38 MAN: PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



largely predominates everywhere and in many places exclusively. 

 The route by which he probably reached these intertropical lands, 

 where he may be regarded as practically indigenous, has been 

 indicated in Ethnology, Chs. x. and XL 



That the occupation took place in pleistocene times, if not 



even earlier, is made daily more evident from the 

 Origfns researches of travellers in hitherto unvisited districts. 



At the meeting of the Royal Society, April 30, 1896, 

 Sir John Evans stated that the numerous palseoliths found by Mr 

 Seton-Karr on his second visit to Somaliland, which originally 

 formed part of the Negro domain, were in form absolutely 

 identical with some from the Somme and other places ; hence 

 there need be no hesitation in claiming them as palaeoliths, 

 despite the absence of a fossil fauna. The finds, he pointed out, 

 help to bridge over the interval between palaeolithic man in 

 Britain and in India, and add another link to the chain of evidence 

 by which the original cradle of man may eventually be identified, 

 tending to prove the unity of race between the inhabitants 

 of Asia, Africa, and Europe in palaeolithic times. Mr Seton-Karr 

 tells us that he obtained several thousands of such objects spear- 

 heads, scrapers, knives, flakes, cores in sites which presented the 

 appearance of having been regular workshops. Nearly all the 

 flints were either damaged or unfinished, while some were found 

 amid a mass of flakes and chips, "as though the people had 

 dropped their work, and, carrying with them all their perfect 

 weapons and belongings, had fled, never to return 1 ." 



Similar evidence has been collected from Upper Guinea, 



Angola, and the extreme south, showing not only the 



Persistence 



of the Negro early arrival but also the general dispersal of the 

 Negro over his present domain during the first 

 Stone Age. Yet since that remote epoch the specialised Negro 

 type, as depicted on the Egyptian monuments some thousands of 

 years ago, has everywhere been maintained with striking uni- 

 formity. " Within this wide domain of the black Negro there is 

 a remarkably general similarity of type. ...If you took a Negro 

 from the Gold Coast of West Africa and passed him off amongst a 



1 Some Implements in Somaliland, Paper read at Meeting of Brit. Assoc. 

 Ipswich, 1895. 



