For the banks of the river Paraguay and the steppes
of the Bolivian Cordilleras are unquestionably the earliest traditional
homes of both Tupis and Aymaras.
These movements took place not in large bodies under the stimulus of a
settled purpose, but step by step, family by family, as the older
hunting grounds became too thickly peopled. This fact hints unmistakably
at the gray antiquity of the race. It were idle even to guess how great
this must be, but it is possible to set limits to it in both directions.
On the one hand, not a tittle of evidence is on record to carry the age
of man in America beyond the present geological epoch. Dr. Lund examined
in Brazil more than eight hundred caverns, out of which number only six
contained human bones, and of these six only one had with the human
bones those of animals now extinct. Even in that instance the original
stratification had been disturbed, and probably the bones had been
interred there.[35-1] This is strong negative evidence. So in every
other example where an unbiased and competent geologist has made the
examination, the alleged discoveries of human remains in the older
strata have proved erroneous.
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