PREHISTORIC TRAVEL
This primitive travel was moreover in the truest sense exploration, for these travelers were the first to penetrate into lands wholly unknown and previously untrodden by the feet of man. Once the greater part of the world was overrun, however, the need for travel was by no means at an end. Intensive exploration in the search for the best hunting grounds and fishing places, or, with the advent of agriculture, for suitable and fertile soils, must have continued for generations. During the long period in which human civilization has been developing it is clear, moreover, that in the shifting of populations, which has constantly been going on, the same areas have thus been explored again and again, now by this people, now by that. Of these countless travels and travelers, little definite trace of course remains, and it is only with the beginning of the historic period that records of travel become available.
Although of this prehistoric travel we can find no accounts, yet we can gain some idea of its character from observation of the savage and barbarous peoples of the world to-day. Now, as then probably, there are sedentary, stay-at-home peoples, contented to live and die within a narrow horizon, people whose individual radius of travel may in a whole lifetime not exceed a score of miles, and whom neither commerce nor conquest can tempt beyond their own small sphere. Now, as then, there are other peoples in whom the spirit of travel is strong, in whom is a great restlessness, an inborn tendency to wander in quest of food or trade or conquest. The radius of travel of a single individual in such a tribe may, as for example in the case of certain Eskimos, reach as much as a thousand miles. But such extensive wanderings are, on the whole, rare among savage peoples, and we may well admire the courage and skill of those old Polynesian travelers who, according to tradition, dared in their small canoes to push their search for new lands for to the south beyond their sunny seas, until they reached the fogs and drift ice of the Antarctic.