HOW OLD IS MAN? 



125 



more advanced, but lower than any ex- 

 isting - savage, and specifically distinct 

 from modern man. This race dwelt in 

 Europe, without other human rivals, for 

 an immense period of time ; probably at 

 least fifty thousand years ; certainly an 

 age several times as long as the period 

 included in the interval between the ear- 

 liest polished stone men and ourselves — ■ 

 in other words, several times as long as 

 the ages of polished stone, bronze, and 

 iron and the total of historic times all 

 put together (see picture, page 120). 



These Neanderthal men were squat, 

 burly, big-headed, thick-skulled savages, 

 with brows projecting over cavernous 

 eyes, knees permanently bent, and jaws 

 almost chinless. Their brains were of 

 good size, but the portions which repre- 

 sent the higher intellectual attainments 

 were poorly developed. 



The type skull of the race was discov- 

 ered sixty years ago ; but its wide diver- 

 gence from existing type, combined with 

 its large brain capacity, caused students 

 to doubt its exact place in the human 

 scale. Darwin practically ignored it, al- 

 though it was exactly the "missing link" 

 he hoped to find! The perverse ingenuity 

 of the great anatomist Virchow, who, 

 with wrong-headed insistence, declared 

 its peculiarities to be pathologic, delayed 

 for a generation the full understanding 

 of its importance. 



Other skulls and skeletons were found, 

 however, and there is now no more doubt 

 of the racial existence of the Neander- 

 thals than of the racial existence of the 

 ancient Egyptians. They were a low race 

 of men, distinctly human, but far nearer 

 the beast than any existing race. They 

 were widely distributed, began to live in 

 caves when the Glacial epoch really 

 opened, and assiduously practiced the in- 

 dustry of making tools, implements, and 

 weapons of flint. 



They lived by the chase of the great 

 game with which they were surrounded. 

 Some of their favorite hunting grounds 

 were frequented by them for untold gen- 

 erations, and the skeletal remains of 

 thousands of bison and reindeer and tens 

 of thousands of wild horses, mingled 

 with the bones of mammoth and rhinoc- 

 eros, show how the game abounded. 



Some of their favorite caverns zvere 

 lived in by them and by their successors 

 for fifty thousand years. 



They were widely, although thinly, 

 spread over Europe, and the development 

 of their flint tools and implements is 

 everywhere so uniform as to show that 

 the various stages in the evolution of 

 their culture in different places were es- 

 sentially contemporary. During the im- 

 mense period of time when they were the 

 only human beings in Europe the climate 

 changed from warm-temperate to glacial, 

 and the fauna changed in like fashion, 

 one set of beasts supplanting another. 

 They hunted all these creatures, but es- 

 pecially the horses, oxen, and reindeer. 



Yet how small a factor man then was 

 as regards the extermination of the big 

 game may be gathered from the fact that 

 the changes in the faunas were evidently 

 due purely to climatic alterations. When 

 the climate changed, so as to favor the 

 mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, musk-ox, 

 reindeer, and steppe horse, they all 

 swarmed into the land, where hitherto 

 they had not been found, and flourished 

 and increased greatly. It is evident that 

 the presence of the Neanderthal hunter 

 had no effect upon them. He could not 

 even prevent their increase when climatic 

 conditions favored such increase. 



OUR ANCESTORS, A RACE OE TALL HUXTER- 

 ARTISTS, ENTER EUROPE 



At last the life term of these primitive 

 hunter folk drew to a close. They were 

 not our ancestors. Y\ 'ith our present 

 knowledge, it seems probable that they 

 were exterminated as completely from 

 Europe as in our own da)' the Tasma- 

 nians were exterminated from Tasmania. 



The most profound change in the 

 whole racial (not cultural) history of 

 western Europe was the sudden and total 

 supplanting of these savages, lower than 

 any existing human type, by the tall, 

 finely built Cro-Magnon race of hunters, 

 who in intelligence evidently ranked high 

 as compared with all but the very fore- 

 most modern peoples, and who belonged 

 to the same species of man that we do — 

 Homo sapiens (see picture, page 122). 



Geologically, these were modern im- 

 migrants into western Europe; for there 



