AN EXPERIMENT IN RECONSTRUCTION 357 
Darwin believed, and rightly believed, that they had 
made a ^reat advance when they proved that men — such 
as you and I are — lived with animals now extinct, animals 
like the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and the cave-bear. 
The anatomists and geologists of thirty, years ago were 
very careful, almost penurious, when they drew a draft 
on the bank of Time ; they believed that their credit was 
strictly limited when they dealt at that bank. They 
were convinced that men of the modern type may have 
appeared towards the end of the Pleistocene period — some 
fifteen thousand years ago or more — when those extinct 
forms of mammals were living. They expected to dis- 
cover, as they searched further into the past and reached 
the beginning of the Pleistocene and end of the Pliocene, 
a series of intermediate forms which would carry us 
rapidly towards a simian stage. Until a year or two ago, 
many of our leading authorities believed that Pithecanthro- 
pus — a humanoid form, with a brain capacity of 850 c.c, 
little more than half that of modern man — represented our 
stage of evolution at the beginning of the Pleistocene 
period. The same men looked on Neanderthal species 
as representative of Pleistocene man, while modern races 
appeared just before the dawn of the recent period. 
These two circumstances — a lower jaw with simian 
features and a belief in the recent evolution of the modern 
human brain — would naturally lead the discoverers of 
Eoanthropus to the conclusion that they had to deal with 
a primitive, small-brained form of man. During these 
last twenty years, however, another line of evidence has 
been slowly accumulating, which seems to point to a much 
earlier date as marking the period of man's evolution. 
Our estimate of the antiquity of the modern type of man 
must be sufficiently long to give time for the differentia- 
tion of that type into the most diverse forms — African, 
European, Mongolian. It is more than twenty years 
a^o since Sir Joseph Prestwich became convinced that 
the Kentish "eoliths" were of human workmanship, and 
were of Pliocene — not even late Pliocene — date. Four 
Mr Reid Moir discovered under the " Red 
