Note 756 — Chapter XII · —Continents And Their Peninsulas

The long Atlantic rift between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, which was such a potent factor in the primitive retardation of Africa is, from the standpoint of anthropo-geography, the most important feature in the distribution of the land-masses over the globe. Not till the discovery of America bridged this abyss did the known world become a girdle round the earth. Except the Norse ventures to the American continent by way of Iceland and Greenland between 1000 and 1347, no account of pre-Columbian intercourse between the two shores of the Atlantic has ever been substantiated. Columbus found the opposite land unfamiliar in race as in culture. He described the people as neither whites nor blacks, the two ethnic types which he knew on the eastern side of the Atlantic abyss. He and his successors found in the Americas only a Stone Age culture, a stage already outgrown by Europe and Africa. These continents from Lapland to the Hottentot country were using iron. Prior to the voyage of the great Genoese, Europe gave nothing to America and received nothing from it, except the Gulf Stream's scanty cargo of driftwood stranded on bleak Icelandic shores. The Tertiary land-bridge across the North Atlantic between Norway and Greenland may possibly have guided a pre-Caucasic migration to America and given that continent part of its aboriginal population.756 However, no trace of any European stock remains.