A WOMAN OF THE ICE AGE
A WOMAN OF THE
ICE AGE
BY
L. P. GRATACAP
Author of “The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars.”
NEW YORK
BRENTANO’S
1906
Copyright, 1906, by
L. P. Gratacap
The Prehistoric Man needs rehabilitation. Atleast it can be urged that there are possible phasesof the prehistoric man that can be elevated intoemotional dignity, not unworthy of romance andheroics. It has been too commonly assumed, underthe omnipresent pressure of scientific generalizations,that the prehistoric was a semi-feral type ofhuman animal, squalid, distorted, simian-faced,thin-thighed and adumbrant, without speech, perchancegroping his blind and biological course upward,by some sort of evolution, into a reasoning,talking, purposive and spiritual creature; that hewas a faunal expression simply, like a triceratopsin the Upper Cretaceous, or a mud-buffalo in thePhilippines.
But there is some sense in claiming for him thepossibilities of dramatic action and feeling, assuringto him the restitution of poetic feeling, religiousdesigns, and emotional episodes. It is sensible, forif we place the prehistoric anywhere before theadvent of human annals, the length in time of hisexistence is so enormous that it is inconceivable that[Pg 2]he could not have evolved speech, and if speech thenthe retinue of feelings and ideas which arise withspeech, just as speech itself is the index of a cerebralcortex that has become elaborately modified.Let us look at this claim more closely; let us evenaffectionately increase, intensify and adorn it.
This story has been written under the influenceof a melodramatic assumption, hostile, it will besaid, to probability, and essentially fanciful, chimericaland fabulous. It cannot be denied that itdeparts, perhaps summarily, from the postulates ofarchæology, as to the life and demeanor and mentalcompass, or, more particularly, emotional resourcesof that necessary object who must, to relieve anthropologyof its lugubrious alarm over accepting aquicker entrance into the world of our race, havelived in the great Prehistoric Day of Geology.
In the day which saw the passage into sedimentaryrecords of the last of the Tertiaries, andcarried on its calendars the rise, amplitude anddisappearance of the Ice Age, in that day Manlived, and he lived all through it, and it was a longday, measured by thousands of years. But whymust it be predicated that man could not havereached in that day such a range of feelings as areinvolved in the rise and refinement of love? It isperfectly true, as it is entirely permissible so tochoose, that this tale of the Woman of the Ice Age,has to do with the advanced types of prehistoric[Pg 3]man, and that thus typified the author has reason toinsist that Lhatto and Ogga are just creations.
The physical perfection of Lhatto and Oggacannot be wisely disputed