THE VOYAGE OF EVOLUTION 119 



of the Glacial Period previous to the time that we have now 

 reached, that is, previous to the last Interglacial Epoch, it had 

 been increasing at a rate vastly faster than formerly. Yet at the 

 time of the Piltdown Man the human animal, as we may perhaps 

 still call him, had made almost no advance in the use of material 

 resources. His weapons were probably nothing but stones, bones, 

 and sticks that he broke with his hands. His most elaborate 

 manufactured implements were flints of the rudest sort. These 

 were merely thick chips roughly flaked a little to increase their 

 cutting power. So far as we yet know, man was still ignorant 

 of the use of fire. 



In those days the climate of central Europe was apparently 

 somewhat milder than at present. This mild climate continued 

 for a long time, approximately 50,000 years according to Osborn's 

 chronology which we are now following. During this time the 

 region from northern Spain and Italy to southern England and 

 western Austria, whence our knowledge of early man is chiefly 

 derived, was peopled by the Neanderthal race. These people 

 appear to have been a little more advanced than the Piltdown 

 type, but their brains were distinctly smaller than those of the 

 Europeans of today. Little by little their skill and power in- 

 creased. Yet even at the end of the period of mild interglacial 

 climate, they were still extremely primitive. They had no 

 aesthetic art so far as we know. Their greatest exhibition of skill 

 was in "flaking" the edges of flints to produce sharp cutting 

 edges. This they did with great skill, producing implements of 

 beautiful symmetry and of considerable utility. Doubtless they 

 had other arts, such as the dressing of skins, the building of huts, 

 and the making of wooden clubs. Yet how little this represents 

 in proportion to the hundreds of thousands of years since man 

 first began to chip the flints that he picked up from the ground! 

 Only at the end of this last Interglacial Epoch do we find the first 

 positive evidence that man had learned to use fire. 



We now come to a strange and most significant fact. Man had 



