MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
as might have been caused by the intervention of a glacial 
stage or the intrusion of a different race. It seems pretty 
clearly to have occurred during the third interglacial 
stage, and has been divided by archeologists into two 
phases, an earlier and a later. 
During the Early Acheulian, the climate of Europe re- 
sembled that of the Chellean, the chief differences being, 
apparently, that it was rather cooler, drier, and perhaps 
more dusty. The animal life of the preceding periods con- 
tinued with but little change. It included the southern 
mammoth, the straight-tusked or “‘ancient” elephant, 
Merck’s rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, lion, hyena, deer, 
wild bull and horse, bison, wolf, beaver, and many other 
forms. 
Man still continued to live in the open; and it is now 
that we come upon the first absolute proof of his use of fire, 
in the layers of charred wood and bones found on his 
ancient camp sites. Little direct evidence bears on his 
physical characteristics and indeed there may have been 
more races than one occupying western Europe then. For 
some have regarded the Piltdown race as belonging to the 
Acheulian, while there may have been also a Neanderthal 
element, or at all events one ancestral to the latter. 
It seems to have been during the Late Acheulian that the 
chill of the approaching Wurm glaciation began seriously 
to be felt. Conditions in western Europe now slowly 
underwent radical changes. Forms of animal life that had 
survived all the vicissitudes of the three earlier glacial 
stages now commenced to disappear, replaced by species 
better adapted to withstand severe cold, including the 
hairy northern form of mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, 
and the reindeer. But even yet the roving bands of hunters 
and food gatherers still preferred to pitch their camps in 
the open and only occasionally sought the protection of 
overhanging cliffs and the mouths of caves. 
Despite these changes in the physical environment, a 
great improvement in the forms of its stone implements 
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