RECENT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE 403 



Riss-Wurm) Interglacial period. As is well known, the pre- 

 sence of the living species in Europe in Pre-Aurignacian times 

 is credited by many, but is still very doubtful. On the 

 other hand, I think the weight of the evidence is against the 

 other extreme opinion — the ultra-conservative view — that the 

 Aurignacian itself is to be given a post-Wurmian date. There 

 is, however, one point of fundamental importance, which 

 should have been obvious to all from the first, but which has 

 nevertheless been sometimes overlooked. When Homo sapiens 

 first appears in Europe he is already thoroughly Homo sapiens. 

 We may trace man back into Neolithic times, into the last 

 of the greater ice-ages, and, further yet, into the wonderful 

 warm period which preceded that ice-age, and we find him 

 anatomically what he is now. He shows no sign of merging 

 backwards into another species, another kind of being. We 

 therefore learn nothing of the origin of Homo sapiens. It has 

 thus always been obvious that the species either (1) sprang 

 into existence suddenly, or very rapidly (an hypothesis which 

 is less improbable than might have appeared to us ten years 

 ago), or (2) possesses a far greater antiquity elsewhere than 

 in Europe. It is at this point that we turn eagerly to the 

 evidences from America. The supposed proofs brought for- 

 ward have been looked at askance because they appear to 

 prove too much. The supposed relics of Pleistocene man in 

 America reveal to us a race of barbarians almost identical, 

 not only anatomically but culturally, with the more primitive 

 Red Indians as they were when they were discovered by 

 Europeans. Now, even the more primitive Red Indians were 

 (except in respect of the artistic faculties) in advance of our 

 European races of the later Pleistocene. They are more com- 

 parable, culturally, with the very earliest of our Neolithic 

 peoples. Moreover, the most credible of the American evi- 

 dences carry back these Red Indians (for they were nothing 

 else) much further than the date of the European Aurignacian 

 — as far back as the first of the three great inter-glacial periods. 

 In other words, the supposed proofs give an early Pleistocene 

 antiquity to a primitive Neolithic culture. Now, this is a 

 theory which any anthropologist will be shy of accepting. 

 But we have no right absolutely to rule out the hypothesis on 

 the basis of a priori improbability. If the species originated 

 in Asia in early Pleistocene times, the first nomadic tribes 

 would have found America quite as accessible as Europe, for 

 there was then a land-connexion between Asia and America. 

 In early and middle Pleistocene times Europe may well have 

 been merely a " backwater," where the older and much more 

 primitive species of the humanoid family took refuge from 

 the ever-spreading tribes of the abler H. sapiens. 



