CHAPTER TV 
THE STUDY OF HUMAN PREHISTORY 
Ir was formerly supposed that the great sequences in life 
forms, like the Age of Fishes, the Age of Reptiles, the Age 
of Mammals, and so on, came as the result of “‘cata- 
clysms.”” There is no evidence, however, that universal 
catastrophes, of flood, glaciation, or what not, have ever 
really wiped out all life on the globe so that nature had 
to start out all over again. The nearest approach to it 
appears to have come in Permian time, but even then, as 
noted in Chapter II, many species survived. On the 
contrary, the same natural forces—rain, wind, frost, ice, 
earthquake, and volcanic eruptions—which we see about 
us today, have operated with only moderate fluctuations 
of effect from the beginning. We shall study the pre- 
historic past of man as a part of this orderly continuous 
working of nature. 
The decipherment of the records of man’s physical type 
and of the achievements of his intelligence in the far- 
distant past by the archeologist has required the coopera- 
tion of specialists in many different fields—of the geologist, 
the climatologist, the paleontologist, the zoologist, the 
botanist, the ethnologist, among others. Thanks to their 
cooperative work we now know far more than would have 
seemed possible even a generation ago. Yet the task 
has been but fairly begun, except perhaps in western 
Europe and especially France. 
In spite of the vast age of human remains in Europe, it 
is probable that man did not originate on that continent, 
but came there from other lands, partly over “‘land- 
[37] 
