6 A MILLION YEAES OF CHILDHOOD 



the apes of to-day — lived in the South of France and 

 in India more than a million years ago. Now these 

 apes and man had a common ancestor. Whether 

 they had an immediate common ancestor, or whether 

 the human branch separated from the tree of life at 

 a still earlier date, is disputed. But there is no 

 dispute whatever to-day in any section of science 

 which is concerned with man — anatomy, physiology, 

 archaeology, ethnography, psychology, etc. — that he, 

 body and mind, was derived from a common animal 

 ancestor with the apes. Reactionary writers merely 

 throw dust in the eyes of their readers by quoting 

 (carefully suppressing the date) older men of science 

 who died before the evidence was complete. No 

 authority in the world would now admit a doubt 

 about it. Man and the apes had a common ancestor, 

 immediately or remotely ; and therefore, if the apes 

 existed at least a million and a-half years ago (in the 

 Miocene Period, as any geological work will show), 

 and were already fully developed and scattered over 

 the earth, it follows that the human or semi-human 

 (humanoid) stem also existed at the same time. 



Some of the leading American authorities have 

 recently worked out a very interesting theory of the 

 relations between man and the apes. They believe 

 that the cradle of the human race, the region in 

 which the earlier common family divided into apes 

 and men, was Central Asia. We know that some 

 two or three million years ago what we now call our 

 Arctic Circle was so warm that plants like the 

 magnolia flourished there; and it is supposed that 

 the great family of early mammals, from which 

 descended our familiar herbivores and carnivores 

 (horse, ox, elephant, lion, tiger, etc.), lived in that 



