106 Evolution 



to the north of England, cannot yet be determined. 

 Few authorities think it can have been less than 

 100,000 years ago, and some put it at 700,000. 

 It seems to me that Mortillet {he Pre-historique) 

 has made the most careful calculation, and he puts 

 it at a quarter of a million years ago. That 

 200,000 years is a moderate estimate will be seen 

 from these facts. In France (at Chelles, for instance), 

 we find the floor of Neanderthal France forty feet below 

 the present surface. In England this early man was a 

 contemporary of the rhinoceros, hippopotamus, sabre- 

 toothed tiger (or lion-tiger), hyena, mammoth, and other 

 strange forms. He wandered over on foot before the 

 German Ocean cut off England from the continent ; and 

 there is good reason to think that the Thames ran in a 

 broad swampy bed several miles wide when he basked in 

 the sun on its gravelled shore, and that the whole 

 valley on which London is built has been cut out since. 



The closer we bring Paleolithic man to our own time, 

 the more unintelligible we make the long evolution from 

 the ape stage, but the question is obscure and not very 

 important, so we may leave it to future archaeologists. 

 Taking the whole history of humanity, from the appear- 

 ance of Paleolithic man, as 200,000 years, we must 

 assign three-fourths of this to the Paleolithic age. 

 Progress was still inconceivably slow, judged by our 

 modern standards. After a time we get slightly 

 improved skulls (Chancelade, Sordes, Laugerie Basse, 

 Brunn, etc.), and the chipping of the flints becomes 

 much finer. The climate of Europe becomes colder 

 once more — probably owing to a fresh extension of the 

 ice sheet in the north — the hippopotamus and tiger and 

 hyena retreat south, and man begins to live in rock 

 shelters and caves. It was probably about this time 

 that he discovered the use of fire. As the earliest fire- 



