2 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



Among the most interesting of these finds has been the 

 bringing to light of several tablets, one of which is preserved 

 in the Yale Babylonian Collection, and which constitute the 

 oldest human documents thus far discovered. These several 

 tablets are of black stone, of no very great size, but bear en- 

 graven on their surfaces characters which give to us a message 

 out of the past, the time of which antedates that of Christ by 

 some 5,500 to 6,000 years; in other words, a thousand or more 

 years before Doctor Lightfoot's date. Nor is this all, for the 

 inscriptions are no longer in the so-called picture writing or 

 ideographs, but in a form of writing undoubtedly derived from 

 this. They have progressed so far along an evolutionary path- 

 way that the original pictures cannot in some instances be even 

 guessed at. This, it would seem, implies a centuries-long de- 

 velopmental period before the beginning of inscriptive writ- 

 ings, and the inference is also justifiable that the protoscript 

 could not have been invented but by peoples of considerable 

 intellectual powers who had long since emerged from savagery 

 and were vastly further yet removed from their ultimate 

 beginnings. 



The third line of evidence is cultural, based not on inscrip- 

 tions or documents of any sort, but upon the implements and 

 weapons of vanished peoples, with their varying degrees of 

 refinement. Historic times, as is well known, are often spoken 

 of as the Age of Iron, and perhaps the Age of Bronze, while 

 the prehistoric is called the Age of Stone. But the Stone Age 

 again has its subdivisions into, first, the New Stone Age or 

 Neolithic period, in which the distinctive characteristic of the 

 implements is that some of them at least were rubbed smooth 

 or polished after the preliminary fashioning was completed. 

 Back of this period lies the Paleolithic, varying immensely in 

 the degree of perfection of use and workmanship, so that 

 archeologists are agreed upon a number of cultures (see 

 table, infra] , based upon distinctions some of which are evident 



