PRIMEVAL MAN 191 



The Soudan under the Mahdi at the end of 

 the nineteenth century was in rehgious, indus- 

 trial, and social life, in fact in everything except 

 mere time, part of the evil Mohammedan world 

 of the seventh century. It had no relation to 

 the contemporary body politic of humanity ex- 

 cept that of being a plague-spot. The Tas- 

 manians, Bushmen, and Esquimaux of the 

 eighteenth century had nothing in common 

 with the Europeans of their day. Their kin- 

 ship, physical and cultural, was with certain 

 races of Palaeolithic Europeans and Asiatics 

 fifty or a hundred thousand years back. 



In just the same way the fierce wild life of parts 

 of Africa to-day has nothing in common with 

 what we now see in Europe and the Americas. 

 Yet in its general aspect, and in many of its 

 most striking details, it reproduces the life that 

 once was, in Europe and in both the Americas, 

 in what paleontologists call the Pleistocene age. 

 By Pleistocene is meant that period — of in- 

 calculable length as we speak of historic time, 

 but a mere moment if we speak of geologic 

 time — which witnessed in Europe and Asia 

 the slow change of the brute-like and but 

 partly human predecessors of man into beings 

 who were culturally on a level with the lower 

 forms of the savages that still exist, and some 



