498 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN 
his successors in point of time that it became impossible 
to believe that Neanderthal man represented a stage 
in the evolution of modern man. Further, when we 
came to review critically the facts relating to the earlier 
discoveries made in England, France, and Italy, we were 
compelled to admit that men of the modern type had 
been in existence long before the extinction of the 
Neanderthal type. 
With the recognition of Neanderthal man as a distinct 
kind or species of human being, our estimate of man's 
antiquity underwent a profound change. We based 
our conception of the ancient world of man on the 
picture which meets our eye when we look abroad at 
the present time and see a world populated by races 
which are but variants of one prevailing human type. 
With such a picture in our minds we peered into the 
past, expecting to find that the population of every 
remote geological period was made up of only one 
type of man. The recognition of the true nature of 
Neanderthal man compelled us to replace that picture 
with a different one — one of an ancient population made 
up of, not mere varieties of one species of mankind as 
at present, but of totally different species and genera. 
Amongst this complex of ancient humanity we have to 
seek for the ancestors of modern man. The problems 
of man's origin and antiquity are thus less simple than 
we had anticipated. 
We could have avoided our initial mistake if we had 
kept in mind the condition of things in the anthropoid 
world. There, amongst the great anthropoids, we find 
three distinct types, two of them existing side by side 
in Africa (the gorilla and chimpanzee), while the third 
(the orang) survives in Sumatra and Borneo. They are 
so like to man in structure of body that we must, to 
account for the degree of similarity, regard all of them as 
collateral descendants of a common stock. We do not 
hesitate to think that the anthropoids retain, to a much 
greater degree than man, the structure and manner of 
Yiv'ms: of the ancient stock from which all four have 
