Vol. XXIX, No. 2 



WASHINGTON 



February, 1916 



THE 



ATQOJMAL 

 ro APED 



HOW OLD IS MAN? 



By Theodore Roosevelt 



O 



F RECENT years scientific writ- 

 ers have for convenience sake 

 distinguished as prehistory that 

 part of man's long history on this earth 

 which precedes the period for which we 

 possess written records, or at least rec- 

 ords that may be treated as in some sort 

 their equivalent. 



This prehistory of man is, of course, 

 immensely longer than what can, by any 

 stretch of language, be called his true his- 

 tory. At present our historical records 

 begin in Egypt and Mesopotamia, using 

 the latter word to include the entire coun- 

 try adjacent to the Tigris and Euphrates ; 

 and the first dim indications of anything 

 that can properly be called history do not 

 go back seven thousand years, while it is 

 not until some five thousand years ago 

 that we begin to be on continuously firm 

 historical ground. 



At that time Europe was still in the 

 prehistoric stage, and its inhabitants knew 

 practically nothing of either metals or 

 writing, being in the neolithic or polished 

 stone cultural stage. In America history 

 cannot be said to have begun much before 

 the advent of the white man, although 

 there are extraordinary architectural re- 

 mains of old and strange civilizations in 

 Mexico, Central America, and Peru. 



"Old," however, is a relative term. 

 The earliest monuments beside the lower 

 Kile and lower Euphrates, like the ear- 

 liest monuments on the high plateaus or 

 in the dense tropical forests of the new 

 world, are purely modern — are things of 



yesterday — when measured by the hoary 

 antiquity into which we grope when we 

 attempt to retrace the prehistory of man, 

 the history of his development from an 

 apelike creature struggling with his fel- 

 low-brutes, to the being with at least 

 longings and hopes that are half divine. 

 All our knowledge of man's slow prog- 

 ress during the immense stretch of time 

 covering this development has been ob- 

 tained during the last two generations; 

 it is still of a sketchy and fragmentary 

 kind, and we cannot hope that it will 

 ever be complete ; but already we know 

 enough to indicate the rough outlines of 

 some of the most important of the devel- 

 opmental stages, and as regards certain 

 of the later stages to fill in various details. 



THE REPTII.KS DISAPPEAR AND MAMMALS 

 RUEE THE EARTH 



In geological or paleontological par- 

 lance, the Age of Mammals is known as 

 the Tertiary period. At the beginning of 

 this period the gigantic creatures with 

 which the Age of Reptiles, the secondary 

 period of the earth's history, culminated, 

 had all died out. 



The mammals, which for ages had ex- 

 isted as small, warm-blooded beasts of 

 low type, now had the field much to them- 

 selves. They developed along many dif- 

 ferent lines, including that of the pri- 

 mates, from which came the monkeys, 

 the anthropoid apes, and finally the half- 

 human predecessors of man himself. At 

 about the time when these last appeared 



