Man was certainly in Europe and possibly even in Britain, which was then united to the Continent by continuous dry land, before the ice-age; but no remains of that earliest inhabitant have yet been found in the Isle of Man. The so-called " River-drift " man has only left his remains in the South and South-east of England up to about a line drawn from the mouth of the Severn to the Wash, while the rather later " Cave " men extended further up to the North of Yorkshire. These were the men of the Palveo lithic Age, when the use of metals was not known and the stone implements were rude and unpolished. These primitive weapons, tools and other remains are found in association with the bones of long extinct animals charac teristic of the Pleistocene period, such as the mammoth, the cave bear and cave lion, the bison, a hyaena, and the woolly-haired rhinoceros. No traces of the presence of man at this early period or of any of such extinct mammals have, however, been found in our district. As Great Britain became severed from the Continent before the next race of men, those of the Neolithic Age, spread over the country these must have arrived by sea; and as Man has been an island since even earlier times the successive waves of immigration which swept across from East to West must all have reached our shores by boat — unless, as Lomas has suggested, the sandy coast of North Lancashire may possibly have extended in prehistoric times by way of the Bahama banks to the Point of Ayre.
The Neolithic or later Stone Age man was of that non-Aryan pre-Celtic race which is usually called Iberian, and is supposed to be related to the Basques of the South of France and Spain. Man of the later Stone Age, when the next wave of immigration arrived, was no doubt driven back, but was probably assimilated rather than exterminated by the Celtic invaders from the East, who brought with them a knowledge of working in copper and inaugurated the age of bronze.
The Celtic tribes that invaded the West of Europe at the end of the later Stone Age have been divided into an earlier Goidelic (the Gaedhils of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man) and a later Brythonic wave, separated possibly by centuries. The Goidels probably absorbed more of the blood of their non-Aryan predecessors and gave rise to those northerly and western Celtic nations that speak a Gaelic tongue; while the later Brythons became the more southerly peoples of Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. The Celtic element in the Isle of Man is Goidelic, and that with its Neolithic strain forms the basis of the Manks people, reinforced later on by a strong Scandinavian influence. The fourth or Iron Age was a late Celtic period which extends into historic times. The majority of the prehistoric remains in the Isle of Man belong to the Neolithic and the Bronze periods, and it may well have been that in this remote and limited area these stages of civilisation may have each persisted on to later times than in other parts of Europe.
There seems reason to believe that the use of copper spread in late Neolithic times from Cyprus along the shores of the Mediterranean to Western Europe; but the coming of copper and bronze to Britain is usually asso ciated with invasion of the country by an Aryan race, the Celts, who were taller than the Neolithic inhabitants. For the bearing of the local folklore upon prehistoric questions, we are told, Mannanan Mac Lir, the non Aryan magician, " kept by necromancy the Land of Mann under mists"; and, when routed by St. Patrick, according to the Manks legends, they avenged their wrongs on human beings." The majority of the prehistoric remains in the Isle of Man belong to the Neolithic and the Bronze periods, and it may well have been that in this remote and limited area these stages of civilisation may have each persisted on to later times than in other parts of Europe. The knowledge of copper and bronze is supposed to have reached Crete about 2800 BC, and in France Montelius estimates that the Bronze Age commenced in 2000 BC and ended about 850 BC. The earliest traces of man met with in our district show him to have been then in the Neolithic stage of civilisation.
Archaeology traced back to its beginnings merges into Geology; and we find on examination that the Isle of Man has been a. land-mass since very early geological times. The precise age of the oldest stratified rocks forming the foundation of the island is very difficult to determine owing to the absence of undoubted fossil remains and the alterations due to heat, pressure and earth movements. The Manx slates which build up its back bone from Bradda Head to North Barrule are however certainly not later than Lower Silurian, and are placed by Mr. Lamplugh in his recent Memoir 1 as Upper Cambrian, with a query; and this central ridge which constitutes the mountain ranges seems to have been an insulated mass even as early as the beginning of the Carboniferous period.
Its insular character is as well maintained in its physical as in its geological features. The erosive agency of the simple drainage system descending radially to the sea from the central hill-range, together with that of the waves which surround it, is adequate to explain all the contours of its present surface. It must indeed frequently during its history have been re-united to the mainland by a continuous land surface; but at such times it probably still retained in some degree its characteristic individuality, and arose above the surrounding plain as a hilly tract with a self-contained drainage, although its streams may then have been tributary to a larger river system lying beyond its limits.
Most of the larger streams of the Island rise in the vicinity of Snaefell and fall outward in different directions to the sea, the Sulby river and Glen Aldyn water draining northward, the Corna and the Laxey rivers east ward, the Glass and the Baldwin south-eastward, and the Neb south-westward. The drainage of the smaller tract south of the transverse valley is radial from a separate centre in the souith-western portion of the hill-chain, whence flow the Glen Rushen waters north and north westward, the Foxdale river northward, and the Santon, the Silverburn, and the Colby southward. In later post-glacial times this land was covered in great part with forests, particularly of oak, fir, and hazel, the remains of which, off Strandhall and Mount Gawne in the South, may be traced below the present tide mark, and are of very special interest to us as having possibly been still in existence when Man first made his appearance in our island.
Measured in years, the formation of these forests and peat beds must have spread over a very long period-a time of gradual upheaval by no means confined to this small area, but part of a general movement, to be after wards followed by a depression of the land throughout Great Britain and Ireland, which carried the ancient forests down in some places to below the present sea-level. They lay upon a bed of fine sand, covered with a stratum about four feet thick of peat-trunks of oak trees, &c., and over the peat was a bed of blue alluvial clay to the depth of three or four feet." In the same work, he mentions it as " singular that an oak tree removed from this sub merged forest exhibited upon its upper surface the marks of a hatchet "; and further adds, at second hand, that " the foundations of a primitive hut were laid bare, and that therein were some antique uncouth-looking instruments, once the property it may be of the primitive wood cutters.
The 10-fathom line around our coast has been considered to be roughly the boundary of the land at the time of greatest elevation. This forest growth has been shown to belong to the Neolithic, or later stone age, by the presence of animals first domesticated, and introduced to our country by Neolithic man, as well as by the absence of the extinct mammalia characteristic of the previous periods. The climate would be necessarily affected by the enlarged area of land, the extended water-system and the growth of forests, and must have been generally more damp, with greater extremes between summer heat and winter cold. It was probably a good deal more favourable to the formation of peat-beds than the conditions seen at the present day. Associated with the silt at the bottom of these peat-beds we have records of the Great Deer usually known as the " Irish Elk," Cervus giganteus (formerly called Megaceros hibernicus), a noble animal with a spread of antlers extending to over 9 feet. There is reason to believe that during historic times, since the disappearance of the ancient Neolithic forests, (ogham) trees have been few and of scanty growth over the greater part of the island. Old European civilization was well-developed in the Balkan peninsula. All species of Ogham trees are natural placenames in Italy, Germany, France, and Switzerland, near seas and continental ice.
The glacial conditions which during the Ice Age overwhelmed the Isle of Man. It was about this time that it is supposed that the Irish Elk may have crossed the retreating and melting ice-fields to reach the possibly verdant hills of Man, just as its near relation the Reindeer is known to traverse the frozen sea north of Siberia, crossing from island to island by ice. Further search may produce still more satisfactory evidence that the elk survived to the period of these peats and forests, and so became a contemporary of our earliest inhabitants of Man.