214 A BOOK-LOVER'S HOLIDAYS 



ape-like predecessors of man and then of man 

 himself. It is in Eurasia that all of the remains 

 of man's immediate predecessors have been 

 found — from the Javan pithecanthropus which 

 can only doubtfully be called human, to the 

 Piltdown and Heidelberg men, who were un- 

 doubtedly human, but who were so much closer 

 than any existing savage to the beasts that 

 (unless our present imperfect knowledge proves 

 erroneous) they can hardly be deemed specif- 

 ically identical with modern homo sapiens. 

 Even the more modern Neanderthal men are 

 probably not ancestral to our own stock. It is 

 in Europe, following on these predecessors of 

 existing man, that we find the skeletons, the 

 weapons and tools, and the carvings of existing 

 man in his earliest stages; and mingled with 

 his remains those of the strange and mighty 

 beasts which dwelt beside him in the land. 

 Probably these European forefathers of exist- 

 ing man came from a stock which had previously 

 gone through its early human and prehuman 

 stages in Asia. But we only know what hap- 

 pened in Europe. There was a slow, halting, 

 and interrupted but on the whole steady de- 

 velopment in physical type — sometimes the 

 type itself gradually changing, while sometimes 

 it was displaced by a wholly different type 



