MAN 475 



fire, seasoned foods, stimulants are terms which suggest some 

 of these artificial elements that have entered into man's life. 

 Just what their final effect will be on the body and mind of man 

 no one can tell. Many of the most terrible diseases to which 

 man is subject are the diseases of civilization. That his wits 

 will continue to enable him to meet the new problems which he 

 brings on himself, as he has met the natural ones, we may well 

 believe. But unquestionably we must realize that his greatest 

 task is to use his increasing mastery of nature in meeting the new 

 difficulties which his own complex and artificial civilization is 

 bringing upon him. Never has this truth been so apparent as 

 during and since the Great war. 



475. The Age of Man on the Earth. — There is no sure 

 knowledge of when man, in his present form, first appeared 

 on the earth. It is known that man lived in Europe in the 

 later portion of the Ice Age, and quite probably earlier. His 

 implements of stone are found along with the remains of such 

 animals as the cave-bear and mastodon and man-like apes, 

 either extinct now or found only in tropical regions. Some of the 

 oldest of these human remains are found in southern Europe and 

 in northern Africa. Por example, in a limestone cave in the 

 Neanderthal in Germany, fossil remains have been found of a 

 man believed to be much more primitive than any now known. 

 Quite a number of individuals of this prehistoric race of men have 

 been discovered. In other words this race is regarded as 

 a distinct species of men; one of several now extinct types of 

 men that have been discovered in various, localities, some earlier 

 and some later than the Neanderthal type. We have signs of 

 the gradual improvement of the stone implements of men from 

 rough to smooth ; the introduction of other material as bone and, 

 later, copper, bronze, and iron. It is only after the thousands of 

 years of this primitive, unrecorded history that we come to the 

 history of such well-separated nations as those of the Euphrates 

 and Nile valleys, whose monuments and inscriptions are believed 

 to take us back 6,000 years or more. 



476. The Principal Types of Men and Their Distribution. — 



It is not perfectly certain that all the men of to-day should really 



