112 THE ORIGIN OF MAN 



the new life would stimulate the brain. If you allow 

 at least half-a-million years to reach the level of the 

 lowest savage from the level of the chimpanzee, you 

 will realize that this suffices; and in spreading the 

 progress over that long period you are assuming a 

 rate of improvement of intelligence immeasurably 

 slower than we have actually witnessed in the last 

 hundred and fifty years. 



It is really the slowness of man's early evolution 

 that puzzles us. I have on an earlier page mentioned 

 a prehistoric human skull that was found at Piltdown, 

 in Sussex, in 191 1. It must have been buried some- 

 thing like 400,000 years ago. There has been a great 

 deal of controversy about this skull, as parts are 

 missing, and it is possible, in reconstructing it, to 

 make the forehead slope back like that of a gorilla or 

 stand up like that of a modern man. From this 

 single skull, therefore, we will not draw any firm 

 conclusion. But the jaws were undoubtedly brutal 

 and retreating, the teeth bulging; and the majority 

 of the authorities concluded that it was the skull of a 

 man very low down in the scale of intelligence. As 

 all the other prehistoric skulls of early date are of the 

 same character, we have a fair idea of our ancestor of 

 between a quarter and half-a-million years ago. ^ 



' This is questioned by Professor Keith and those who make 

 the "Sussex man " highly developed in brain. They think that 

 there were two human races at the time, a higher and a lower, and 

 they put the real origin of man much further back, as I said. 



