A MILLION YEARS OF CHILDHOOD 11 



and as Professor Carveth Read has recently suggested 

 in his Origin of Man. If man was a social animal 

 from the start, the million years which it took him to 

 reach the level of lowest known savagery, from the 

 level of the chimpanzee, would greatly discredit the 

 efficiency of the social factor itself. 



But all the evidence we have is against the suppo-*- 

 sition that primitive man was social. The higher 

 apes are not social ; the lowest human groups are 

 very imperfectly social ; and in the very abundant 

 relics of early man collected by prehistoric science 

 there are no clear traces of group-life until the middle 

 of the Ice Age. It seems, therefore, most likely that 

 during those million years of almost unprogressive 

 childhood early men wandered over the face of 

 Europe and xAsia in family groups only, and that the 

 lack of social life and power of communication is the 

 chief cause of the long stagnation. 



There is no need to consider here the way in which 

 liberal Catholics and a few other non-scientific writers 

 would get out of the difficulty. They would suggest 

 that the human mind, as we know it, was not evolved, 

 but created. No psychologist or anthropologist in 

 the world would now countenance that view, and it 

 is waste of time to discuss the opinions of men who 

 would settle scientific questions by their preconceived 

 ideas. We have not many skulls or skeletons of 

 early man — only about forty specimens of the whole 

 prehistoric race (at least, before the New Stone Age). 

 Moreover, these skulls are often so battered and 

 imperfect that (as in the case of the famous Piltdown 

 skull) the highest authorities differ from each other 

 in reconstructing them and estimating the intelligence 

 of the men to whom they belonged. But for every 



