RECENT ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES RELATING TO THE ANTIQUITY OF HUMAN LIFE IN THIS REGION.

     The beginning of everything is the object of a deal of investigation all over the world.  Whole libraries are filled with opinions of many scholars in as many different languages giving as many varying notions regarding the antiquity of human life.  In such a discussion our particular spot on the earth cannot very well be overlooked.  Much as we may be interested in the pioneer life and the modern Coshocton County there is something in the mystery of the ages that holds us in awe before these hills and valleys where a wonderful procession of mankind issued from Cimmerian night and vanished into pathetic and fathomless silence.
     As everyone knows from the pages of geology, there was once upon a time whirling through space a ball of fire whose surface in course of ages gradually crusted, cooling the air until moisture formed and the first rain washed our young world.  The waters tore their way through.  Explosions and earthquakes shook the new earth in frightful convulsion, while the wild-flaming, wild thundering train of of heaven's artillery swept across inky skies.  Upheavals of rock clung into continents.  Receding waters became seas.  And to this sublime dawn of the earth's creation the geologist has given a name - the Eozoic age - a million years ago, what matter if more or less, a time that no man knows.
     The world turned on in the wheel of time and passed through its Palaeozoic age, when life appeared in a tadpole state, and if you believe in evolution (which you can if you want to) we were those self-same tadpoles along this one-time seashore where

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     For it is written in geology that the sea covered what is now Coshocton County long enough to form the stratifications, including the shale with its fossil remains of the fish age, and eons later the coal and limestone imprinted with the plant tracery of the carboniferous age.  Then the hot lands heaved amain and in Langdon Smith's lines on the Darwinian theory.

     In time came the Mammoth.  Remains of huge elephants and mastodons have been found in peat marshes of these valleys, according to C. H. Mitchener of the New Philadelphia bar, thirty-three years ago in his history of our Coshocton valleys, a rare work even in this day.
     As the eons came and the eons went more snow accumulated in the North than summer suns could melt.  Then formed that vast mass of slowly moving ice which geologists have decided pressed down from the north pole toward this latitude, similar to the present ice-covered waste of Northern Greenland.  In Europe the ancient glacial covering spread over Britain and the Scandinavian peninsula, Western Russia, Northern Germany and the whole valley of Switzerland, and in America as far south as our region and thence southwesterly in a direction of some variableness.
     The signs of this ice sheet are traced in glacial scratches on stones.  The geologist reasons that the grinding ice leveled the land, and that boulders, drift and rocks carried from the North in the ice-sheet's freezing embrace were left here when the ice finally melted.  There are some, however, who reject the ice evidence that persuades others, and who hold that a flood instead produced all the phenomena.

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     Coshocton County valleys are lined with gravel terraces, the drift deposit laid down by the swollen streams of the melting glacial years.  Much of the city of Coshocton is built upon a glacial terrace.  Granitic pebbles from Northern Canada are massed here with local pebbles.  Verily, "sermons in stones," and cyclopedias in pebbles.
     H. J. Lewis, of Pittsburg, and one-time president of the Society of Engineers of Western Pennsylvania, has an interesting theory regarding the gravel terrace or bench that lines the Tuscarawas valley.  He has traced its entire length, and from pebbles found in it near his home town of West Lafayette he is convinced that the waters of the St. Lawrence River once followed this course.  These pebbles, he avers, are seen nowhere else except along the shores of the St. Lawrence.  According to Professor George Frederick Wright, of Oberlin, among America's eminent archaeologists, there were no Niagara Falls and no Lake Erie before the glacial period, while northern rivers found new beds with the retreat of the ice.
     It is in such gravel terraces as ours that archaeologists are searching today for evidence that man inhabited the earth during the glacial period ten thousand years ago or more, according to various estimates.  The attention of the scientific world was drawn to the first discovery of human implements in the gravel terraces near Abbeville, in Northern France, seventy years ago.  Later, more implements of a similar type were found in England.  In recent years a most important archaeological discovery made in America was the finding of paleolithic implements by Dr. C. C. Abbott at a depth of five to twenty feet in the gravel bluff overlooking the Delaware River at Trenton.
     The hatchet-like implements, and fish-spears are accepted as paleolithic because found in undisturbed deposits of the glacial age.  They are now in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
     Indians fashioned similar objects of flint, but Dr. Abbott, who is well known as an investigator of Indian antiquities, describes the paleolithic implements as of argillite or slate, resembling closely what European archaeologists call stone axes of the Chellean type.
     More recent discoveries of these paleolithic implements have been made in the gravel terraces at Madisonville and Loveland, showing that glacial man was in Ohio.  Wherefore Professor Wright enjoins that wherever excavations are being made in these glacial

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drifts someone should be on the lookout for paleoliths, the discovery of which would interest scientists the world over.  Nor should the observer be too easily discouraged, says the professor, because hunting a chipped stone in a great bank of pebbles and gravel is like looking for a needle in a haystack.  The writer cheerfully attests to the difficulty after personally satisfying himself by a feverish scramble along the walls of Coshocton's gravel pit, with clawing hands and an archaeological stare.
     Having evidence that man existed as early as the glacial age, what manner of being was he?  Dr. Abbott argues he was the ancestor of the Eskimo, driven northward by the invading Indian, but the paleolithic man's implements no more resemble those of the Eskimo than those of people in the later stone age.  Some yet consider glacial man of the same blood as the ancient cave-dwellers of France.
     If we accept the view of Henry W. Haynes of the Archaeological Institute of America, as set forth in the Narrative and Critical History of America, whatever primitive people may have occupied this region they were at least no mysterious, superior race, and they did not even reach a stage of culture that could properly be called civilization.
     This may restrain any ardent local archaeologist from asserting this to be the seat of the vanished empire of Atlantis, though several writers have declared their belief it was somewhere in America as an offset to learned commentators who have variously and wildly supported the claims of Sweden, Africa, Spitzbergen, and Palestine.
     At any rate it is an interesting tale of Plato's whether or not we endorse the conservative opinion of Longinus as expressed to his pupils in Alexandria that Plato designed the tradition merely as a literary ornament.  As Plato's story runs, when Solon was in Egypt an aged priest said to him, "Solon an aged priest said to him, "Solon, you Greeks are all children.  You know of but one deluge, whereas there have been many destructions of mankind, both by flood and fire; in Egypt alone is ancient history recorded."  And the dialogue goes on to describe the island of Atlantis somewhere off the Spanish coast where a mighty power held sway about as many thousand years ago as when glacial man hunted the mammoth in Coshocton valleys.  This power pressed hard upon other nations of the known world to subjugate them all.  "Then came

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a day and night of great floods and earthquakes; Atlantis disappeared, swallowed by the waves."
     So much for the visions of poets and the theories of philosophers in their ancient guessing at the possibility of such a land, as some today imagine an antarctic continent or an open polar sea.  Enough that archaeologists generally have settled it in boos if not by the spade that glacial man perished before a foreign invasion from Asia or the Pacific islands.  How far this theory of an Oriental invasion has gone and to what extent it has fostered the belief that from such early Asiatics were descended the tribes which for ages dwelt in Coshocton County, we will not look into, even if we don't sanction.

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