520 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 31 



long as there is no question of exact dating or of interference with 

 the antiquity which he would assign to his own protege, literary 

 man. Here he believes he can count the generations, and the oftener 

 he counts them the fewer they become. 



But archeological science, hand in hand with the decipherment 

 of the languages and records of the past, has come with a rude shock, 

 and the most recent discoveries have been more than usually subver- 

 sive. Civilized man in the fullest sense of the word is immeasur- 

 ably old. His history forms no exception to that of the rest of the 

 world; though the latest comer, he too has a past which can not be 

 measured by the half-dozen inches of the literary historian's rod. 

 Archeology is rej)eating the lesson of geology and physical science. 



I have already touched upon the discoveries in southern and east- 

 ern Africa. The consummate artists who depicted the animals of an 

 extinct fauna, like their brethren in France and Spain, were repre- 

 sentatives not only of homo sapiens^ but of hotno sapiens in a highly 

 developed form. And think only of the conditions under which in 

 Europe he drew his pictures on the walls and even the roofs of the 

 caves he inhabited or carved the mammoth tusk and moulded the 

 clay into lifelike figures ! The exhibition of primitive art organized 

 at Manchester in 1928 by the late Sir William Boyd Dawkins must 

 have been a revelation to many of us. In the subterranean dark- 

 ness of a world in which the conditions were those of Iceland or 

 even Greenland to-day, and by such light as could be obtained from 

 a little grease, works of art were produced worthy of being grouped 

 with those of a fifteenth century painter. But the artistic achieve- 

 ment was more than matched by an achievement of an even greater 

 nature. Man had already invented articulate language, the greatest 

 and most outstanding invention he has ever made. 



But I must leave the history of homo sapiens in his earlier years to 

 the geologist and prehistoric archeologist. There is one experience 

 of my own, however, which I will record, as it impressed me in a 

 way that no amount of books or museum specimens could have done. 

 Some 30 years ago I undertook to make an archeological survey of 

 the sandstone district of Gebel es-Silsila, in Upper Egypt, for the 

 Egyptian Department of Antiquities. A barrage was to be built 

 across the Nile at Esna, and as the engineers wished to get their 

 stone for it from the sandstone rocks at Silsila, it became necessary 

 to ascertain where they could do so without destroying or injuring 

 any remains of antiquity. In the course of my work a few miles 

 north of the Gebel I found a wadi on the western bank of the river, 

 which had been the bed of a torrent that had poured into the valley 

 of the Nile from the jungle that then flourished on what is now the 

 western desert in the Pluvial Age, when the Sahara was covered 



