i8 INTRODUCTION 



devices merely shows up as a development and improvement 

 of that of their predecessors, to whom in point of time they 

 surely stand nearer than any other known race ? 



The objection is pertinent. But, startling as the statement 

 may seem, there now exist, or have within the last century 

 existed, races, who in the actual material, and in the mode of 

 fashioning, of their weapons are, in the opinion of experts, 

 nearer akin to and resemble more closely Palseohthic than 

 did Neolithic man. 



Speaking of the Eskimos, Cartailhac simply summarises the 

 evidence of many authorities, when he writes " the likenesses 

 in the above points are so striking that one sees in them the 

 true descendants of the Troglodytes of Perigord," 



Professor Boyd-Dawkins goes farther. He finds the 

 Eskimos so intimately connected with the Cave Men in their 

 manners and customs, in their art, especially in their method 

 of representing animals, and in their implements and weapons, 

 that " the only possible explanation is that they belong to 

 the same race : that they are representatives of the Troglo- 

 dytes, protected within the Arctic circle from those causes by 

 which their forbears had been driven from Europe and Asia. 

 They stand at the present day wholly apart from other living 

 races, and are cut off from all by the philologer and the 

 craniologist." ^ 



Food supply probably effected the migration of the Eskimos, 

 or rather of their ancestors from Europe. ^ At the close of the 

 last ice age, as the ice cap retreated Northwards, the reindeer 

 followed the ice, and the Eskimo followed the reindeer. 



Of the aborigines of Tasmania Professor E. B. Tylor 

 testifies : "If there have remained anywhere up to modern 

 times men, whose condition has changed little since the early 

 Stone Age, the Tasmanians seem such a people. Many tribes 

 of the late Stone Age have lasted on into modern times, but it 

 appears that the Tasmanians by the workmanship of their 



^ Emile de Cartailhac et H. Breuil, La Caverne d'Altamira, Paris, 1906, 

 p. 145. Professor Boyd-Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, London, 1880, 

 p. 233. But their technique in flaking, etc., suggests a later date. 



^ The route was probably by Russia, Siberia, and across the land now cut 

 by the Behring Straits. 



