WHO WAS PRIMITIVE MAN? 99 



on mammoth ivory or reindeer horn of various animals, living or ex- 

 tinct. In fact, they seem to have been in most essential particulars 

 almost as advanced as the modern Esquimaux, with whom Professor 

 Dawkins conjecturally identifies them. 



But if Professor Dawkins means us to understand that the cave- 

 men were physically developed to the same extent as the Esquimaux, it 

 is necessary to accept his conclusion with great caution. It does not 

 follow, because the Esquimaux are the nearest modern parallels of the 

 cave-men, that the cave-men therefore resembled them closely in ap- 

 pearance. Several of the sketches of cave-men, cut by themselves on 

 horn and bone, certainly show (it seems to me) that they were covered 

 with hair over the whole body ; and the hunter in the antler from the 

 Duruthy cave has a long pointed beard and high crest of hair on the 

 poll utterly unlike the Esquimau type. The figures are also those of 

 a slim and long-limbed race. And when Professor Dawkins tells us 

 that the very earliest known man was unquestionably a man and not 

 a " missing link," it becomes a matter of importance to decide exactly 

 what the phrase " a missing link " is held to imply. 



Man differs from the anthropoid apes mainly in the immensely 

 larger development of his brain ; for the other peculiarities of his pel- 

 vis, his teeth, and the position of his head on the shoulders, are mere 

 small adaptive points, dependent upon his upright attitude and the 

 nature of his food. Even the lowest savage and the oldest known 

 human skull have a brain-capacity far bigger in proportion than that 

 of the highest apes. Now, this brain could not, of course, have been 

 developed per saltum it must have been slowly evolved in the course 

 of a long and special intercourse with nature. But between civilized 

 man and his early ancestor, common to him and the anthropoid apes, 

 there must at some time have existed every possible intermediate link. 

 Some such links still survive in the Bushman, the Australian black 

 fellow, and the Andaman-Islander. Other and earlier links probably 

 became extinct at various previous periods, under the pressure of the 

 higher varieties from time to time developed, just as these lowest sav- 

 ages are now in process of becoming extinct before the face of the 

 European colonist. But we would naturally expect the men of the 

 palaeolithic period to be still a trifle more brute-like in several small 

 particulars than any existing savages, because they were so much 

 the nearer to the primitive common ancestor, a few of whose distinct- 

 ive traits they would probably retain in a higher degree than any race 

 now living. In short, while it would be absurd to suppose that palaeo- 

 lithic men were " missing links " in the sense of being exactly half-way 

 houses between apes and Bushmen, it is yet natural to expect that they 

 would be the last or penultimate links in a chain whose other links are 

 many and wanting. Do we, as a matter of fact, find any such slight 

 traces of brute-like structure in the earliest human remains which have 

 come down to us ? 



