EVOLUTION 241 



family. And the always-mysterious Piltdown skull, in spite of its extremely 

 ape-like jaw, has a very human brain case which indicates the same thing. 



It is possible to disregard the limitations of the fossil evidence and to 

 take a fresh view of the problem by considering the living races of Hoiiio 

 sapiens as they have probably been in the past. To-day two biUion people 

 are spread thickly upon the earth. They are divided somewhat unequally 

 into the conventional White, Yellow and Black, with infinitely weaker 

 representations of American Indians, Australian blackfellows, South 

 African Bushmen, and so on. They constitute different races but all be- 

 long, from a zoological standpoint, to a single species. None of these races 

 alone is the type of the species, which is made up of all of them together. 

 In other words the most advanced is not necessarily the most typical. It 

 would indeed be more proper to represent Homo sapiens as a whole by 

 his most primitive manifestation, the native Australian, or by an imaginary 

 form of this sort, which could have become the parent of all living races, 

 as a sort of greatest common denominator. 



The picture of the present suffers from lack of depth, because our col- 

 lections of skulls of various ethnic origins do not go back far enough to 

 tell much of history on a grand scale, and the older remains give us only 

 the barest of indications as to race. Nevertheless, it is clear that before we 

 even begin to trace races back we must modify this picture because of 

 violent changes which must have taken place in the very recent past, in 

 the time since culture really began to develop. 



A mere ten thousand years ago, toward the end of the Paleolithic, man 

 knew only the art of hunting. Since then, with the onset of the Neolithic, 

 he has progressed to agriculture, opening a vast food supply to himself; 

 later on, in the Bronze Age and classical times, he has benefited by town 

 life and artisanship, and still later, in the last few centuries, by the subjuga- 

 tion of natural forces to the purposes of transportation and manufacture. 

 These things have occasioned an almost incredible increase in the popula- 

 tion of the world. Throughout his previous existence, man could never 

 rise in numbers above what the stable animal population in any region 

 would feed. It can be estimated, from the little that is known about the 

 recent rate of increase, and the population density of present-day hunting 

 peoples, that there can have been only something like ten million beings in 

 the then-inhabited world, compared to the two billion of today. (For ex- 

 ample, the New World, most of whose people were relatively advanced in 

 culture, had a population of roughly eight million at the time of dis- 

 covery.) Now in this tumultuous upsurge of some two hundred fold, it is 

 plain that those peoples who participated in the progress of culture would 

 increase and monopolize the world, while those who remained hunters 

 would continue to be few in numbers and sparse in distribution, or would 

 even face extinction on encounter with a people more advanced. 



Ten millenniums is a very short time, being only one hundredth of the 



