120 SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



ing the overwhelmingly greater part of the story of 

 life there was no social evolution at all. Social life 

 was found only among sponges and corals and other 

 unconscious or barely conscious types of animals, 

 and they made no progress during millions of years. 

 Social life proper began only in the last two or three 

 million years. There is no proof, in fact, that it 

 began earlier than within the last million years. 

 At all events, beavers, bees, ants, etc., began their 

 social ways in only quite recent geological time. So 

 the "Darwinian factor" has been the chief agency 

 of evolution during forty-eight out of fifty million 

 years. 



In Darwin's time very little was known about pre- 

 historic man. Now we know his story very fairly. 

 I have described the early part of it: a period of 

 non-social life and extraordinarily slow progress. 

 Curiously enough, many advanced social writers 

 insist on regarding early man as social almost from 

 the start. They probably think, that this explains 

 his progress; and they would change their opinion, 

 which is a pure theory, if they knew how very little 

 progress man made for three-quarters-of-a-million 

 years. The facts are all the other way. The man- 

 like apes, early man's cousins, are not social. They 

 live generally in families. The lowest living human 

 groups to-day are imperfectly social. They live in 

 family groups, with strict monogamy, and have no 

 tribal organization. And, as far as we can gather 



