ANCIENT AND MODERN MAN 



385 



make fire, and probably capable of speech, lived on this 

 earth one hundred thousand years ago. Some geologists 

 make this distance backward in time a shorter one by half; 

 most make it twice as long. At least it was back to the days 

 of great wild animals now extinct, and when other animals 

 and plants that now live only in the Arctic regions lived in 

 middle Europe. 



During the Quaternary epoch four successive large animal 

 species have lived in and disappeared from France, namely, 

 the cave-bear, the mammoth, the reindeer and the aurochs. 



FIG. 188. Specimen of Indian picture-writing. (After Lubbock.) 



Man has lived contemporaneously with them all. He used 

 their flesh for food and has left representations of them in 

 rude carvings and drawings. All through these times he 

 used stone implements chipped and shaped by his hands. 

 These relics exist by thousands in all the great museums 

 of the world. And, besides, as we shall see in a moment, 

 the early Quaternary man has left his own bones to prove 

 even more positively his existence. 



From a geologic epoch earlier than Quaternary there 

 are in existence certain suggestively shaped pieces of flint, 

 called eoliths, concerning which a great strife rages among 



