130 ANIMAL LIFE AND HUMAN PEOGRESS 



have crossed " Wallace's line " in their company. Beyond a 

 doubt they came by sea, and they came not as sea-tossed 

 castaways such as are those animal pioneers that furnish the 

 population of some distant islands. The progenitor of the 

 Talgai Man came with his wife, he came with his dog and with 

 his dog's wife, and he must have done the journey in a sea- 

 worthy boat capable of traversing this unquiet portion of the 

 ocean with his considerable cargo. Besides this living freight, 

 and the food and water necessary for the adventure, he carried 

 other things — he carried a knowledge of the boomerang, of the 

 basis of a totem system, and various other cultural features all 

 bearing a strange suggestion of very distinctly Western origin. 

 Beyond all this, and to increase our wonder, this man was 

 already racially differentiated — ^he was an " Austrahan " — and 

 he landed with his domesticated dogs in the Pleistocene of this 

 New World almost the first Eutherian animal to break in 

 upon a territory and a fauna not visited again by Eutherian 

 mammals until the arrival of such as Captain Cook and La 

 Perouse.^ With such evidence to hand one may be quit of 

 any haggling about the humanity of Eoanthropus, just as the 

 knowledge of Eoanthropus relieves us of any care for the 

 defence of Neanderthal Man. 



That there have been many side branches of the Primate 

 stock is not to be doubted ; that more ape-like types of 

 humanity have sprung from the stem, as the apes themselves 

 have done, is highly probable — even that the whole of the 

 human race has not originated in one single point of departure 

 is extremely likely. One fact we now know— that Man had 

 domesticated the dog, had acquired some very highly special- 

 ised cultural distinctions, and was a complete navigator of 

 oceans at a period of the world's history at which but a com- 

 paratively few years ago no scientific man would have admitted 

 his existence as a zoological type. 



With such a brief summary we must be contented in this 



1 The small rodents and the several species of bats which are found 

 in Austraha, though typical Eutherian animals, are here left out of 

 account, since their faoiUties for dispersal are well known and their 

 intrusion into the Metatherian fauna of Australia presents no problem. 



