ADVANCE OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 479 



inter-glacial Hominidce specialised not less, probably 

 much more, than half a million years ago/' * Giglioli 

 may be named as another expert anthropologist who 

 regards man's origin as inter-glacial. For our 

 present purpose, the long and weary discussions on 

 this subject are of little moment, for though there 

 may be doubts whether a million or half a million 

 or a quarter of a million of years should be claimed, 

 the general tendency among those who know most 

 about it is towards the larger figures, and while, on 

 the other hand, man is but a child of yesterday when 

 the age of the earth is considered. 



Let us recall the great periods in man's unwritten 

 history. 



(a) Since man is certainly not derivable from 

 any of the known anthropoid apes, and since it is 

 likely that he sprang from an ancestral stock com- 

 mon to them and to him, we seem almost bound to 

 conclude that the divergence which led on to the hu- 

 man line of evolution must have occurred before the 

 appearance of the anthropoid family. But the an- 

 thropoids (e.g., Pliopiiliecus, Dryopiihecus) were in 

 existence in Miocene times, and the inference is that 

 man's direct precursors had also appeared. 



(&) Before man became habitually a user of tools 

 and weapons, there probably was a long period when 

 he used such sticks and stones as came readily to 

 hand. Even monkeys occasionally do so. Although 

 we do not know with security of any implements 

 older than palaeolithic axes and hammers and the 

 like, it is plain that the making of these implied no 

 small skill and a previous period of apprenticeship. 



(c) The data for the study of the prehistoric evo- 



* Ethnology, 1896, p. 69. 



