PRE-MOUSTERIAN MAN 209 
period — Neanderthal man — from an anatomist's point of 
view, was of a most primitive type. He possessed many 
features which are rightly regarded as ape-like. In the 
deposits of the two long periods which preceded the 
Mousterian — the Acheulean and Chellean — probably cover- 
inff between them a stretch of a hundred thousand years 
^t least, the Thames filled up and scoured out its valley 
twice during that space of time — we have found no trace 
of Neanderthal man, nor of his ancestor. The deposits 
of the Thames, of the Somme, of the Seine, of the Arno, 
from one side of Europe to the other, have revealed the 
same story — the existence of a man, a mere variant of 
modern man, one with a thick skull, a big brain, and a 
long head. How are we to account for this unexpected 
revelation ? There are two ways : we may hold with the 
majority of anatomists and geologists, and simply refuse 
to believe in the authenticity of these discoveries because 
they run so contrary to our preconception of how and 
when modern man was evolved. Or, with Sergi and with 
Rutot, we may put our preconceptions aside, and, as we 
are bound to do, accept the revelations of those discoveries 
as facts, and alter our conception of man's evolution to 
harmonise with our facts. We have, in the first place, to 
conclude that man of the modern type is much older than 
we supposed. We expected to find him in a process of 
evolution during the Pleistocene period, but we have 
traversed more than the half of that period and find our 
own species much as we find him at the present day. It 
is clear we must seek for his evolution at an earlier time 
than the Pleistocene. Neanderthal man is a different and 
very primitive species of man. Where and when he was 
evolved we do not know, but clearly he was an intruder 
when he entered Europe at a late stage of the mid- 
Pleistocene period. Further, we have to take a more 
complex view of the world of ancient man. In our first 
youthful burst of Darwinianism we pictured our evolution 
as a simple procession of forms leading from ape to man. 
Each age, as it passed, transformed the men of the time 
one stage nearer to us — one more distant from the ape. 
