n 6 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



be obliged to go back to find demonstrable changes it is impos- 

 sible to say. We know that the major anatomical character- 

 istics of man have not materially shifted for the last twenty 

 or thirty thousand years. 



There is a very common popular belief that, although 

 civilized man may be the superior of his uncivilized contem- 

 porary in certain forms of purely intellectual activities, he is 

 his inferior in keenness of sense perception and in his response 

 to many of the aspects of nature. Such evidence as we have 

 tends on the whole rather to discredit both of the inferences 

 involved in this assertion if they be made too sweeping. It is 

 surely open to question whether all races of nature people now 

 living are radically inferior to the more civilized groups in 

 natural powers of intelligence. Certainly there are some 

 striking individual instances of high intellectual achievement 

 attained by representatives of some of these more primitive 

 racial groups; and, on the other hand, there is good evidence 

 for the statement that at least occasional representatives of 

 civilized races are quite as keen in their vision and hearing 

 taking these two examples as any of the primitive peoples 

 with whom they may be compared. The North American 

 Indian and the white frontiersman may illustrate the point. 

 There are not a few instances of Indians who have exhibited 

 intellectual capacities of a very high order, and the keenness 

 of vision and hearing of some of the scouts of frontier history 

 rival anything reported of their savage contemporaries. 

 Training and discipline are perhaps in both cases the clew to 

 achievement quite as much as deep-seated and indisputable 

 difference of natural capacity a statement which in turn must 

 not be understood as implying that there are no significant 

 differences between the lowest tribes of savages and the highest 

 exemplars of civilization. 



If, as a clever writer on these subjects has suggested, we 

 may consider existing tribes of savages as in some sense our 



