ANCIENT EGYPT, ASIA MINOR, AND CRETE 
On the contrary, the greater is the honor due them for 
their ability to accomplish so much with such compara- 
tively poor means. 
SOUTHWESTERN ASIA IN PREHISTORIC TIMES 
The only other region which, so far as we now know, can 
compete with Egypt in priority of civilization is south- 
western Asia. Here, too, the Ice Age made its influence 
strongly felt, although the ice sheet itself seems not to 
have covered the extreme southern portions of the conti- 
nent. Weare only just beginning to find out a little about 
the men who lived there then. But that they did exist 
is certain; for they have left behind them records of their 
presence in the shape of stone implements. And lately, 
as we have seen, there has been found in Galilee part of 
the skull of a member of the lowly Neanderthal race. 
When we come down to the period following the close 
of the Ice Age, our knowledge becomes slightly more 
definite. It now seems probable that the whole of southern 
Asia then contained a sparse population of hunting and 
food-gathering peoples belonging to the black-skinned 
races which we find today, in various forms, in Africa, 
India, and some of the islands stretching out to the south- 
east of Asia. Among them were in all likelihood both 
peoples of ordinary size and pygmies, or dwarf races, like 
those which today survive only in parts of Africa on the 
one hand and in the Malay Peninsula and the East Indies 
on the other. They seem never to have had to undergo 
the stern discipline of the Ice Age, and therefore retained 
many primitive traits, remaining essentially in the Old 
Stone Age. They were too few in number and too lowly 
in culture to influence later races very deeply. 
The great changes which took place both in the climate 
and in the character of the earth’s surface as the Ice Age 
passed gradually away occurred in southwestern Asia just 
as they did in northern Africa. A great deal of the land 
that had been either actually covered deep with ice, or 
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