ANTIQUITY OF MAN — SAYCB 517 



minimize their number and merge the languages of the smaller 

 tribes or nations into that of the dominant power. The Roman 

 Empire was a case in point. And what is true of the multiplicity 

 of languages is true also of their character. Simplicity is a sign 

 of age and progress; the most intricate and complex grammar is 

 usually to be found among peoples of a low type. If we could 

 transport ourselves back to the Aurignacian artists of France and 

 the draughtsmen of the extinct animals of Africa, I fancy we should 

 find a multiplicity of dialects and languages and a corresponding 

 complexity of grammar. 



What all this indicates is obvious. Civilized man— and man who 

 had invented language and was a first-class artist, was already civi- 

 lized man — is exceedingly old; his antiquity can not be measured 

 by centuries or even by millennia. This much is the teaching of 

 prehistoric archeology. Let us now turn to archeology in the more 

 restricted sense of the name and see what it can tell us. 



At the outset we are met by the historians on what may be termed 

 the "lower margin of archeology," whose sphere of work begins 

 where that of the archeologist ends. The historian has to deal with 

 literary records and his outlook, therefore, is subjective rather than 

 objective. The interpretation, and, still more, the valuation of them, 

 is a purely subjective matter dependent on his own judgment, preju- 

 dices, and knowledge. Words, as we know, can be twisted in mani- 

 fold ways and it does not follow that what the original writer meant 

 by them is what his later critic believes them to signify. Where the 

 documents belong to a distant past, more especially if that past be- 

 longs to a different world and civilization from his own, the con- 

 clusions of the critic are apt to be mistaken. They represent his 

 own surroundings and not those of the past. 



The more distant the past and the more scanty the literary re- 

 mains which belong to it the more doubtful and open to suspicion 

 must the verdict of the historian be. His interpretation of the evi- 

 dence must be purely subjective and colored by the assumptions and 

 prejudices of his own time. Before we can accept it, it must be 

 tested by the objective facts of archeology. 



One of the leading obsessions of the historian has been the belief 

 in the recent evolution of civilization and the shortness of the period 

 during which it has endured. The obsession, as I have already 

 noted, is derived from medieval tradition — civilization was believed 

 to have been coeval with the creation of man, and man, like the rest 

 of the universe, to have been in existence only about 6,000 years. 

 The science of geology in its early days had hardly penetrated into 

 the ranks of the historical scholars, and the famous presidential 

 address of Sir Charles Lyell on the Antiquity of Man, to which I 



