Page:Nature and Man.djvu/20

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
Nature and Man
17

over the facts submitted to the scientific world by Boucher de Perthes was violent and of short duration. The immense antiquity of man was established and accepted on all sides just before Mr. Darwin published his book on The Origin of Species. The palaeolithic implements, though not improbably made 150,000 years ago, do not, any more than do the imperfect skulls occasionally found in association with them, indicate a condition of the human race more monkey-like than is presented by existing savage races. The implements themselves are manufactured with great skill and artistic feeling. Within the last ten years much rougher flint implements, of peculiar types, have been discovered in gravels which are 500 feet above the level of the existing rivers. These Eoliths of the South of England indicate a race of men of less-developed skill than the makers of the Palaeoliths, and carry the antiquity of man at least as far back beyond the Palaeoliths as these are from the present day. We have as yet found no remains giving the direct basis for conclusions on the subject; but judging by the analogy (not by any means a conclusive method) furnished by the history of other large animals now living alongside of man—such as the horse, the rhinoceros, the tapir, the wolf, the hyaena, and the bear—it is not improbable that it was in the remote period known as the lower Miocene—remote as compared with the gravels in which Eoliths occur—that Natural Selection began to favour that increase in the size of the brain of a large and not very powerful semi-erect ape which eventuated, after some hundreds of thousands of years, in the breeding-out of a being with a relatively enormous brain-case, a skilful hand, and an inveterate tendency to throw stones, flourish