PRIMEVAL MAN 213 



to try to draw all the distinctions and make 

 all the quahfications that would be essential 

 to minutely accurate treatment; such treat- 

 ment would merely mar the outlines of a gen- 

 eral sketch. The same thing is, of course, true 

 of an outline sketch of what our present knowl- 

 edge shows of man's most wide-spread beast 

 associates, when he had begun, in forms not 

 very different from those of the lower savages 

 to-day, to spread over the world's surface. 



Therefore it is necessary to remember that 

 in dealing even with such a recent chapter of 

 paleontological discovery as that concerned 

 with early man and the great four-footed crea- 

 tures that were his contemporaries, our general 

 picture can rarely pretend to more than general 

 accuracy. It is only in prehistoric and proto- 

 historic Europe that the early career of "homo 

 sapiens" and his immediate predecessors has 

 been worked out in sufficient detail to give 

 even the roughest idea of its successive stages, 

 and of the varying groups of great beasts with 

 which at the different stages man was associated. 

 This is because the record has been better pre- 

 served, and more closely studied in Europe than 

 elsewhere; for it seems fairly certain that it is 

 in Eurasia, in the palaearctic realm, that there 

 took place the development of the more or less 



