WHO WAS PRIMITIVE MAN? 107 



they had been developed straightway from a totally inferior quadru- 

 manous form, and reached their Pleistocene mental eminence by a leap. 

 " The implements of the drift," says Professor Dawkins, " though they 

 imply that their possessors were savages like the native Australians, 

 show a considerable advance on the simple flake left behind as the only 

 trace of man of the mid-Pleistocene age." They also show a still 

 greater advance upon the very rude chips of the unknown mid-Miocene 

 ancestor. Hence the j)rogressive improvement is exactly what we 

 should expect it to be, and we are justified, I think, in concluding that 

 by the beginning of the Pleistocene age the evolving anthropoid had 

 reached a point in his development where he might fairly be consid- 

 ered as a man and a brother. At the beginning of that age, he was 

 probably what naturalists would recognize as specifically identical with 

 existing man, but of a very low variety. By the mid-Pleistocene he 

 had become an ordinary savage of an exaggerated sort, and by the 

 age of the drift he had reached the stage of making himself mod- 

 erately shapely stone implements. The river-drift man, however, as 

 Professor Dawkins believes, has no modern direct representative or, 

 to put it more correctly, the whole race, even in its lowest varieties, has 

 now quite outstripped him, certainly in culture, and probably in phy- 

 sique as well. 



At last, we reach the age of the cave-men. By that period, man 

 had become to a certain extent cultured. He had learned how to 

 make finished implements of stone and bone, and to draw and carve 

 with spirit and with a rude imitative accuracy. It is possible enough 

 that the cave-man was the direct ancestor of the Esquimaux, and that 

 that race has kept its early culture with but few later additions and 

 improvements.* Nevertheless, it does not at all follow that in phys- 

 ical appearance the earlier cave-men were the equals of the Esquimaux, 

 or, indeed, that the Esquimaux are any more nearly related to them 

 than ourselves. They may have been darker-skinned and less highly 

 human looking ; they probably had lower foreheads, with high bosses, 

 like the Neanderthal skull, and big canine teeth like the Naulette jaw. 

 Even if the Esquimaux are lineally descended from the later cave-men 

 with little change of habit or increase of culture, the mere lapse of 

 time, aided by disuse of parts, may have done much to modify and 

 mollify these brute-like traits. " The fact that ancient races," says 

 Mr. Darwin, " in this and several other cases " [he is speaking of the 

 inter-condyloid foramen, observed in so large a proportion of early 



* I am not, however, inclined to attach much importance to the evidence of Esquimau 

 art ; or rather, that art seems to me to point in the opposite direction. After carefully 

 comparing numerous specimens, I am convinced that the art of the cave-men is of quite 

 a different type from that of the Esquimaux, and far higher in kind. Both, it is true, rep- 

 resent animals ; but there the likeness stops. The Esquimaux represent them with 

 wooden stiffness ; the cave-men represent them with surprising spirit and life-like ac- 

 curacy. 



