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NOTES AND COMMENTS. 



PRIMITIVE MAN. 



Prof. G. Elliot Smith, F.R.S., has published a pamphlet 

 with the above title.* At the outset he states that : ' The 

 term " prehistoric," and especially the unpardonable word 

 " prehistory " must be renounced, or used only in the most 

 general sense, by all who value clearness of thought and 

 precision of statement. When the adjective first came into 

 use there was a vast break of unknown extent between the 

 history of man that has been preserved in written documents 

 and the complementary story that was recorded in what was 

 then the less legible palimpsest of bones, implements, and 

 potsherds. With the accumulation of further information and 

 the acquisition of a fuller insight into the meaning of the latter 

 kind of evidence, not only has the gap between the historical 

 and the so-called " prehistoric " been to a large extent bridged, 

 and by evidence of contact between neighbouring peoples the 

 two " ages " been shown to overlap, but the unwritten records 

 preserved in the bones and cultural remains have become more 

 and more comprehensible, and have given us perhaps a fuller 

 and more truthful history of certain phases of man's activities 

 than the written documents, often coloured and distorted by 

 the personal bias of their authors, which it has been the custom 

 to regard as the only sources of real history.' 



UNWRITTEN HISTORY. 



' One has only to recall the recently acquired knowledge of 

 the archaeology of Crete and Nubia, for example, to realise the 

 vastness and the accuracy of the body of history that has 

 been recovered from sources other than literary records. Not 

 only have such researches revealed a very extensive chapter 

 of positive history, but they have shed a new light upon the 

 hitherto accepted interpretation of the written documents and 

 forced a considerable re-orientation of the ideas which they had 

 provided of the growth of civilisation. With the widening of 

 outlook and the growth of conception ot continuity in history, 

 the term " prehistoric " has, in fact, lost much of its usefulness. 

 It has now become a hindrance rather than a help to those 

 who are striving to obtain a clear view and a right perspective 

 of Man's history as a closely interrelated whole and of the 

 essential unity of civilisation. Hence, except perhaps in the 

 case of some small localised area, it would be a distinct advan- 

 tage if the word " prehistoric," and all the misleading and 

 confusing glamour that has grown up in association with it, 

 were relegated to the oblivion of the past to which it naturally 

 belongs.' 



* Oxford University Press. 50 pp., 3/6. 



1917 Dec. 1. 



2 A 



