be of re-
mote white origin. The African forests were
denser then, and spread eastward and north
ward from the Upper Nile.
A Land Bridge to Australia
The islands of the East Indies three thou
sand years ago, were probably still only in
habited here and there by stranded patches
OF Palaeollthic Australoids, who had wan
dered thtther in those immemorial ages when
there was nearly complete land bridge by
the way of the East Indies to Australia The
islands Of Oceania were uninhabted The
spreading of the heliolithic peoples by sea-
going canoes into the islands Of the Pacific
came much later in the history of man, at
earliest ajthousanG years BIC. Still later did
they reach Madagascar. The beauty of New
Zealand also yet wasted upon man
kind; its highest living creatures were a
great ostrich-like bird, the moa, now extinct
and the little kiwi. which has feathers like
coarse hair and the mereSt rudiments OF
wings.
L he Ancestors of the Indians
In North America a group of MongoIoid
tribes were now cut off altogether from the
old world. They were spreading slowly
southwark, hunting the innumerable bison of
the plains. They still had to learn for them
selves the secrets of a separate agriculture
based on maize, and in South America to
tame the lama to their service, and to build
up in Mexico and Yucatan and Peru three
separate civilizations of very curious and
distinctive type
When men reached the southern extrem-
1ty of America the megatherium the giant
sloth, and the glyptodon, the giant armadillo,
were still living
These American primitive civilizations may
ultimately prove Of very great help to our
understanding of human development be-
cause they seem to have persevered right up
to the time of their extinction by the Euro
pean discoveries at the end o., the fifteenth
century A. D., ideas and methods that passed
out of old world experience 5000 or 5000
years B. C.
They never got to the use of iron; their
metallurgy was of the simplest kind, and
their chief metals, copper and gold, they
found native. Their stonework, pottery and
and weaving however were at a very high
level, and they were extremely skillful dyers.
Savage Rites of Human Sacrifice
Like the long superseded primitive civili-
cations of the old world, these commune
ties displayed close association of human
sacrifice with the processes of seed time