beavers

• beavers

61:2.7Var­i­ous groups of mam­mals had their ori­gin in a unique an­i­mal now ex­tinct. This car­niv­o­rous crea­ture was some­thing of a cross be­tween a cat and a seal; it could live on land or in wa­ter and was highly in­tel­li­gent and very ac­tive. In Eu­rope the an­ces­tor of the ca­nine fam­ily evolved, soon giv­ing rise to many species of small dogs. About the same time the gnaw­ing ro­dents, in­clud­ing beavers, squir­rels, go­phers, mice, and rab­bits, ap­peared and soon be­came a no­table form of life, very lit­tle change hav­ing since oc­curred in this fam­ily. The later de­posits of this pe­riod con­tain the fos­sil re­mains of dogs, cats, coons, and weasels in an­ces­tral form.

• beavers

61:5.7These first two ice in­va­sions were not ex­ten­sive in Eura­sia. Dur­ing these early epochs of the ice age North Amer­ica was over­run with mastodons, woolly mam­moths, horses, camels, deer, musk oxen, bi­son, ground sloths, gi­ant beavers, saber-toothed tigers, sloths as large as ele­phants, and many groups of the cat and dog fam­i­lies. But from this time for­ward they were rapidly re­duced in num­bers by the in­creas­ing cold of the glacial pe­riod. To­ward the close of the ice age the ma­jor­ity of these an­i­mal species were ex­tinct in North Amer­ica.

• Indian tribes believed they originated from

74:8.5Away from the in­flu­ences of Dala­ma­tia and Eden, man­kind tended to­ward the be­lief in the grad­ual as­cent of the hu­man race. The fact of evo­lu­tion is not a mod­ern dis­cov­ery; the an­cients un­der­stood the slow and evo­lu­tion­ary char­ac­ter of hu­man prog­ress. The early Greeks had clear ideas of this de­spite their prox­im­ity to Mes­o­po­ta­mia. Al­though the var­i­ous races of earth be­came sadly mixed up in their no­tions of evo­lu­tion, nev­er­the­less, many of the prim­i­tive tribes be­lieved and taught that they were the de­scen­dants of var­i­ous an­i­mals. Prim­i­tive peo­ples made a prac­tice of se­lect­ing for their “totems” the an­i­mals of their sup­posed an­ces­try. Cer­tain North Amer­i­can In­dian tribes be­lieved they orig­i­nated from beavers and coy­otes. Cer­tain African tribes teach that they are de­scended from the hyena, a Malay tribe from the lemur, a New Guinea group from the par­rot.