516 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 31 



ciation at Bath in 1864. To a generation which had been brought up 

 to believe that in 4004 B. C, or thereabouts, the world was being 

 created, the idea that man himself went back to some 100,000 years 

 ago was both incredible and inconceivable. 



But it was uncivilized man, not homo sapiens, as he is called to- 

 day, of whom this was postulated, and between Aomo sapiens and his 

 predecessor or predecessors the scientist still inserts a period of 

 untold centuries. It is true that the Tasmanian with his paleolithic 

 implements and mathematical deficiencies still survived into our own 

 time ; but he possessed a language and could even cook his food and 

 make clay vessels. It is also true that Cromagnon man had a skill 

 which rivalled that of the modern European and has left us works 

 of art which, considering the conditions under which they were 

 produced, place him on the highest stage of artistic ability. But 

 he, too, possessed speech and belonged to the later and not to the 

 older Paleolithic age of Europe. After all, it has been assumed, his 

 distance in time from us has not been so great when measured with 

 that which separates us from Chellean and still more Eolithic man. 



Recent discoveries, however, in Southern and Eastern Africa have 

 been disturbing. I learn from Sir Arthur Keith and L. S. B. 

 Leakey that homo sapiens already appears in the Rift Valley of 

 Kenya at the beginning of the second major pluvial period which 

 may roughly correspond with the two last glacial epochs of Europe 

 (the Riss and Wiirm). He had already invented pottery before 

 the closing stages of that period, so that by the next wet period or 

 the first post-pluvial wet phases of it he had developed a class of 

 pottery of really good character. The Mousterian type of culture 

 in Kenya existed contemporaneously with the Aurignacian through- 

 out the second major pluvial epoch, gradually developing as time 

 progressed. Homo sapiens, therefore, with his art of pottery mak- 

 ing and the use of fire which it implies, is thus pushed back to an 

 age which we have hitherto associated with his semisimian pre- 

 decessors. 



Man, that is to say, civilized man, or man in the true sense of the 

 word, must therefore have existed untold centuries ago. He already 

 possessed the potentiality of speech; we may argue from his artistic 

 skill and products that that potentiality had been already translated 

 into fact. The greatest invention ever made by him had already 

 been made. That language was an invention we knoAv; every child 

 born into the world has to learn it. And language exists irrespective 

 of race. Wherever we find man, however low he may be in the 

 scale of humanity, he is possessed of language. The further we go 

 back in his history, the more multitudinous are the languages which 

 he has spoken. The tendency of an advance in civilization is to 



