A MILLION YEAES OF CHILDHOOD 13 



chopper without handle). We have ample remains 

 of the Neanderthal race which fashioned these imple- 

 ments, and the racial type is not disputed. Man was 

 still a type of savage lower than the Australian black : 

 a brutal-looking creature, about five feet three inches 

 high on the average, with massive jaws and sloping 

 forehead and almost gorilla-like ridges over the eyes. 



Sir Arthur Keith and a few other authorities hold 

 that a higher race existed at the same time as this 

 Neanderthal race. Their opinion is based upon very 

 disputed reconstructions of the Piltdown and other 

 skulls, and we will here confine ourselves to the plain 

 evidence of the stone implements and undisputed 

 remains. We have hundreds of thousands of imple- 

 ments of these early stages of the Old Stone Age. 

 They probably represent at least a hundred thousand 

 years of human development, and they show only 

 slow progress in the improvement of the weapons 

 and implements. 



We then reach a period (the Mousterian Period) of 

 marked advance. The fashioning of the stone imple- 

 ments becomes much finer, and the number of types 

 increases. There is a rudimentary artistic feeling in 

 the prehistoric maker. There are also " hearths," 

 which for the first time indicate that man has dis- 

 covered the use of fire and that he is living in social 

 groups. 



This advance coincides unmistakably with the Ice 

 Age. What we call the Ice Age was not one con- 

 tinuous period of ice and snow all the year round for 

 half-a-million years or so. It is divided into four or 

 five long periods of intense cold, with three or four 

 relatively warm periods between them. Neanderthal 

 man probably wandered over Europe during the first 



