John Lubbock (afterwards Lord Avebury) served a useful pur- pose for a time in discriminating between the early and the later methods of flint-working before the discovery of bronze. But it is now known that the great break in the technique of stone-working did not occur at the transition from the Palaeo- lithic to the Neolithic phase,, but when the so-called " Lower Palaeolithic" gave place to the so-called "Upper Palaeolithic."
The vast significance of this great revolution in man's history (at any rate in western Europe) is emphasized by the fact that it coincided with the final disappearance of the species H. neanderthalensis and the coming of the members of the species to which we ourselves (and all existing members of the human family) belong, i.e. H. sapiens. The replacement of the de- graded type of mankind with his crude Mousterian culture and the coming of H. sapiens with his greater skill and artistic ap- titude is surely the most significant revolution in the whole of man's history. To discriminate between these two phases of cul- ture, Elliot Smith has suggested the terms, " palaeanthropic " and " neoanthropic " to apply respectively to the extinct species and their works and H. sapiens and his achievements ("Primitive Man," Proceedings of the British Academy, 1917).
All the races of man that exist at present belong to the species sapiens, but they differ profoundly in type and in the probable dates of their differentiation the one from the other. The most primitive race of all is the aboriginal Australian, who represents the survival of the earliest phase of H. sapiens with relatively slight change. After he separated from the rest of mankind he found a home in India, where he formed the substratum of the aboriginal people called pre-Dravidian. The rest of this race wandered E. until they reached Australia, small remnants remaining in some of the Indonesian Is. as abiding witnesses of the ancient migration. Probably at a much later period the Negro and Negritto became differentiated from the rest of mankind and found their area of characterization in tropical Africa, from which place in later times negroid peoples drifted along the whole southern littoral of Asia to Indonesia and Melanesia. It is probable that the Bushmen and Hottentot races represent early differentiations from the Negro stock. These two races, Australian and Negro, retain the black colour of skin which originally was probably common to all mankind and his nearest relatives, the gorilla and chimpanzee. After the Australian and Negro had been differentiated the rest of the human family attained a higher plane of development asso- ciated with a bleaching of the skin, a refinement of the features and a further growth and specialization of the brain. This pale- faced stock became broken up during the glacial period into four main stocks which became isolated the one from the other. Probably the earliest to wander off and become segregated - possibly in the region of the Yellow river was the proto- Mongolian group which in course of time became specialized in structure as the Mongolian race. The next group probably found its area of characterization in N.E. Africa where it assumed the less specialized, i.e. relatively primitive, features that dis- tinguish the Brown or Mediterranean race. Two other groups became isolated in the N. one, probably in Turkestan,- assumed brachycephalic traits and developed into the so-called Alpine or Armenoid race; the other, somewhere to the N.W., retained its primitive dolichocephaly but developed the distinctively blond traits that are the obtrusive characteristic of the Nordic race. Within each of the areas of characterization groups be- came isolated and differentiated in greater or less degree the one from the other. Moreover at the end of the glacial period, when the great ice-barriers disappeared there was extensive inter- mingling not merely of the formerly isolated groups of the same race, but also of different races. In Siberia especially there was a complex intermixture of Armenoid, Mongolian and Nordic peoples; and in western Asia and the Mediterranean littoral a variety of blends of Brown and Armenoid peoples. It was prob- ably after a certain amount of such intermixture had occurred near the head-waters of the Yenisei that an essentially proto- Mongolian people moved E. and crossed into America as the first inhabitants of the New World.
The whole racial problem was in 1921 still in process of reconsider- ation. The best collection of facts relating to the subject will be found in the new edition of Keane's Man, Past and Present, edited by Quiggin and Haddon (Cambridge, 1920), but the headings of the chapters preserve the fallacies of the effete system of classification that is now being discarded.
Only the most inveterate prejudice can blind one to the fact that the widespread movement of small groups of people in Polynesia (the chief ingredients in whose constitution were elements of the Brown and Armenoid races) served to link up America with the Old World, and to provide the means whereby the elements of the early civilization of south-eastern Asia were introduced into Central America and Peru. No ethnologist doubts for a moment that the early mariners reached Easter I., because the island is peopled, and the language and the culture of the islanders afford proof of the fact that they came from the West. But it must be apparent that for every ship that chanced to strike that microscopic islet in eastern Polynesia there must have been hundreds, if not thousands, that missed it and were swept on to the coast of America. The whole cul- ture of this Pacific littoral affords corroborative evidence of the fact that these early mariners did plant in Central America and Peru the beliefs and customs which we know them to have had. Mr. Charles Hedley claims (Man, Jan. 1917, p. 12) that the peoples of Oceania obtained from America the coconut and the sweet-potato as the result of such intercourse. The recent discovery (Chinnery) of the use of tobacco in the central high- lands of New Guinea raises the question whether America learned the use of tobacco from Papua or the reverse. The very primitive and peculiar methods of smoking tobacco that Lt. Chinnery discovered in New Guinea suggest that if introduced from the East it must have occurred at a relatively remote period.
The Diffusion of Culture. For half a century ethnology has been suffering from a grave reaction which it is only now begin- ning to overcome. Thus in the earlier article it was stated (see 2.119):
" Anthropological researches undertaken all over the globe have shown the necessity of abandoning the old theory that a similarity of customs and superstitions, of arts and crafts, justifies the assump- tion of a remote relationship, if not an identity of origin, between races. It is now certain that there has ever been an inherent ten- dency in man, allowing for difference of climate and material sur- roundings, to develop culture by the same stages and in the same way. American man, for example, need not necessarily owe the minutest portion of his mental, religious, social or industrial develop- ment to remote contact with Asia or Europe, though he were proved to possess identical usages. An example in point is that of pyramid- building. No ethnical relationship can ever have existed between the Aztecs and the Egyptians; yet each race developed the idea of the pyramid tomb through that psychological similarity which is as much a characteristic of the species man as is his physique."
This once authoritative statement is cited at length to call attention to the actual teaching in ethnology which went far to sterilize half a century's intensive investigation; and as the present tendency is to sweep away all such sophistry and intro- duce into ethnology the real scientific method, it will be useful to examine the claims of the system which has to be got rid of.
Let us take the above five sentences as quoted seriatim. As it stands the first sentence would be altogether satisfactory if it really meant that ethnology utterly and totally disclaimed the view that similarity of customs implied racial kinship. The fact that a Japanese makes a steam-engine does not transform him into an Englishman! But as the second sentence shows, the ethnologists were confusing race and culture. The Japanese engineer who builds the steam-engine does not do so because there is "an inherent tendency in man to develop culture in the same way": the fact that the making of a steam-engine does not transform him into an Englishman does not preclude the recognition of the debt he owes directly or indirectly to English- men for the idea and for the methods of putting it into practice. Instead of it being " now certain " that there is " an inherent tendency in man " (in other words what the psychologist calls an instinct) to build steam-engines or pyramids, both the facts of history and the principles of psychology teach us that there
