. YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind BY H. G. WELLS WBITTEN ORIGINALLY WITH THE ADVICE AND EDITORIAL HELP OF MR. ERNEST BARKER, SIR H. H. JOHNSTON, SIR E. RAY L-ANKESTER, AND PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY AND ILLUSTRATED BY J. F. HORRABIN THE THIRD EDITION Revised and Rearranged by the Author ileto gorfe THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1921 All rights reserved PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA YALE Copyright, 1920 and 1921, Bt THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Copyright, 1920 and 1921, By H. G. WELLS. Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1920. Third Edition revised and rearranged September, 1921. INTRODUCTION "A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name, must begin with the heavens and descend to the earth, must be charged with the conviction that all existence is one — a single conception sustained from be ginning to end upon one identical law" — Friedkich Batzel. THIS Outline of History, of which this is a third edition, freshly revised and rearranged, is an attempt to tell, truly and clearly, in one continuous narrative, the whole story of life and mankind so far as it is known to-day. It is written plainly for the general reader, but its aim goes beyond its use as merely interesting reading matter. There is a feeling abroad that the teaching of history considered as a part of gen eral education is in an unsatisfactory condition, and particu larly that the ordinary treatment of this "subject" by the class and teacher and examiner is too partial and narrow. But the desire to extend the general range of historical ideas is con fronted by the argument that the available time for instruction is already consumed by that partial and narrow treatment, and that therefore, however desirable this extension of range may be, it is in practice impossible. If an Englishman, for example, has found the history of England quite enough for his powers of assimilation, then it seems hopeless to expect his sons and daughters to master universal history, if that is to consist of the history of England, plus the history of France, plus the history of Germany, plus the history of Russia, and so on. To which the only possible answer is that universal history is at. once something more and something less than the aggregate of the national histories to which we are accustomed, that it must be approached in a different spirit and dealt with in a different manner. This book seeks to justify that answer. It has been written primarily to show that history as one whole is amenable to a more broad and comprehensive handling than is the history of special nations and periods, a broader handling vi INTRODUCTION that will bring it within the normal limitations of time and energy set to the reading and education of an ordinary citizen. This outline deals with ages and races and nations, where the ordinary history deals with reigns and pedigrees and campaigns ; but it will not be found to be more crowded with names and dates, nor more difficult to follow and understand. History is no exception amongst the sciences ; as the gaps fill in,, the out line simplifies ; as the outlook broadens, the clustering multitude of details dissolves into general laws. And many topics of quite primary interest to mankind, the first appearance and the growth of scientific knowledge for example, and its effects upon human life, the elaboration of the ideas of money and credit, or the story of the origins and spread and influence of Christianity, which must be treated fragmentarily or by elaborate digressions in any partial history, arise and flow completely and naturally in one general record of the world in which we live. The need for a common knowledge of the general facts of human history throughout the world has become very evident during the tragic happenings of the last few years. Swifter means of communication have brought all men closer to one another for good or for evil. War becomes a universal disaster, blind and monstrously destructive; it bombs the baby in its cradle and sinks the food-ships that cater for the non-combatant and the neutral. There can be no peace now, we realize, but a common peace in all the world; no prosperity but a general prosperity. But there can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas. Without such ideas to hold them together in harmonious co-operation, with nothing but nar row, selfish, and conflicting nationalist traditions, races and peoples are bound to drift towards conflict and destruction. This truth, which was apparent to that great philosopher Kant a century or more ago — it is the gist of his tract upon universal peace — is now plain to the man in the street Our internal policies and our economic and social ideas are profoundly vitiated at present by wrong and fantastic ideas of the origin and historical relationship of social classes. A sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind is as necessary for peace within as it is for peace between the nations. The writer will offer no apology for making this experiment His disqualifications are manifest. But such work needs to be done- by as many people as possible, he was free to make his iJNiKOUUUTION vii contribution, and he was greatly attracted by the task. , He has read sedulously and made the utmost use of all the help he could obtain. There is not a chapter that has not been examined by some more competent person than himself and very carefully revised. He has particularly to thank his friends Sir E. Bay Lankester, Sir H. H. Johnston, Professor Gilbert Murray, and Mr. Ernest Barker for much counsel and direc tion and. editorial help. Mr. Philip Guedalla has toiled most efficiently and kindly through all the proofs. Mr. A. Allison, Professor T. W. Arnold, Mr. Arnold Bennett, the Eev. A. H. Trevor Benson, Mr. Aodh de Blacam, Mr. Laurence Binyon, the Eev. G. W. Broomfield, Sir William Bull, Mr. L. Cranmer Byng, Mr. A. J. D. Campbell, Mr. A. Y. Campbell, Mr. L. Y. Chen, Mr. A. E. Cowan, Mr. O. G. S. Crawford, Dr. W. S. Culbertson, Mr. R. Langton Cole, Mr. B. G. Collins, Mr. J. J. L. Duyvendak, Mr. O. W. Ellis, Mr. G. S. Ferrier, Mr. David Freeman, Mr. S. K Fu, Mr. G. B. Gloyne, Sir Eichard Gregory, Mr. F. H. Hayward, Mr. Sydney Herbert, Dr. Fr. Krupieka, Mr. H. Lang Jones, Mr. C. H. B. Laughton, Mr. B. I. Macalpin, Mr. G. H. Mair, Mr. F. S. Marvin, Mr. J. S. Mayhew, Mr. B. Stafford Morse, Professor J. L. Myres, the Hon. W. Ormsby-Gore, Sir Sydney Olivier, Mr. E. I. Pocock, Mr. J. Pringle, Mr. W. H. E. Eivers, Sir Denison Boss, Dr. E. J. Eussell, Dr. Charles Singer, Mr. A. St. George Sanford, Dr. C. O. Stallybrass, Mr. G. H. Walsh, Mr. G. P. Wells, Miss Eebecca West, and Mr. George Whale have all. to be thanked for help, either by reading parts of the MS. or by pointing out errors in the published parts, making suggestions, answering questions or giving advice. Numerous other helpful corre spondents have pointed out printer's errors and minor slips in the serial publication which preceded the book edition, and they have added many useful items of information, and to those writers also the warmest thanks are due. Mr. C. M. Anton Belaiew, Mr. Henry Coates, Mr. J. A. Corry, Mr. Archibald Craig, Mr. W. V. Cruden, Mr. A. H. Dodd, Mr. T. B. Gold smith, Mr. F. E. Green, Mr. F. S. Hare, Mr. Homer B. Hul- bert, Mr. Walter Ingleby, Mr. J. H. Leviton, Mr. H. Comyn Maitland, Mr. Karsten" Meyer, Mr. William Piatt, Mr. F. Gordon Eoe, Mr. Alden Sampson, Mr. Neville H. Smith, Mr. M. Timur, Mr. W. H. Thompson, Mr. A. J. Vogan, Mr. W. A. Voss, Mr. G. F. Wates, and one or two correspondents with viii INTRODUCTION illegible signatures, have made valuable suggestions since the publication of the second edition. Pamphlets against the Out line by Mr. Go'mme and Dr. Downey have also been useful in this later revision. But of course none of these helpers are to be held responsible for the judgments, tone, arrangement or writing of this Outline. In the relative importance of the parts, in the moral and political implications of the story, the final decision has necessarily fallen to the writer. The problem of illustrations was a very difficult one for him, for he had had no previous experience in the production of an illustrated book. In Mr. J. F. Horrabin he has had the good fortune to find not only an illustrator but a collaborator. Mr. Horrabin has spared no pains to make this work informative and exact. His maps and drawings are a part of the text, the most vital and decorative part. Some of them represent the reading and inquiry of many laborious days. The index to this edition is the work of Mr. Strickland Gib son of Oxford. Several correspondents have asked for a pro nouncing index and accordingly this has been provided. The writer owes a word of thanks to that living index of printed books, Mr. J. F. Cox of the London Library. He would also like to acknowledge here the help he has received from Mrs. Wells. Without her labour in typing and re-typing the drafts of the various chapters as they have been revised and amended, in checking references, finding suitable quotations, hunting up illustrations, and keeping in order the whole mass of material for this history, and without her constant help and watchful criticism, its completion would have been impossible. H. G. Wells. SCHEME OF CONTENTS PAGE Chapter I. The Earth in Space and Time 1 Chapter II. The Record op the Rocks § 1. The first living things .5 §2. How old is the world? 10 Chapter III. Natural Selection and the Changes of Species . 13 Chapter IV. The Invasion of the Dry Land by Life § 1. Life and water .19 § 2. The earliest animals ..'... . . .21 Chapter V. The Age of Reptiles § 1. The age of lowland life .25 29 303234 §2. Flying dragons . § 3. The first birds §4. An age of hardship and death . § 5. The first appearance of fur and feathers Chapter VI. The Age of Mammals § 1. A new age of life .37 §2. Tradition comes into the world 38 § 3. An age of brain growth 42 §4. The world grows hard again 44 Chapter VII. The Ancestey of Man-. § 1. Man descended from a walking ape 46 § 2. First traces of man-like creatures 51 § 3. The Heidelberg sub-man 52 § 4. The Piltdown sub-man 53 Chapter VIII. The Neanderthal Men, an Extinct Race. (The Early Palaeolithic Age) § 1. The world 50,000 years ago 55 §2. The daily life of the first men 59 Chapter IX. The Later Postglacial Paleolithic Men, the First True Men. (Lateb Paleolithic Age) § 1. The coming of men like ourselves .65 § 2. Hunters give place to herdsmen .74 § 3. No sub-men in America 75 SCHEME OF CONTENTS Chapter X. Neolithic Man in Europe § I. The age of cultivation begins §2. Where did the Neolithic culture arise? § 3. Everyday Neolithic life § 4. Primitive trade § 5. The flooding of the Mediterranean valley 77 81 8187 88 Chapteb XI. Eably Thought § 1. Primitive philosophy 92 §2. The Old Man in religion 94 § 3. Fear and hope in religion 96 § 4. Stars and seasons ......... 97 § 5. Story-telling and myth-making ...... 99 § 6. Complex origins of religion ....... 100 Chapter XII. The Races of Mankind § 1. Is mankind still differentiating? . § 2. The main races of mankind § 3. The Heliolithic culture of the Brunei peoples 106110111 Chapter XIII. The Languages of Mankind § 1. No one primitive language .117 §2. The Aryan languages .118 § 3. The Semitic languages 120 § 4. The Hamitic languages . . . . . . .121 § 5. The Ural-Altaic languages 123 § 6. The Chinese languages 123 § 7. Other language groups 124 § 8. A possible primitive language group .... 127 § 9. Some isolated ¦ languages 129 Chapter XIV. The First Civilizations § 1. Early cities and early nomads § 2a. The Sumerians § 2b. The empire of Sargon the First § 2c The empire of Hammurabi . § 2d. The Assyrians and their empire § 2e. The Chaldean empire . § 3. The early history of Egypt . § 4. The early civilization of India § 5. The early history of China . § 6. While the civilizations were growing Chapter XV. Sea Peoples and Trading Peoples § 1. The earliest ships and sailors . § 2. The . Azote or Archaeozoic v "Proterozoic "Wvttwut visible braces oF Ixvixux struct* vx-a. 7kxa oP7bxnanlrnlne.,Je2^ ££sbs?-~ Green. Scum, avel the. IHka. JEarfo' Palaeozoic "Before -the appearance, or any vertebrate. axuxxialsZAaz of Sea Scorpions HfTrilobihis. l Lazfer Palaeozoic Jhm. or° 'Fishes ,1imphihria. , and. Swamp ~ devests. I Mesozoic }CtttiOZO\C ~&gv op mammals, (jrass, & Land, forests. as a mere swift prelude of preparation to the apparently much longer history that follows, but in reality that subsequent his tory is longer only because it is more detailed and more in teresting to us. It looms larger in perspective. For ages that stagger the imagination this earth spun hot and lifeless, 12 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY and again for ages of equal vastness it held no life above the level of the animalculae in a drop of ditch-water. Not only is Space from the point of view of life and human ity empty, but Time is empty also. Life is like a little glow, scarcely kindled yet, in these void immensities. Ill NATURAL SELECTION AND THE CHANGES OF SPECIES NOW here it will be well to pui plainly certain general facts about this new thing, life, that was creeping in the shallow waters and intertidal muds of the early Palaeozoic period, and which is perhaps confined to our planet alone in all the immensity of space. Life differs from all things whatever that are without life in certain general aspects. There are the most wonderful dif ferences among living things to-day, but all living things past and present agree in possessing a certain power of growth, all living, things take nourishment, all living things move about as they feed and grow, though the movement be no more than the spread of roots through the soil, or of branches in the air. Moreover, living things reproduce; they give rise to other living things, either by growing and- then dividing or by means of seeds or spores or eggs or other ways of producing young. Reproduction is a characteristic of life. No living thing goes on living for ever. There seems to be a limit of growth for every kind of living thing. Among very small and simple living things, such as that microscopic blob of living matter the Amoeba, an individual may grow and then divide completely into two new individuals, which again may divide in their turn. Many other microscopic creatures live actively for a time, grow, and then become quiet and inactive, enclose themselves in an outer covering and break up wholly into a number of still smaller things, spores, which are released and scattered and again grow into the likeness of their parent. Among more complex creatures the reproduc tion is not usually such simple division, though division does occur even in the case of many creatures big enough to be visible to the unassisted eye. But the rule with almost all 13 14 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY larger beings is that the individual grows up to a certain limit of size. Then, before it becomes unwieldy, its growth declines and stops. As it reaches its full size it matures, it begins to produce young, which are either born alive or hatched from eggs. But all of its body does not produce young. Only a special part does that. After the individual has lived and produced offspring for some time, it ages and dies. It does so by a sort of necessity. There is a practical limit to its life as well as to its growth. These things are as true of plants as they are of animals. And they are not true of things that do not live. Non-living things, such as crystals, grow, but they have no set limits of growth or size, they do not move of their own accord and there is no stir within them. Crystals once formed may last unchanged for millions of years. There is no reproduction for any non-living thing. This growth and dying and reproduction of living things leads to some very wonderful consequences. The young which a living thing produces are either directly, or after some inter mediate stages and changes (such as the changes of a cater pillar and butterfly), like the parent living thing. But they are .never exactly like it or like each other. " There is always a slight difference, which we speak of as individuality. A thousand butterflies this year may produce two or three thou sand next year; these latter will look to us almost exactly like their predecessors, but each one will have just that slight difference. It is hard for us to see individuality in butter flies because we do not observe them very closely, but it is easy for us to see it in men. All the men and women in the world now are descended from the men and women of a.d. 1800, but not one of us now is exactly the same as one of that vanished generation. And what is true of men and butterflies is true of every sort of living thing, of plants as of animals. Every species changes all its individualities in each generation. That is true of all the minute creatures that swarmed and repro duced and died in the Archaeozoic and Proterozoic seas, as it. is of men to-day. Every species of living things is continually dying and being born again, as a multitude of fresh individuals. Consider, then, what must happen to a new-born generation of living things of any species. Some of the individuals will be stronger or sturdier or better suited to succeed in life in NATURAL SELECTION 15 some way than the rest, many individuals will be weaker or less suited. In particular single cases any sort of luck or accident may occur, but on the whole the better equipped in dividuals will live and grow up and reproduce themselves and the weaker will as a rule go under. The latter will be less able to get food, to fight their enemies and pull through. So that in each generation there is as it were a picking over of a species, a picking out of most of the weak or unsuitable and a preference for the strong and suitable. This process is called Natural Selection or the Survival of the Fittest.1 It follows, therefore, from the fact that living things grow and breed and die, that every species, so long as the conditions under which it lives remain the same, becomes more and more perfectly fitted to those conditions in every generation. But now suppose those conditions change, then the sort of individual that used to succeed may now fail to succeed and a sort of individual that could not get on at all under the old conditions may now find its opportunity. These species will change, therefore, generation by generation; the old sort of individual that used to prosper and dominate will fail and die out and the new sort of individual will become the rule, — until the general character of the species changes. Suppose, for example, there is some little furry whitey- brown animal living in a bitterly cold land which is usually under snow. Such individuals as have the thickest, whitest fur will be least hurt by the cold, less seen by their enemies, and less conspicuous as they seek their prey. The fur of this species will thicken and its whiteness increase with every gen eration, until there is no advantage in carrying any more fur. Imagine now a change of climate that brings warmth into the land, sweeps away the snows, makes white creatures glar ingly visible during the greater part of the year and thick fur an encumbrance. Then every individual with a touch of brown in its colouring and a thinner fur will find itself at an advantage, and very white and heavy fur will be a handi cap. There will be a weeding out of the white in favour of the brown in each generation. If this change of climate come about too quickly, it may of course exterminate the species altogether; but if it come about gradually, the species, although it may have a hard time, may yet be able to change 1 It might be called with more exactness the Survival of the Fitter. HW O a t-1i— i 121W o t— I HC t= K Diaqkam of Life in the Lateb Paleozoic Age. Life is creeping out of the water. An insect like a dragon-fly is shown. There were amphibia like gigantic newts and salamanders, and even primitive reptiles in these swamps. NATURAL SELECTION ' 17 itself and adapt itself generation by generation. This change and adaptation is called the Modification of Species. Perhaps this change of climate does not occur all over the lands inhabited by the species ; maybe it occurs only on one side of some great arm of the sea or some great mountain range or such-like divide, and not on the other. A warm ocean cur rent- like the Gulf Stream may be deflected, and flow so as to warm one side of the barrier, leaving the other still cold. Then on the cold side this species will still be going on to its utmost possible furriness and whiteness and on the other side it will be modifying towards brownness and a thinner coat. At the same time there will probably be other changes going on ; a difference in the paws perhaps, because one • half of the species will be frequently scratching through snow for its food, while the other will be scampering over brown earth. Probably also the difference of climate will mean differences in the sort of food available, and that may produce differences in the teeth and the digestive organs. And there may be changes in the sweat and oil glands of the skin due to the changes in the fur, and these will affect the excretory organs and all the internal chemistry of the body. • And so through all the structure of the creature. A time will come when the two separated varieties of this formerly single species will become so unlike each other as to be recognizably different species. Such a splitting up of a species in the course of gen erations into two or more species is called the Differentiation of Species. And it should be clear to the reader that given these ele mental facts of life, given growth and death and reproduction with individual variation in a world that changes, life must change in this way, modification and differentiation, must occur, old species must disappear, and new ones appear. We have chosen for our instance here a familiar sort of animal, but what is true of furry beasts in snow and ice is true of all life, and equally true of the soft jellies and simple be ginnings that flowed and crawled for hundreds of millions of years1 between the tidal levels and in the shallow, warm waters of the Proterozoic seas. The early life of the early world, when the blazing sun rose and set in only a quarter of the time it now takes, when the warm seas poured in great tides over the sandy and 18 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY muddy shores of the rocky lands and the air was full of clouds and steam, must have been modified and varied and species must have developed at a great pace. Life was prob ably as swift and short as the days and years; the generations, which natural selection picked over, followed one another in rapid succession. Natural selection is a slower process with man than with any other creature. It takes twenty years or more before an ordinary human being in western Europe grows up and re produces. In the case of most animals the new generation is on trial in a year or less. With such simple and lowly be ings, however, as first appeared in the primordial seas, growth and reproduction was probably a matter of a few brief hours or even of a few brief minutes. Modification and differentia tion of species must accordingly have been extremely rapid, and life had already developed a great variety of widely con trasted forms before it began to leave traces in the rocks. The Record of the Rocks does not begin, therefore, with any group of closely related forms from which all subsequent and existing creatures are descended. It begins in the midst of the game, with nearly every main division of the animal kingdom already represented. Plants are already plants, and animals animals. The curtain rises on a drama in the sea that has already begun, and has been going on for some time. The brachiopods are discovered already in their shells, accept ing and consuming much the same sort of food that oysters and mussels do now; the great water scorpions crawl among the seaweeds, the trilobites roll up into balls and unroll and scuttle away. In that ancient mud and among those early weeds there was probably as rich and abundant and active a life of infusoria and the like as one finds in a drop of ditch- water to-day. In the ocean waters, too, down to the utmost downward limit to which light could filter, then as now, there was an abundance of minute and translucent, and in many cases phosphorescent, beings. But though the ocean and intertidal waters already swarmed with life, the land above the high-tide line was still, so far as we can guess, a stony wilderness without a trace of life. rv THE INVASION OF THE DRY LAND BY LIFE § 1. Life and Water. § 2. The Earliest Animals. § 1 WHEREVER the shore line ran there was life, and that life went on in and by and with water as its home, its medium, and its fundamental necessity. The first jelly-like beginnings of life must have perished whenever they got out of the water, as jelly-fish dry up and perish on our beaches to-day. Drying up was the fatal thing for life in those days, against which at first it had no protec tion. But in a world of rain-pools and shallow seas and tideSj any variation that enabled a living thing to hold out and keep its moisture during hours of low tide or drought met with every encouragement in the circumstances of the time. There must have been a constant risk of stranding. And, on the other hand, life had to keep rather near the shore and beaches in the shallows because it had need of air (dissolved of course in the water) and light. No creature can breathe, no creature can digest its food, without water. We talk of breathing air, but what all living things really do is to breathe oxygen dissolved in water. The air we ourselves breathe must first be dissolved in the moisture in our lungs; and all our food must be liquefied before it can be assimilated. Water-living creatures which are always under water, wave the freely exposed gills by which they breathe in that water, and extract the air dissolved in it. But a creature that is to be exposed for any time out of the water must have its body and its breathing apparatus protected from drying up. Before the seaweeds could creep up out of the Early Palseozoic seas into the intertidal line of the beach, they had to develop a tougher outer skin to hold their moisture. 19 20 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY Before the ancestor of the sea scorpion could survive being left by the tide it had to develop its casing and armour. The trilobites probably developed their tough covering and rolled up into balls, far less as a protection against each other and any other enemies they may have possessed, than as a precau tion against drying. And when presently, as we ascend the Palaeozoic rocks, the fish appear, first of all the back-boned or vertebrated animals, it is evident that a number of them are already adapted by the protection of their gills with gill covers and by a sort of primitive lung swimming-bladder, to face the same risk of temporary stranding. Now the weeds and plants that were adapting themselves to intertidal conditions were also bringing themselves into a region of brighter light, and light is very necessary and precious to all plants. Any development of structure that would stiffen them and hold them up to the light, so that in stead of crumping and flopping when the waters receded, they would stand up outspread, was a great advantage. And so we find them developing fibre and support, and the beginning of woody fibre in them. The early plants reproduced by soft spores, or half-animal "gametes," that were released in water, were distributed by water and could only germinate under water. The early plants were tied, and most lowly plants to day are tied, by the conditions of their life cycle, to water. But here again there was a great advantage to be got by the development of some protection of the spores from drought that would enable reproduction to occur without submergence. So soon as a species could do that, it could live and reproduce and spread above the high-water mark, bathed in light and out of reach of the beating and distress of the waves. The main classificatory divisions of the larger plants mark stages in the release of plant life from the necessity of submergence by the development of woody support and of a method of reproduction that is more and more defiant of drying up. The lower plants are still the prisoner attendants of water. The lower mosses must live in damp, and even the development of the spore of the ferns demands at certain stages extreme wet ness. The highest plants have carried freedom from water so far that they can live and reproduce if only there is some moisture in the soil below them. They have solved their problem of living out of water altogether. inn in vnDiuii w.r inn JJltx J-.AJN.D zl The essentials of that problem were worked out through the vast aeons of the Proterozoic Age and the early Palaeozoic Age by nature's method of experiment and trial. Then slowly, but in great abundance, a variety of new plants began to swarm away from the sea and over the lower lands, still keep ing to swamp and lagoon and water-course as they spread. § 2 And after the plants came the animal life. There is no sort of land animal in the world, as there is no sort of land plant, whose structure is not primarily that of a water-inhabiting being which has been adapted through the modification and differentiation of species to life out of the water. This adaptation is attained in various ways. In the case of the land scorpion the gill-plates of the primitive sea scorpion are sunken into the body so as to make the lung- books secure from rapid evaporation. The gills of- crustaceans, such as the crabs which run about in the air, are protected by the gill-cover extensions of the back shell or carapace. The ancestors of the insects developed a system of air pouches and air tubes, the trachea! tubes, which carry the air all over the body before it is dissolved. In the case of the vertebrated land animals, the gills of the ancestral fish were first supple mented and then replaced by a bag-like growth from the throat, the primitive lung swimming-bladder. To this day there sur vive certain mudfish which enable us to understand very clearly the method by which the vertebrated land animals worked their way out of the water. These creatures (e.g. the African lung fish) are found in tropical regions in which there is a rainy full season and a dry season, during which the rivers become mere ditches of baked mud. During the rainy season these fish swim about and breathe by gills like any other fish. As the waters of the river evaporate, these fish bury them selves in the mud, their gills go out of action, and the creature keeps itself alive until the waters return by swallowing air, which passes into its swimming-bladder. The Australian lung fish, when it is caught by the drying up of the river in stagnant pools, and the water has become deaerated and foul, rises to the surface and gulps air. A newt in a pond does exactly the same thing. These creatures still remain at the transition 22 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY stage, the stage at which the ancestors of the higher vertebrated animals were released from their restriction to an under-water life. The amphibia (frogs, newts, tritons, etc.) still show in their life history all the stages in the process of this liberation. They are still dependent on water for their reproduction ; their eggs must be laid in sunlit water, and there they must develop. The young tadpole has branching external gills that wave in ^ the water; then a ~J '\/\ P^V-~_ 6^1 cover grows *"' '* " "' back over them and forms a gill cham ber. Then as the creature's legs ap pear and its tail is absorbed, it begins to use its lungs, and its gills dwindle and vanish. The adult frog can live all the rest of its days in the air, but it can be drowned if it, is kept steadfastly below water. When we come to the reptile^ however, we find an egg which is pro tected from evaporation by a tough egg case, and this egg produces young which breathe by lungs from the very moment of hatching. The reptile is on all fours with the seeding plant in its freedom from the necessity to pass any stage of its life cycle in water. The later Palaeozoic Rocks of the northern hemisphere give us the materials for a series of pictures of this slow spreading of life over the land. Geographically, all round the northern half of the world it was an age of lagoons and shallow seas very favourable to this invasion. The new plants, now that they had acquired the power to live this new aerial life, de veloped with an extraordinary richness and variety. There were as yet no true flowering plants,1 no grasses nor trees that shed their leaves in winter ; 2 the first "flora" con sisted of great tree ferns, gigantic equisetums, cycad ferns, and kindred vegetation. Many of these plants took the form of hugestemmed trees, of which great multitudes of trunks survive fossilized to this day. Some of these trees were over 'Phanerogams. 'Deciduous trees. THE INVASION OF THE DRY LAND 23 a hundred feet high, of orders and classes now vanished from the world. They stood with their stems in the water, in which no doubt there was a thick tangle of soft mosses and green Some "Reptiles' cft£e- 'cosniuV :'W~. ' I~A. Sitf-foot man . / i ~T~ \*\ atraxm. tb same scale i fill i Vft/ slime and fungoid growths that left few plain vestiges behind them. The abundant remains of these first swamp forests constitute the main coal measures of the world to-day. Amidst this luxuriant primitive vegetation crawled ,and glided and flew the first insects. They were rigid-winged, four- winged creatures, often very big, some of them having wings 24 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY measuring a foot in length. There were numerous dragon flies — one found in the Belgian coal-measures had a wing span of twenty-nine inches ! There were also a great variety of flying cockroaches. Scorpions abounded, and a number of early spiders, which', however, had no spinnerets for web mak ing. Land snails appeared. So, too, did the first-known step of our own ancestry upon land, the amphibia. As we ascend the higher levels of the Later Palaeozoic record, we find the process of air adaptation has gone as far as the appearance of true reptiles amidst the abundant and various amphibia. The land life of the Upper Palaeozoic Age was the life of a green swamp forest without flowers or birds or the noises of modern insects. There were no big land beasts at all; wal lowing amphibia and primitive reptiles were the very highest creatures that life had so far produced. Whatever land lay away from the water or high above the water was still alto gether barren and lifeless. But steadfastly, generation by generation, life was creeping away from the shallow sea-water of its beginning. THE AGE OF REPTILES § 1. The Age of Lowland Life. § 2. Flying Dragons. § 3. The First Birds. § 4. An age of Hardship and Death. § 5. The first appearance of Fur and Feathers. § 1 WE know that for hundreds of thousands of years the wetness and warmth, the shallow lagoon conditions that made possible the vast accumulations of vegetable matter which, compressed and mummified,1 are now coal, pre vailed over most of the world. There were some cold intervals, it is true; but they did not last long enough to destroy the growths. Then that long age of luxuriant low-grade vegetation drew to its end, and for a time life on the earth seems to have undergone a period of world-wide bleakness. We cannot discuss fully here the changes that have gone on and are going on in the climate of the earth. A great variety of causes, astronomical movements, changes in the sun and changes upon and within the earth, combine to produce a cease less fluctuation of the conditions under which life exists. As these conditions change, life, too, must, change or perish. When the story resumes again after this arrest at the end of the Palaeozoic period we find life entering upon a fresh phase of richness and expansion. Vegetation has made great advances in the art of living out of water. While the Palaeozoic plants of the coal measures probably grew with swamp water flowing over their roots, the Mesozoic flora from its very out set included palm-like cycads and low-grown conifers that were distinctly land plants growing on soil above the water level. 'Dr. Marie Stopes, Monograph on the Constitution of Coal. 25 26 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY The lower levels of the Mesozoic land were no doubt covered by great fern brakes and shrubby bush and a kind of jungle growth of trees. But there existed as yet no grass, no small flowering plants, no turf nor greensward. Probably the Mes ozoic was not an age of very brightly coloured vegetation. It must have had a flora green in the wet season and brown and purple in the dry. There were no gay flowers, no bright autumn tints before the fall of the leaf, because there was as yet no fall of the leaf. And beyond the lower levels the world was still barren, still unclothed, still exposed without any mitigation to the wear and tear of the wind and rain. When one speaks of conifers in the Mesozoic the reader must not think of the pines and firs that clothe the high moun tain slopes of our time. He must think of low-growing ever greens. The mountains were still as bare and lifeless as ever. The only colour effects among the mountains were the colour effects of naked rock, such colours as make the landscape of Colorado so marvellous to-day. Amidst this spreading vegetation of the lower plains the reptiles were increasing mightily in multitude and variety. They were now in many cases absolutely land animals. There are numerous anatomical points of distinction between a reptile and an amphibian; they held good between such reptiles and amphibians as prevailed in the carboniferous time of the Upper Palaeozoic; but the fundamental difference between reptiles and amphibia which matters in this history is that the am phibian must go back to the water to lay its eggs, and that in the early stages of its life it must live in and under water. The reptile, on the other hand, has cut out all the tadpole stages from its life cycle, or, to be more exact, its tadpole stages are got through before the young leave the egg case. The reptile has come out of the water altogether. Some had gone back to it again, just as the hippopotamus and the otter among mam mals have gone back, but that is a further extension of the story to which we cannot give much attention in this Outline. In the Palaeozoic period, as we have said, life had not spread beyond the swampy river valleys and the borders of. sea lagoons and the like; but in the Mesozoic, life was growing ever more accustomed to the thinner medium of the air, was sweeping boldly up over the plains and towards the hill-sides. It is well for the student of human history and the human future to Some T&esozoic "Rev&Lcs \^ =- Six-foot raoa. J^ drawn, io soma. "skii'i Scale as-other \i\ te«» 28 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY note that. If a disembodied intelligence with no knowledge of the future had come to earth and studied life during the early Palaeozoic age, he might very reasonably have concluded that life was absolutely confined to the water, and that it could never spread over the land. It found a way. In the Later Palae ozoic Period that visitant might have been equally sure that life could not go beyond the edge of a swamp. The Mesozoic Period would still have found him setting bounds to life far more limited than the bounds that are set to-day. And so to-day, though we mark how life and man are still limited to five miles of air and a depth of perhaps a mile or so of sea, we must not conclude from that present limitation that life, through man, may not presently spread out and up and down to a range of living as yet inconceivable. The earliest known reptiles were beasts with great bellies and not very powerful legs, very like their kindred amphibia, wallowing as the crocodile wallows to this day; but in the Mesozoic they soon began to stand up and go stoutly on all fours, and several great sections of them began to balance them selves on tail and hind-legs, rather as the kangaroos do now, in order to release the fore limbs for grasping food. The bones of one notable division of reptiles which retained a quadrupedal habit, a division of which many remains have been found in South African and Russian Early Mesozoic deposits, display a number of characters which approach those of the mammalian skeleton, and because of this resemblance to the mammals (beasts) this division is called the Theriomorpha (beastlike). Another division was the crocodile branch, and another devel oped towards the tortoises and turtles. The Plesiosaurs and Ichthyosaurs were two groups which have left no living repre sentatives; they were huge reptiles returning to a whalelike life in the sea. Pliosaurus, one of the largest plesiosaurs, measured thirty feet from snout to tail tip — of which half was neck. The Mosasaurs were a third group of great porpoiselike marine lizards. But the largest and most diversified group of these Mesozoic reptiles was the group we have spoken of as kangaroo-like, the Dinosaurs, many of which attained enor mous proportions. In bigness these greater Dinosaurs have never been exceeded, although the sea can still show in the whales creatures as great. Some of these, and the largest among them, were herbivorous animals; they browsed on the THE AGE OF REPTILES 29 rushy vegetation and among the ferns and bushes, or they stood up and grasped trees with their forelegs while they devoured the foliage. Among the browsers, for example, were the Diplod.ocus carnegii, which measured eighty-four feet in length, and the Atlantosaurus. The Gigantosaurus, disinterred by a German expedition in 1912 from rocks in East Africa, was still more colossal. It measured well over a hundred feet! These greater monsters had legs, and they are usually figured as standing up on them ; but it is very doubtful if they could have supported, their weight in this way, out of water. Buoyed up by water or mud, they may have got along. Another note worthy type we have figured is the Triceratops. There were also a number of great flesh-eaters who preyed upon these herbivores. Of these, Tyrannosaurus seems almost the last word in "frightfulness" among living things. Some species of this genus measured forty feet from snout to tail. Appar ently it carried this vast body kangaroo fashion on its tail and hindlegs. Probably it reared itself up. Some authorities even suppose that it leapt through the air. If so, it pos sessed muscles of a quite miraculous quality. A leaping elephant would be a far less astounding idea. Much more probably it waded half submerged in pursuit of the herbivorous river saurians. § 2 One special development of the dinosaurian type of reptile was a light, hopping, climbing group of creatures which de veloped a bat-like web between the fifth finger and the side of the body, which was used in gliding from tree to tree after the fashion of the flying squirrels. These bat-lizards were the Pterodactyls. They are often described as flying reptiles, and pictures are drawn .of Mesozoic scenery in which they are seen soaring and swooping about. But their breastbone has no keel such as the breastbone of a bird has for the attachment of muscles strong enough for long sustained flying. They must have flitted about like bats. They must have had a grotesque resemblance to heraldic dragons, and they played the part of bat-like birds in the Mesozoic jungles. But bird-like though they were, they were not birds nor the ancestors of birds. The structure of their wings was altogether different from that of bird?. The structure of their wings was that of 30 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY a hand with one long finger and a web; the wing of 'a bird is like an arm with feathers projecting from its hind edge. And these Pterodactyls had no feathers. Soma. ^M. 'L&Jbz. 'Mesozoic ^JW, "Reptile \ •$? ill Six-iootrmaa. drawn to sazae. scale. § 3 Far less prevalent at this time were certain other truly bird like creatures, of which the earlier sorts also hopped and THE AGE OF REPTILES 31 clambered and the later sorts skimmed and flew. These were at first — by all the standards of classification — Reptiles. They developed into true birds as they developed wings and as their reptilian scales became long and complicated, fronds rather than scales, and so at last, by much spreading and splitting, feathers. Feathers are the distinctive covering of birds, and they give a power of resisting heat and cold far greater than 32 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY that of any other integumentary covering except perhaps the thickest fur. At a very early stage this novel covering of feathers, this new heat-proof contrivance that life had chanced upon, enabled many species of birds to invade a province for which the pterodactyl was ill equipped. They took to sea fish ing — if indeed they did not begin with it — and spread to the north and south polewards beyond the temperature limits set to the true reptiles. The earliest birds seem to have been car nivorous divers and water birds. To this day some of the most primitive bird forms are found among the sea birds of the Arctic and Antarctic seas, and it is among these sea birds that zoologists still find lingering traces of teeth, which have otherwise vanished completely from the beak of the bird. The earliest known bird (the Archceopteryx) had no beak; it had a row of teeth in a jaw like a reptile's. It had three claws at the forward corner of its wing. Its tail, too, was pe culiar. All modern birds havt their tail feathers set in a short compact bony rump; the Archceopteryx had a long bony tail with a row of feathers along each side. § 4 This great period of Mesozoic life, this second volume of the book of life, is indeed an amazing story of reptilian life proliferating and developing. But the most striking thing of all the story remains to be told. Right up to the latest Meso zoic Rocks we find all these reptilian orders we have enumerated still flourishing unchallenged. There is no hint of an enemy or competitor to them in the relics we find of their world. Then the record is broken. We do not know how long a time the break represents ; many pages may be missing here, pages that may represent some great cataclysmal climatic change. When next we find abundant traces of the land plants and the land animals of the earth, this great multitude of reptile species had gone. For the most part they have left no descendants. They have been "wiped out." The pterodactyls have gone ab solutely, of the plesiosaurs and ichthyosaufs "none is aKve"; the mosasaurs have gone ; of the lizards a few remain, the moni tors of the Dutch East Indies are the largest ; all the multitude*! and diversity of the dinosaurs have vanished.- Only the croco diles and the turtles and tortoises carry on in any quantity into lJtl£i AliB ur Jt.tt.friJL.tti3 33 Cainozoic times. The place of all these types in the picture that the Cainozoic fossils presently unfold to us is taken by other animals not closely related to the Mesozoic reptiles and cer tainly not descended from any of their ruling types. A new kind of life is in possession of the world. This apparently abrupt ending up of the reptiles is, beyond all question, the most striking revolution in the whole history of the earth before the coming of mankind. It is probably connected with the close of a vast period of equable warm conditions and the onset of a new austerer age, in which the winters were bitterer and the summers brief but hot. The Mesozoic life, animal and vegetable alike, was adapted to warm conditions and capable of little resistance to cold. The new life, on the other hand, was before all things capable of re sisting great changes of temperature. Whatever it was that led to the extinction of the Mesozoic reptiles, it was probably some very far-reaching change indeed, for the life of the seas did at the same time undergo a similar catastrophic alteration. The crescendo and ending of the Reptiles on land was paralleled by the crescendo and ending of the Ammonites, a division of creatures like squids with coiled shells which swarmed in those ancient seas. All though the rocky record of this Mesozoic period there is a vast multitude and variety of these. coiled shells; there are hundreds of species, and towards the end of the Mesozoic period they increased in diversity and produced exaggerated types. When the record resumes these, too, have gone. So far as the reptiles are con cerned, people may perhaps be inclined to argue that they were exterminated because the Mammals that replaced them, com peted with them, and were more fitted to survive; but nothing of the sort can be true of the Ammonites, because to this day their place has not been taken. Simply they are gone. Un known conditions made it possible for them to live in the Mesozoic seas, and then some unknown change made life im possible for them. No genus of Ammonite survives to-day of all that vast variety, but there still exists one isolated genus very closely related to the Ammonites, the Pearly Nautilus. It is found, it is to be noted, in the warm waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans. And as for the Mammals competing with and ousting the less fit reptiles, a struggle of which people talk at times, there 34 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY is not a scrap of evidence of any such direct competition. To judge by the Record of the Rocks as we know it to-day, there is much more reason for believing that first the reptiles in some inexplicable way perished, and then that later on, after a very hard time for all life upon the earth, the mammals, as conditions became more genial again, developed and spread to fill the vacant world. § 5 Were there mammals in the Mesozoic period? This is a question not yet to be answered precisely. Pa tiently and steadily the geologists gather fresh evidence and reason out completer conclusions. At any time some new deposit may reveal fossils that will illuminate this question. Certainly either mammals, or the ancestors of the mammals, must have lived throughout the Mesozoic period. In the very opening chapter of the Mesozoic volume of the Record there were those Theriomorphous Reptiles to which we have already alluded, and in the later Mesozoic a number of small jaw bones are found, entirely mammalian in character. But there is not a scrap, not a bone, to suggest that there lived any Mesozoic Mammal which could look a dinosaur in the face. The Mesozoic mammals or mammal-like reptiles — for we do not know clearly which they were — seem to have been all obscure little beasts of the size of mice and rats, more like a down trodden order of reptiles than a distinct class; probably they still laid eggs and were developing only slowly their distinctive covering of hair. They lived away from big waters, and per haps in the desolate uplands, as marmots do now ; probably they lived there beyond the pursuit of the carnivorous dinosaurs. Some perhaps went on all fours, some chiefly went on their hind-legs and clambered with their fore limbs. They became fossils only so occasionally that chance has not yet revealed a single complete skeleton in the whole vast record of the Mesozoic rocks by which to check these guesses. These little Theriomorphs, these ancestral mammals, de veloped hair. Hairs, like feathers, are long and elaborately specialized scales. Hair is perhaps the clue to the salvation of the early mammals. Leading lives upon the margin of ex istence, away from the marshes and the warmth, they developed THE AGE OF REPTILES 35 an outer covering only second in its warmth-holding (or heat- resisting) powers to the down and feathers of the Arctic sea- birds. And so they held out through the age of hardship be- "cvms CRepiHixn vniu&esr vaier-hird) tXF.n:. tween the Mesozoic and Cainozoic ages, to which most of the true reptiles succumbed. All the main characteristics of this flora and sea and land fauna that came to an end with the end of the Mesozoic age were such as were adapted to an equable climate and to shallow 86 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY and swampy regions. But in the case of their Cainozoic suc cessors, both hair and feathers gave a power of resistance to variable temperatures such as no reptile possessed, and with it they gave a range far greater than any animal had hitherto attained. The range of life of the Lower Palaeozoic Period was con fined to warm water. The range of life of the Upper Palaeozoic Period was con fined to warm water or to warm swamps and wet ground. The range of life of the Mesozoic Period as we know it was confined to water arid fairly low-lying valley regions under equable conditions. Meanwhile in each of these periods there were types in voluntarily extending the range of life beyond the limits pre vailing in that period; and when ages of extreme conditions prevailed, it was the3e marginal types which survived to in herit the depopulated world. That perhaps is the most general statement we can make about the story of the geological record ; it is a story of widen ing range. Classes, genera, and species of animals appear and disappear, but the range widens. It widens always. Life has never had so great a range as it has to-day. Life to-day, in the form of man, goes higher in the air than it has ever done before; man's geographical range is from pole to pole, he goes under the water in submarines, he sounds the cold, lifeless darkness of the deepest seas, he burrows into virgin levels of the rocks, and in thought and knowledge he pierces to the centre of the earth and reaches out to the uttermost star. Yet in all the relics of the Mesozoic time we find no certain memorials of his ancestry. His ancestors, like the ancestors of all the kindred mammals, must have been creatures so rare, so obscure, and so remote that they have left scarcely a trace amidst the abundant vestiges of the monsters that wallowed rejoicing in the steamy air and lush vegetation of the Meso zoic lagoons, or crawled or hopped or fluttered over the great river plains of that time. VI THE AGE OF MAMMALS 1. A New Age of Life. § 2. Tradition Comes into the World. § 3. An Age of Brain Growth. § 4. The World Grows Hard Again. THE third great division of the geological record, the Cainozoic, opens with a world already physically very like the world we live in to-day. Probably the day was at first still perceptibly shorter, but the scenery had be come very modern in its character. Climate was, of course, undergoing, age by age, its incessant and irregular variations ; lands that are temperate to-day have passed, since the Cainozoic age began, through phases of great warmth, intense cold, and extreme dryness; but the landscape, if it altered, altered' to nothing that cannot still be paralleled to-day in some part of the world or other. In the place of the cycads, sequoias, and strange conifers of the Mesozoic, the plant names that now appear in the lists of fossils include birch, beech, holly, tulip trees, ivy, sweet gum, bread-fruit trees. Flowers had developed concurrently with bees and butterflies. Palms were now very important. Such plants had already been in evidence in the later levels of the (American Cretaceous) Mesozoic, but now they dominated the scene altogether. Grass was becoming a great fact in the world. Certain grasses, too, had appeared in the later Mesozoic, but only with the Cainozoic period came grass plains and turf spreading wide over a world that was once barren stone. The period opened with a long phase of considerable warmth ; then the world cooled. And in the opening of this third part of the record, this Cainozoic period, a gigantic crumpling of 37 38 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY the earth's crust and an upheaval of mountain ranges was in progress. The Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, are all Cain ozoic mountain ranges; the background of an early Cainozoic scene to be typical should display an active volcano or so. It must have been an age of great earthquakes. Geologists make certain main divisions of the Cainozoic period, and it will be convenient to name them here and to indicate their climate. First comes the Eocene (dawn of re cent life), an age of exceptional warmth in the world's his tory, subdivided into an older and newer Eocene; then the Oligocene (but little of recent life), in which the climate was still equable. The Miocene (with living species still in a minority) was the great age of mountain building, and the general temperature was falling. In the Pliocene (more living than extinct species), climate was very much as its present phase; but with the Pleistocene (a great majority of living species) there set in a long period of extreme conditions — it was the Great Ice Age. Glaciers spread from the poles towards the equator, until England to the Thames was covered in ice. Thereafter to our own time came a period of partial recovery. We may be moving now towards a warmer phase. . Half a mil lion years hence this may be a much sunnier and pleasanter world to live in than it is to-day. § 2 In the forests and following the grass over the Eocene plains there appeared for the first time a variety and abundance of mammals. Before we proceed to any description of these mam mals, it may be well to note in general terms what a mammal is. From the appearance of the vertebrated animals in the Lower Palaeozoic Age, when the fish first swarmed out into the sea, there has been a steady progressive development of vertebrated creatures. A fish is a vertebrated animal that breathes by gills and can live only in water. An amphibian may be de scribed as a fish that has added to its gill-breathing the power of breathing air with its swimming-bladder in adult life, and that has also developed limbs with five toes to them in place of the fins of a fish. A tadpole is for a time a fish, it becomes a land creature as it develops. A reptile is a further stage in this detachment from water; it is an amphibian that is no ititt AGE OK MAMMALS 39 longer amphibious ; it passes through its tadpole stage — its fish stage that is — in an egg. From the beginning it must breathe in air; it can never breathe under water as a tadpole can do. Some OKapeene Is/laxnttLals m\ jjx, Six-toot man draamto same scale itexnomev'e. TiyracocLon rtunaceros) EtvbzL?rr> "Woolly "Rhinoceros- falls as the footprints become fainter. His great toe is the king of his toes. Among all the apes and monkeys, the only group that have THE ANCESTRY OF MAN 49 their great toes developed on anything like the same fashion as man are some of the lemurs. The baboon walks on a flat foot and all his toes, using his middle toe as his chief throw-off, much as the bear does. And the three great apes all walk on the outer side of the foot in a very different manner from the walking of man. The great apes are forest dwellers; their walking even now is incidental ; they are at their happiest among trees. They have very distinctive methods of climb ing; they swing by the arms much more than the monkeys do, and do not, like the latter, take off with a spring from the feet. They have a specially developed climbing style of their own. But man walks so well and runs so swiftly as to suggest a very long ancestry upon the ground. Also, he does not climb well now; he climbs with caution and hesita tion. His ancestors may have been running creatures for long ages. Moreover, it is to be noted that he does not swim naturally; he has to learn to swim, and that seems to point to a long-standing separation from rivers and lakes and the sea. Almost certainly that ancestor was a smaller and slighter creature than its human descendants. Conceivably the human ancestor at the opening of the Cainozoic period was a running ape living chiefly on the ground, hiding among rocks rather than trees. It could still climb trees well and hold things between its great toe and its second toe (as the Japanese can to this day), but it was already coming down to the ground Possible Appeabance of the Sub-Man Pithecanthropus. The face, jaws, and teeth are mere guess-work (see text). The creature may have been much less human-looking than this. 50 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY again from a still remoter, a Mesozoic arboreal ancestry. It is quite understandable that such a creature would very rarely die in water in such circumstances as to leave bones to become fossilized. It must always be borne in mind that among its many other imperfections the Geological Record necessarily contains abun dant traces only of water or marsh creatures or of creatures easily and frequently drowned. The same reasons that make any traces of the ancestors of the mammals rare and relatively unprocurable in the Mesozoic rocks, probably make the traces of possible human ancestors rare and relatively unprocurable in the Cainozoic rocks. Such knowledge as we have of the earliest men, for example, is almost entirely got from a few caves, into which they went and in which they left their traces. Until the hard Pleistocene times they lived and died in the open, and their bodies were consumed or decayed altogether. But it is well to bear in mind also that the record of the rocks has still to be thoroughly examined. It has been studied only for a few generations, and by only a few men in each genera tion. Most men have been too busy making war, making profits out of their neighbours, toiling at work that machinery could do for them in a tenth of the time, or simply playing about, to give any attention to these more interesting things. There may be, there probably are, thousands of deposits still untouched containing countless fragments and vestiges of man and his progenitors. In Asia particularly, in India or the East Indies, there may be hidden the most illuminating clues. What we know to-day of early men is the merest scrap of what will presently be known. The apes and monkeys already appear to have been differen tiated at the beginning of the Cainozoic Age, and there are a number of Oligocene and Miocene apes whose relations to one another and to the human line have still to be made out. Among these we may mention Dryopithecus of the Miocene Age, with a very human-looking jaw. In the Siwalik Hills of northern India remains of some very interesting apes have been found, of which Sivapithecus and Palwopithecus were possibly related closely to the human ancestor. Possibly these animals already used implements. Charles Darwin represents baboons as open ing nuts by breaking them with stones, using stakes to prise up rocks in the hunt for insects, and striking blows with sticks JLM THE ANCESTRY OF MAN 51 and stones. The chimpanzee makes itself a sort of tree hut by intertwining branches. Stones apparently chipped for use have been found in strata of Oligocene Age at Boncelles in Belgium. Possibly the implement-using disposition was al ready present in the Mesozoic ancestry from which we are descended. § 2 Among the earliest evidences of some creature, either human or at least more manlike than any living ape upon earth, are a number of flints and stones very roughly chipped and shaped so as to be held in the hand. These were probably used as hand- axes. These early implements ("Eoliths") are often so crude and simple that there was for a long time a controversy whether they were to be regarded as natural or artificial productions. The date of the earliest of them is put by geologists as Pliocene — that is to say, before the First Glacial Age. They occur also throughout the First Interglacial period. We know of no bones or other remains in Europe or America of the quasi- human beings of half a million years ago, who made and used these implements. They used them to lammer with, perhaps they used them to fight with, and perhaps they used bits of wood for similar purposes.1 But at Trinil, in Java, in strata which are said to correspond either to the later Pliocene or to the American and European First Ice Age, there have been found some scattered bones of a creature, such as the makers of these early implements may have been. . The top of a skull, some teeth, and a thigh-bone have been found. The skull shows a brain-case about half-way in size between that of the chimpanzee and man, but the thigh bone is that of a creature as well adapted to standing and run ning as a man, and as free, therefore, to use its hands. The creature was not a man, nor was it an arboreal ape like the chimpanzee. It was a walking ape. It has been named by naturalists Pithecanthropus erectus (the walking ape-man). We cannot say that it is a direct human ancestor, but we may guess that the creatures who scattered these first stone tools 1 Some writers suppose that a Wood and Shell Age preceded the earliest Stone Age. South Sea Islanders, Negroes, and Bushmen still make use of wood and the sharp-edged shells of land and water molluscs as im plements. 52 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY over the world must have been closely similar and kindred, and that our ancestor was a beast of like kind. This little trayful of bony fragments from Trinil is, at present, apart from stone implements, the oldest relic of early humanity, or of the close blood relations of early humanity, that is known. While these early men or "sub-men" were running about Europe four or five hundred thousand years ago, there were mammoths, rhinoceroses, a huge hippopotamus, a giant beaver, and a bison and wild cattle in their world. There were also wild horses, and the sabre-toothed tiger still abounded. There are no traces of lions or true tigers at that time in Europe, but there were bears, otters, wolves, and a wild boar. It may be that the early sub-man sometimes played jackal to the sabre- toothed tiger, and finished up the bodies on which the latter had gorged itself. § 3 After this first glimpse of something at least sub-human in the record of geology, there is not another fragment of human or man-like bone yet known from that record for an interval of hundreds of thousands of years. It is not until we reach de posits which are stated to be of the Second Interglacial period, 200,000 years later, 200,000 or 250,000 years ago, that another little scrap of bone comes to hand. Then we find a jaw-bone. This jaw-bone was found in a sand-pit near Heidelberg, at a depth of eighty feet from the surface, and it is not the jaw bone of a man as we understand man, but it is man-like in every respect, except that it has absolutely no trace of a chin; it is more massive than a man's, and its narrowness behind could not, it is thought, have given the tongue sufficient play for articulate speech. It is not an ape's jaw-bone; the teeth are human. The owner of this jaw-bone has been variously named Homo Heidelbergensis and Paleoanthropus Heidelber- gensis, according to the estimate formed of his humanity or sub-humanity by various authorities. He lived in a world not remotely unlike the world of the still earlier sub-man of the first implements; the deposits in which it is found show that there were elephants, horses, rhinoceroses, bison, a moose, and so forth with it in the world, but the sabretoothed tiger was declining and the lion was spreading over Europe. The imple ments of this period (known as the Chellean period) are a very THE ANCESTRY OF MAN 53 considerable advance upon those of the Pliocene Age. They are well made but very much bigger than any truly human implements. The Heidelberg man may have had a very big body and large fore limbs. He may have been a woolly, strange- looking creature. §,4 We must turn over the Record for, it may be, another 100,000 years for the next remains of anything human or sub-human. Then in a deposit ascribed to the Third Interglacial period, which may have begun 100,000 years ago and lasted 50,000 years, the smashed pieces of a whole skull turn up. The de posit is a gravel which may have been derived from the washing out of still earlier gravel strata, and this skull fragment may be in reality as old as the First Glacial Period. The bony re mains discovered at Piltdown in Sussex display a creature still ascending only very gradually from the sub-human. The first scraps of this skull were found in an excavation for road gravel in Sussex. Bit by bit other fragments of this skull were hunted out from the quarry heaps until most of it could be pieced together. It is a thick skull, thicker than that of any living race of men, and it has a brain capacity inter mediate between that of Pithecanthropus and man. This crea ture has been named Eoanthropus, the dawn man. In the same gravel-pits were found teeth of rhinoceros, hippopotamus, and the leg-bone of a deer with marks upon it that may be cuts. A curious bat-shaped instrument of elephant bone has also been found. • There was moreover a jaw-bone among these scattered re mains, which was at first assumed naturally enough to belong to Eoanthropus, but which it was afterwards suggested was prob ably that of a chimpanzee. It is extraordinarily like that of a chimpanzee, but Dr. Keith, one of the greatest authorities in these questions, assigns it, after an exhaustive analysis in his Antiquity of Man (1915), to the skull with which it is found. It is, as a jaw-bone, far less human in character than the jaw of the much more ancient Homo HeideTbergensis, but the teeth are in some respects more like those of living men. Dr. Keith, swayed by the jaw-bone, does not think that Eoanthropus, in spite of its name, is a creature in the direct ancestry of man. Much less is it an intermediate form between 54 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY the Heidelberg man and the Neanderthal man we shall pres ently describe. It was only related to the true ancestor of man as the orang is related to the chimpanzee. It was one of a number of sub-human running apes of more than apelike in telligence, and if it was not on the line royal, it was at any rate a very close collateral. After this glimpse of a skull, the Record for very many centuries gives nothing but flint implements, which improve steadily in quality. A very characteristic form is shaped like a sole, with one flat side stricken off at one blow and the other side worked. The archaeologists, as the Record continues, are presently able to distinguish scrapers, borers, knives, darts, throwing stones, and the like. Progress is now more rapid; in a few centuries the shape of the hand-axe shows distinct and recognizable improvements. And then comes quite a num ber of remains. The Fourth Glacial Age is rising towards its maximum. Man is taking to caves and leaving vestiges there; at Krapina in Croatia, at Neanderthal near Diisseldorf, at Spy, human remains have been found, skulls and bones of a creature that is certainly a man. Somewhen about 50,000 years ago, if not earlier, appeared Homo Neanderthaiensis (also called Homo antiquus and Homo primigenius) , a quite passable human being. His thumb was not quite equal in flexi bility and usefulness to a human thumb, he stooped forward and could not hold his head erect, as all living men do, he was chinless and perhaps incapable of speech, there were curious differences about the enamel and the roots of his teeth from those of all living men, he was very thick-set, he was, indeed, not quite of the human species; but there is no dispute about his attribution to the genus Homo. He was certainly not de scended from Eoanthropus, but his jaw-bone is so like the Heidelberg jaw-bone, as to make it possible that the clumsier and heavier Homo Heidelbergensis, a thousand centuries before him, was of his blood and race. VIII THE NEANDERTHAL MEN, AN EXTINCT RACE (The Early Palaeolithic Age x) : § 1. The World 50,000 Years Ago. § 2. The Daily Life of the First Men. § 3. The Last Palaeolithic Men. IN the time of the Third Interglacial period the outline of Europe and Western Asia was very different from what it is to-day. Vast areas to the west and north-west which are now under the Atlantic waters were then dry land; the Irish Sea and the North Sea were river valleys. Over these northern areas there spread and receded and spread again a great ice cap such as covers central Greenland to-day (see Map on p. 56). This vast ice cap, which covered both polar regions of the earth, withdrew huge masses of water from the ocean, and the sea-level consequently fell, exposing great areas of land that are now submerged again. The Mediterranean area was probably a great valley below the general sea-level, containing two inland seas cut off from the general ocean. The climate of this Mediterranean basin was perhaps cold temperate, and the region of the Sahara to the south was not then a desert of baked rock and blown sand, but a well-watered and fertile coun try. Between the ice sheets to the north and the Alps and Mediterranean valley to the south stretched a bleak wilderness 1 Three phases of human history before the knowledge and use of metals are often distinguished. First there is the so-called Eolithic Age (dawn of stone implements), then the Palaeolithic Age (old stone implements), and finally an age in which the implements are skilfully made and fre quently well finished and polished (Neolithic Age). The Palseolithic Period is further divided into an earlier (sub-human) and a later (fully human) period. We shall comment on these divisions later. 55 'Possible Outline of 1 EUROPE © Wcrtsm 2*SI A> at thcMairimrtmorlhe Tburtk JccAae {about 50,000 ruaxraoo) 01 This Map Represents the Present State op Ottb Knowledge op the Geography op Europe and Western Asia at a Period which We Guess to be about 50,uu0 Years Ago, the Neanderthaler Age. Much of this map is of course speculative, but its broad outlines must be fairly like those of the world in which men first became men. ittJi JMJttAJNDfSRTHAL MEN 5? whose climate changed from harshness to a mild kindliness and then hardened again for the Fourth Glacial Age. Across this wilderness, which is now the great plain of Europe, wandered a various fauna. At first there were hippo potami, rhinoceroses, mammoths, and elephants. The sabre toothed tiger was diminishing towards extinction. Then, as the air chilled, the hippopotamus, and then other warmth-loving creatures, ceased to come so far north, and the sabre-toothed tiger disappeared altogether. The woolly mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the musk ox, the bison, the aurochs, and the reindeer became prevalent, and the temperate vegetation gave place to plants of a more arctic type. The glaciers spread southward to the maximum of the Fourth Glacial Age (about 50,000 years ago), and then receded again. In the earlier phase, the Third Interglacial period, a certain number of small family groups of men {Homo Neanderthaiensis) and probably of sub-men {Eoanthropus) wandered over the land, leaving nothing but their flint implements to witness to their presence. They prob ably used a multitude and variety of wooden implements also; they had probably learnt much about the shapes of objects and the use of different shapes froin wood, knowledge which they afterwards applied to stone ; but none of this wooden material! has survived ; we can only speculate about its forms and uses. A3 the weather hardened to its maximum of severity, the: Neanderthal men, already it would seem acquainted with the use of fire, began to seek shelter under rock ledges and in caves — and so leave remains behind them. Hitherto they had been accustomed to squat in the open about the fire, and near their water supply. But they were sufficiently intelligent to adapt themselves to the new and harder conditions. (As for the sub- men, they seem to have succumbed to the stresses of this Fourth Glacial Age altogether. At any rate, the rudest type of Palaeo lithic implements presently disappears.) Not merely man was taking to the caves. This period also had a cave lion, a cave bear, and a cave hyaena. These creatures had to be driven out of the caves and kept out of the caves in which these early men wanted to squat and hide; and no doubt fire was an effective method of eviction and protection. Prob ably early men did not go deeply into the caves, because they had no means of lighting their recesses. They got in far enough to. be out of the weather, and stored wood and food in odd 58 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY corners. Perhaps they barricaded the cave mouths. Their only available light for going deeply into the caverns would be torches. What did these Neanderthal men hunt ? Their only possible weapons for killing such giant creatures as the mammoth or the cave bear, or even the reindeer, were spears of wood, wooden clubs, and those big pieces of flint they left behind them, the "Chellean" and "Mousterian" implements ; 1 and probably their usual quarry was smaller game. But they did certainly eat the flesh of the big beasts when they had a chance, and perhaps they followed them when sick or when wounded by combats, or took advantage of them when they were bogged or in trouble with ice or water. (The Labrador Indi ans still kill the cari bou with spears at awkward river cross ings.) At Dewlish, in Dorset, an artifi cial trench has been found which is sup posed to have been a Palaeolithic trap for elephants.2 We know that the Neanderthalers partly ate their kill where it fell ; but they brought back the big narrow bones to the cave to crack and eat at leisure, because few ribs and vertebrae are found in the caves, but great quantities of cracked and split, long bones. They used skins to wrap about them, and the women probably dressed the skins. We know also that they were right-handed like modern men, because the left side of the brain (which serves the right side of the body) is bigger than the right. But while the back parts of the brain which deal with sight and touch and the energy of the body are well developed, the front parts, whic1- are con- 1 From Chelles and Le Moustier in Prance. 'Osmond Fisher, quoted in Wright's Quaternary Joe Age. THE NEANDERTHAL MEN 59 nected with thought and speech, are comparatively small. It was as big a brain as ours, but different. This species of Homo had certainly a very different mentality from ours; its indi viduals were not merely simpler and lower than we are, they were on another line. It may be they did not speak at all, or very sparingly. They had nothing that we should call a language. § 2 In Worthington Smith's Man the Primeval Savage there is a very vividly written description of early Palaeolithic life, from which much of the following account is borrowed. In the original, Mr. Worthington Smith assumes a more extensive social life, a larger community, and a more definite division of labour among its members than is altogether justifiable in the face of such subsequent writings as J. J. Atkinson's memorable essay on Primal Law.1 For the little tribe Mr. Worthington Smith described, there has been substituted, therefore, a family group under the leadership of one Old Man, and the suggestions of Mr. Atkinson as to the behaviour of the Old Man have been worked into the sketch. Mr. Worthington Smith describes a squatting-place near a stream, because primitive man, having no pots or other vessels, must needs have kept close to a water supply, and with some chalk cliffs adjacent from which flints could be got to work. The air was bleak, and the fire was of great importance, be cause fires once out were not easily relit in those days. When not required to blaze it was probably banked down with ashes. The most probable way in which fires were started was by hacking a bit of iron pyrites with a flint amidst dry dead leaves ; concretions of iron pyrites and flints are found together in England where the gault and chalk approach each other.2 The little group of people would be squatting about amidst a litter of fern, moss, and such-like dry material. Some of the women and children would need to be continually gathering fuel to keep up the fires. It would be a tradition that had grown up. % Social Origins, by Andrew Lang, and Primal Law, by J. J. Atkinson. (Longmans, 1903.) 'This first origin of fire was suggested by Sir John Lubbock ( Prehistoric Times), and Ludwig Hopf, in The Human Species, says that. "Flints and pieces of pyrites are found in close proximity in palaeolithic settlements near the remains of mammoths." 60 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY u-ChelU&ti Valxolv&nc Stone Implements (.all roughly to scale of hand shown) Three views of a. vostro* carinate (earliest period) implement Hand- axes Choppinq; toolr [N.B.Thls u a modern. — not a. Nean<^2r- daL-hand.] "Mottsteriasi Fiercer ^Reindeer j.rh Eably Stone Implements. The Mousterian Age implements, and all above it, are those of Neanderthal men pr, possibly in the case of the rostro-carinates, of sub-men. The lower row (Reindeer Age) are the work of true men. The student should compare this diagram with the time diagram attached to Chapter VII, § 1, and he should note the relatively large sine of the pre-human implements. THE NEANDERTHAL MEN 61 The young would imitate their elders in this task. Perhaps there would be rude wind shelters of boughs on one side of the encampment. The Old Man, the father and master of the group, would perhaps be engaged in hammering flints beside the fire. The children would imitate him and learn to use the sharpened fragments. Probably some of the women would hunt good flints; they would fish them out of the chalk with sticks and bring them to the squatting-place. There would be skins about. It seems probable that at a very early time primitive men took to using skins. Probably they were wrapped about the children, and used to lie upon when the ground was damp and cold. A woman would perhaps be preparing a skin. The inside of the skin would be well scraped free of superfluous flesh with trimmed flints, and then strained and pulled and pegged out flat on the grass, and dried in the rays of the sun. Away from the fire other members of the family group prowl in search of food, but at night they all gather closely round the fire and build it up, for it is their protection against the wandering bear and such-like beasts of prey. The Old Man i3 the only fully adult male in the little group. There are women, boys and girls, but so soon as the boys are big enough to rouse the Old Man's jealousy, he will fall foul of them and either drive them off or kill them. Some girls may perhaps go off with these exiles, or two or three of these youths may keep together for a time, wandering until they come upon some other group, from which they may try to steal a mate. Then they would probably fall out among themselves. Some day, when he is forty years old perhaps or even older, and his teeth are worn down and his energy abating, some younger male will stand up to the Old Man and kill him and reign in his stead. There is probably short shrift for the old at the squatting- place. So soon as they grow weak and bad-tempered, trouble and death come upon them. What did they eat at the squatting-place ? "Primeval man is commonly described as a hunter of the great hairy mammoth, of the bear, and the lion, but it is in the highest degree improbable that the human savage ever hunted animals much larger than the hare, the rabbit, and the rat. Man was probably the hunted rather than the hunter. 62 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY AUSTRALIA &Ove "Western Pacific in.ifae Glacial Ag< (The 100-fatham. line as coastline...") "The primeval savage was both herbivorous and carnivorous. He had for food hazel-nuts, beech-nuts, sweet chestnuts, earth- nuts, and acorns. He had crab-apples, wild pears, wild cherries, wild gooseberries, bullaces, sorbs, sloes, blackberries, yewberries, hips and haws, watercress, fungi, the larger and softer leaf- buds, Nostoc (the vegetable substance called 'fallen stars' by countryfolk), the fleshy, juicy, asparagus-like rhizomes or sub terranean stems of the Lobiatw and like plants, as well as other delicacies of the vegetable kingdom, He had birds' eggs, young birds, and the honey and honeycomb of wild bees. He had newts, snails, and frogs — the two latter delicacies are still highly esteemed in Normandy and Brit tany. He had fish, dead and alive, and fresh-water mussels; he could easily catch fish with his hands and paddle and dive for and trap them. By the seaside he would have fish, mol- lusca, and seaweed. He would have many of the larger birds and smaller mam mals, which he could easily secure by throwing stones and sticks, or by setting simple snares. He would have the snake, the slow worm, and the crayfish. He would have various grubs and insects, the large larvae of beetles and vfarious cater pillars. The taste for caterpillars still survives in China, where they are sold in dried bundles in the markets. A chief and highly nourishing object of food would doubtlessly be bones smashed up into a stiff and gritty paste. "A fact of great importance is this — primeval man would not be particular about having his flesh food over-fresh. He would constantly find it in a dead state, and, if semi-putrid, he While the waters were held up in. the Polar Ice Caps , the. eearleveL was lovr enough to ertzOJbe. Vaheo- lithic Man. to reach Tasmania,. THE NEANDERTHAL MEN 63 would relish it none the less — the taste for high or half-putrid game still survives. If driven by hunger and hard pressed, he would perhaps sometimes eat his weaker companions or un healthy children who happened to be feeble or unsightly or burthensome. The larger animals in a weak and dying state would no doubt be much sought for ; when these were not forth coming, dead and half -rotten examples would be made to suffice. An unpleasant odour would not be objected to; it is not ob jected to now in many continental hotels. "The savages sat huddled close together round their fire, with fruits, bones, and half-putrid flesh. We can imagine the old man and his women twitching the skin of their shoul ders, brows, and muzzles as they were annoyed or bitten by flies or other insects. We can imagine the large human nostrils, indicative of keen scent, giving rapidly repeated sniffs at the foul meat before it was consumed ; the bad odour of the meat, and the various other disgusting odours belonging to a haunt of savages, being not in the least disapproved. "Man at that time was not a degraded animal, for he had never been higher; he was therefore an exalted animal, and, low as we esteem him now, he yet represented the highest stage of development of the animal kingdom of his time." That is at least an acceptable sketch of a Neanderthal squat ting-place. But before extinction overtook them, even the Nean- derthalers learnt much and went far. Whatever the older Palaeolithic men did with their dead, there is reason to suppose that the later Homo Neanderthaiensis buried some individuals at least with respect and ceremony. One of the best-known Neanderthal skeletons is that of a youth who apparently had been deliberately interred. He had been placed in a sleeping posture, head on the right fore-arm. The head lay on a number of flint fragments carefully piled to gether "pillow fashion." A big hand-axe lay near his head, and around him were numerous charred and split ox bones, as though there had been a feast or an offering. To this appearance of burial during the later Neanderthal age we shall return when we are considering the ideas that were inside the heads of primitive men. This sort of men may have wandered, squatted about their fires, and died in Europe for a period extending over 100,000 years, if we assume, that is, that the Heidelberg jaw-bone 64 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY belongs to a member of the species, a period so vast that all the subsequent history of our race becomes a thing of yesterday. Along its own line this species of men was accumulating a dim tradition, and working out its limited possibilities. Its thick skull imprisoned its brain, and to the end it was low-browed and brutish. { ' fc 25,000 yea b-ebiTj coast-line - U.R1C Map showing Europe and Western Asia about the Time True Men were Replacing the Neanderthalers in Western Europe. THE FIRST TRUE MEN 69 most savage conquerors, who take the women of the defeated side for their own and interbreed with them, it would seem that the true men would have nothing to do with the Neanderthal "Reindeer Aac ArticW (drawn io djiffexixia scales) (Azilian— pierced £or tkono;) Harpoons 'otrvi-ndoev horn "Pebble cup mortar Bone needles J.RH eThrowma-stick . . , , . ° (retntuerhom) race, women or men. There is no trace of any intermixture between the races, in spite of the fact that the newcomers, being also flint users, were establishing themselves in the very same spots that their predecessors had occupied. We know nothing 70 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY of the appearance of the Neanderthal man, but this absence of intermixture seems to suggest an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive strangeness in his appearance over and above his low forehead, his beetle brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature. Or he — and she — may have been too fierce to tame. Says Sir Harry Johnston, in a survey of the rise of modern man in his Views and Reviews: "The dim racial remembrance of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibalistic tend encies, may be the germ of the ogre in folklore. . . ." These true men of the Palaeolithic Age, who replaced the Neanderthalers, were coming into a milder climate, and al though they used the caves and shelters of their predecessors, they lived largely in the open. They were hunting peoples, and some or all of them appear to have hunted the mammoth and the wild horse as well as the reindeer, bison, and aurochs. They ate much horse. At a great open-air camp at Solutre, where they seem to have had annual gatherings for many cen turies, it is estimated that there are the bones of 100,000 horses, besides reindeer, mammoth, and bison bones. They probably followed herds of horses, the little bearded ponies of that age, as these moved after pasture. They hung about on the flanks of the herd, and became very wise about its habits and disposi tions. A large part of these men's lives must have been spent in watching animals. Whether they tamed and domesticated the horse is still an open question. Perhaps they learnt to do so by degrees as the centuries passed. At any rate, we find late Palaeolithic draw ings of horses with marks about the heads that are strongly suggestive of bridles, and there exists a carving of a horse's head showing what is perhaps a rope of twisted skin or tendon. But even if they tamed the horse, it is still more doubtful whether they rode it or had much use for it when it was tamed. The horse they knew was a wild pony with a beard under its chin, not up to carrying a man for any distance. It is improb able that these men had yet learnt the rather unnatural use of animal's milk as food. If they tamed the horse at last, it was the only animal they seem to have tamed. They had no dogs, and they had little to do with any sort of domesticated sheep or cattle. It greatly aids us to realize their common humanity that THE FIRST TRUE MEN - 71 these earliest true men could draw. Both races, it would seem, drew astonishingly well. They were by all standards savages, but they were artistic savages. They drew better than any of their successors down to the beginnings of history. They drew and painted on the cliffs and cave walls that they had wrested from the Neanderthal men. And the surviving drawings come to the ethnologist, puzzling over bones and scraps, with the effect of a plain message shining through guesswork and dark ness. They drew on bones and antlers; they carved little figures. These later Palaeolithic people not only drew remarkably well for our information, and with an increasing skill as the cen turies passed, but they have also left us other information about their lives in their graves* They buried. They buried their dead, often with ornaments, weapons, and food; they used a lot of colour in the burial, and evidently painted the body. From that one may infer that they painted their bodies during life. Paint was a big fact in their lives. They were inveterate painters; they used black, brown, red, yellow, and white pig ments, and the pigments they used endure to this day in the caves of France and Spain. Of all modern races, none have shown so pictorial a disposition ; the nearest approach to it has been among the American Indians. These drawings and paintings of the later Palaeolithic people went on through a long period of time, and present wide fluctua tions in artistic merit. We give here some early sketches, from which we learn of the interest taken by these early men in the bison, horse, ibex, cave bear, and reindeer. In its early stages the drawing is often primitive like the drawing of clever chil dren; quadrupeds are usually drawn with one hind-leg and one fore-leg, as children draw them to this day. The legs on the other side were too much for the artist's technique. Possi bly the first drawings began as children's drawings begin, out of idle scratchings. The savage scratched with a flint on a smooth rock surface, and was reminded of some line or gesture. But their solid carvings are at least as old as their first pic tures. The earlier drawings betray a complete incapacity to group animals. As the centuries progressed, more skilful artists appeared. The representation of beasts became at last astonish ingly vivid and like. But even at the crest of their artistic time they still drew in profile as children do; perspective and 72 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY the fore-shortening needed for back and front views were too much for them.1 They rarely drew themselves. The vast majority of their drawings represent animals. The mammoth and the horse are among the commonest themes. Some of the people, whether Grimaldi people or Cro-Magnon people, also made little ivory and soapstone statuettes, and among these are some very fat female figures. These latter suggest the physique of Grimaldi rather than of Cro-Magnon artists. They are like J.F.H ^Painting in. -favor colours (Save cfAJtamira. , Spain) Bushmen women. The human sculpture of the earlier times inclined to caricature, and generally such human figures as they represent are far below the animal studies in vigour and veracity. Later on there was more grace and less coarseness in the human representations. One little ivory head discovered is that of a girl with an elaborate coiffure. These people at a later stage also scratched and engraved designs on ivory and bone. Some of the most interesting groups of figures are »R. I. Pocock. THE FIRST TRUE MEN 73 carved very curiously round bone, and especially round rods of deer bone, so that it is impossible to see the entire design Stag and salmon 1 on reuideer horn. "Rcwrulcer "Kclc (Quvigoacian) , Xtuyravuurf fc Carving •j—m. Snorraved Stone. 4£§£3> <££2> ^Eb Taiubel pebUes ( ArUian. Ikap) altogether. Figures have also been found modelled in clay, although no Palaeolithic people made any use of pottery. Many of the paintings are found in the depths of unlit caves. They are often difficult of access. The artists must 74 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY have employed lamps to do their work, and shallow soapstone lamps in which fat could have been burnt have been found. Whether the seeing of these cavern paintings was in some way ceremonial or under what circumstances they were seen, we are now altogether at a loss to imagine. At last it would seem that circumstances began to turn alto gether against these hunting Newer Palaeolithic people who had flourished for so long in Europe. They disappeared. New kinds of men appeared in Europe, replacing them. These latter seem to have brought in -bow and arrows ; they had do mesticated animals and cultivated the soil. A new way of living, the Neolithic way of living, spread over the European area ; and the life of the Eeindeer Age and of the races of Rein deer men, the Later Palaeolithic men, after a reign vastly greater than the time between ourselves and the very earliest begin nings of recorded history, passed off the European stage. §2 It was about 12,000 or fewer years ago that, with the spread of forests and a great change of the fauna, the long prevalence of the hunting life in Europe drew to its end. Eeindeer van ished. Changing conditions frequently bring with them new diseases. There may have been prehistoric pestilences. For many centuries there may have been no men in Britain or Central Europe (Wright). For a time there were in Southern Europe drifting communities of some little known people who are called the Azilians.1 They may have been transition gen erations; they may have been a different race. We do not know. Some authorities incline to the view that the Azilians were the first wave of a race which, as we shall see later, has played a great part in populating Europe, the dark-white or Mediterranean or Iberian race. These Azilian people have left behind them a multitude of pebbles, roughly daubed with markings of an unknown purport (see illus. p. 73). The use or significance of these Azilian pebbles is still a profound mystery. Was this some sort of token writing? Were they counters in some game ? Did the Azilians play with these pebbles or tell a story with them, as imaginative children will do with bits of 1 From the cave of Mas d'Azil. THE FIRST TRUE MEN 73 wood and stone nowadays ? At present we are unable to cope with any of these questions. We will not deal here with the other various peoples who left their scanty traces in the world during the close of the New Palaeolithic period, the spread of the forests where for merly there had been steppes, and the wane of the hunters, some 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. We will go on to describe the new sort of human community that was now spreading over the northern hemisphere, whose appearance marks what is called the Neolithic Age. The map of the world was assuming some thing like its present outlines, the landscape and the flora and fauna were taking on their existing characteristics. The pre vailing animals in the spreading woods of Europe were the royal stag, the great ox, and the bison; the mammoth and the musk ox had gone. The great ox, or aurochs, is now extinct, but it survived in the German forests up to the time of the Roman Empire. It was never domesticated.1 It stood eleven feet high at the shoulder, as high as an elephant. There were still lions in the Balkan peninsula, and they remained there until about 1,000 or 1,200 b.c. The lions of Wiirtembefg and South Germany in those days were twice the size of the modern lion. South Russia and Central Asia were thickly wooded then, and there were elephants in Mesopotamia and Syria, and a fauna in Algeria that was tropical African in character. Hitherto men in Europe had never gone farther north than the Baltic Sea or the British Isles, but now the Scandinavian peninsula and perhaps Great Russia were becoming possible regions for human occupation. There are no Palaeolithic re mains in Sweden or Norway. Man, when he entered these countries, was apparently already at the Neolithic stage of social development. § 3 Nor is there any convincing evidence of man in America before the end of the Pleistocene.2 The same relaxation of the aBut our domestic cattle are derived from some form of aurochs— probably from some lesser Central Asiatic variety. — H. H. J. "'The various finds of human remains in North America for which the geological antiquity has been claimed have been thus briefly passed under review. In every instance where enough of the bones is preserved for comparison, the evidence bears witness against the geological antiquity of the remains and for their close affinity to or identity with the modern 76 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY climate that permitted the retreat of the reindeer hunters into Russia and Siberia, as the Neolithic tribes advanced, may have allowed them to wander across the land that is now cut by Bering Strait, and so reach the American continent. They spread thence southward, age by age. When they reached South America, they found the giant sloth (the Megatherium), the glyptodon, and many other extinct creatures, still flourish ing. The glyptodon was a monstrous South American arma dillo; and a human skeleton has been found by Roth buried beneath its huge tortoise-like shell. x All the human remains in America, even the earliest, it is to be noted, are of an Amer-Indian character. In America there does not seem to have been any preceding races of sub- men. Man was fully man when he entered America. The old world was the nursery of the sub-races of mankind. Indian." (Smithsonian Institute, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bul letin 33. Dr. Hrdlicka.) But J. Deniker quotes evidence to show that eoliths and early palaeoliths have been found in America. See his compact but full summary of the evidence and views for and against in his Races' of Man, pp. 510, 511. 1 "Questioned by some authorities," says J. Deniker in The Races of Man. NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE § 1. The Age of Cultivation Begins. § 2. Where Did the Neolithic Culture Arise? § 3. Everyday Neolithic Life. § 4. Primitive Trade. § 5. The Flooding of the Medi terranean Valley. § 1 THE Neolithic phase of human affairs began in Europe about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. But probably men had reached the Neolithic stage elsewhere some thou sands of years earlier. Neolithic men came slowly into Europe from the south or south-east as the reindeer and the open steppes gave way to forest and modern European conditions. The Neolithic stage in culture is characterized by: (1) the presence of polished stone implements, and in particular the stone axe, which was perforated so. as to be the more effectually fastened to a wooden handle, and which was probably used rather for working wood than in conflict. There are also abun dant arrow-heads. The fact that some implements are polished does not preclude the presence of great quantities of implements of unpolished stone. But there are differences in the make between even the unpolished tools of the Neolithic and of the Palaeolithic Period. (2) The beginning of a sort of agricul ture, and the use of plants and seeds. But at first there are abundant evidences that hunting was still of great importance in the Neolithic Age. Neolithic man did not at first sit down to his agriculture. He took snatch crops. He settled later. (3) Pottery and proper cooking. The horse is no longer eaten. (4) Domesticated animals. The dog appears very early. The Neolithic man had domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. 77 78 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY He was a huntsman turned herdsman of the herds he once hunted. (5) Plaiting and weaving. These Neolithic people probably "migrated" into Europe, in the same way that the Reindeer Men had migrated before them ; that is to say, generation by generation and century by century, as the climate changed, they spread after their accus tomed food. They were not "nomads." Nomadism, like civili zation, had still to be developed. At present we are quite un able to estimate how far the Neolithic peoples were new-comers and how far their arts were developed or acquired by the de scendants of some of the hunters and fishers of the Later Palaeolithic Age. Whatever our conclusions in that matter, this much we may say with certainty ; there is no great break, no further sweeping away of one kind of man and replacement by another kind be tween the appearance of the Neolithic way of living and our own time. There are invasions, conquests, extensive emigra tions and intermixtures, but the races as a whole carry on and continue to adapt themselves to the areas into which they began to settle in the opening of the Neolithic Age. The Neolithic men of Europe were white men ancestral to the modern Euro peans. They may have been of a darker complexion than many of their descendants; of that we cannot speak with certainty. But there is no real break in culture from their time onward until we reach the age of coal, steam, and power-driven ma chinery that began in the eighteenth century. After a long time gold, the first known of the metals, appears among the bone ornaments with jet and amber. Irish Neolithic remains are particularly rich in gold. Then, perhaps 6,000 or 7,000 years ago in Europe, Neolithic people began to use copper in certain centres, making out of it implements of much the same pattern as their stone ones. They cast the copper in moulds made to the shape of the stone implements. Possibly they first found native copper and hammered it into shape.1 Later — we will not venture upon figures — men had found out how to get copper from its ore. Perhaps, as Lord Avebury sug gested, they discovered the secret of smelting by the chance put ting of lumps of copper ore among the ordinary stones with which they built the fire pits they used for cooking. In China, 'Native copper is still found to-day in Italy, Hungary, Cornwall, and many other places. NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE 79 Hungary, Cornwall, and elsewhere copper ore and tinstone occur in the same veins ; it is a very common association, and so, rather through dirtiness than skill, the ancient smelters, it N^olitkic Ittvpiametds- (draxmto differing.scales) And horn axe and hammer Axe-hammers or polished stone . 1 \\ Ckristia tt & VX 19B) -J LJ J.T.H. Time Diagram Showing the General Duration of the Neolithic Period in which Early Thought Developed. By this scale, the diagram on p. 47 of the period since the earliest subhuman traces would be 12 feet long, and the diagram of geological time (ch. ii, § 2) somewhere between 1,500 feet and three miles. and kings. They are not to be thought of as cheats or usurpers of power, nor the rest of mankind as their dupes. All men are mixed in their motives; a hundred things move men to 104 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY seek ascendancy over other men, but not all such motives are base or bad. The magicians usually believed more or less in their own magic, the priests in their ceremonies, the chiefs in their right. The history of mankind henceforth is a history of more or less blind endeavours to conceive a common purpose in relation to which all men may live happily, and to create and develop a common consciousness and a common stock of knowl edge which may serve and illuminate that purpose. In a vast variety of forms this appearance of kings and priests and magic men was happening all over the world under Neolithic condi tions. Everywhere mankind was seeking where knowledge and mastery and magic power might reside; everywhere individual men were willing, honestly or dishonestly, to rule, to direct, or to be. the magic beings who would reconcile the confusions of the community. Another queer development of the later Palaeo lithic and Neolithic ages was the development of self -mutilation. Men began to cut themselves about, to excise noses, ears, fingers, teeth and the like, and to attach all sorts of superstitious ideas to these acts. Many children to-day pass through a similar phase in their mental development. There is a phase in the life of most little girls when they are not to be left alone with a pair of scissors for fear that they will cut off their hair. No ani mal does anything of this sort. In many ways the simplicity, directness, and detachment of a later Palaeolithic rock-painter appeal more to modern sympa thies than does the state of mind of these Neolithic men, full of the fear of some ancient Old Man who had developed into a tribal God obsessed by ideas of sacrificial propitiations, mutila tions, and magic murder. No doubt the reindeer hunter was a ruthless hunter and a combative and passionate creature, but he killed for reasons we can still understand; Neolithic man, under the sway of talk. and a confused thought process, killed ori theory, he killed for monstrous and now incredible ideas, he killed those he loved through fear and under direction. Those Neolithic men not only made human sacrifices at seedtime; there is every reason to suppose they sacrificed wives and slaves at the burial of their chieftains ; they killed men, women, and children whenever they were under adversity and thought the gods were athirst. They practised infanticide. All these things passed on into the Bronze Age. Hitherto a social consciousness had been asleep and not even EARLY THOUGHT 105 dreaming in human history. Before it awakened it produced nightmares. Away beyond the dawn of history, 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, one thinks of the Wiltshire uplands in the twilight of a mid summer day's morning. The torches pale in the growing light. One has a dim apprehension of a procession through the avenue of stone, of priests, i perhaps i fantastically dressed with skins and horns and horrible painted masks — -not the robed and bearded dignitaries our artists represent the Druids to have been — of chiefs in skins adorned with necklaces of teeth and bearing spears and axes, their great heads of hair held up with pins of bone, of women in skins or flaxen robes, of a great peering crowd of shock-headed men and naked children. They have assembled from many distant places; the ground between the avenues and Silbury Hill is dotted with their encamp ments. A certain festive cheerfulness prevails. And amidst the throng march the appointed human victims, submissive, helpless, staring towards the distant smoking altar at which they are to die — that the harvests may be good and the tribe increase. . . . To that had life progressed 3,000 or 4,000 years ago from its starting-place in the slime of the tidal beaches. XII THE RACES OF MANKIND 1. Is Mankind Still Differentiating? § 2. The Main Races of Mankind. § 3. The Brunei Peoples. IT is necessary now to discuss plainly what is meant by a phrase, used often very carelessly, "The Races of Man kind." , Jt. must be evident from what has already been explained in Chapter III that man, so widely spread and subjected there fore to great differences of climate, consuming very different food in different regions, attacked by different enemies, must always, have been .undergoing considerable local modification and differentiation. Man, like every other species of living thing, has constantly been tending to differentiate into several species; wherever a body of men has been cut off, in islands or oceans or by deserts or mountains, from the rest of humanity, it must have begun very soon to develop special characteristics, specially adapted to the local conditions. But, on the other hand, man is usually a wandering and enterprising animal for whom there exist few insurmountable barriers. Men imi tate men, fight and conquer them, interbreed, one people with another. Concurrently for thousands of years there have been two sets of forces at work, one tending to separate men into a multitude of local varieties, and another to remix and blend these varieties together before a separate series has been established. These two sets of forces may have fluctuated in this relative effect in the past. Palaeolithic man, for instance, may have been more of a wanderer, he may have drifted about over a much greater area, than later Neolithic man ; he was less fixed to any sort of home or lair, he was tied by fewer possessions. Being a hunter, he was obliged to follow the migrations of his 106 THE RACES OF MANKIND 107 ordinary quarry. A few bad seasons may have shifted him hundreds of miles. He may therefore have mixed very widely and developed few varieties over the greater part of the world. The appearance of agriculture tended to tie those com munities of mankind that took it up to the region in which it was most conveniently carried on,' and so to favour differentia tion. Mixing or differentiation is not dependent upon a higher or lower stage of civilization; many savage tribes wander how for hundreds of miles ; many English villagers in the eighteenth century, on the other hand:/ had never been more than eight or ten miles from their villages, neither they nor their fathers nor grandfathers before them. Hunting peoples often have enormous range. The Labrador country, for instance, is in habited by a few thousand Indians, who follow the one great herd of caribou as it wanders yearly north and then south again in pursuit of food. This mere handful of people covers a territory as large as France. Nomad peoples also range very widely.' Some Kalmuck tribes are said to travel nearly a thou sand miles between summer and winter pasture. It carries out this suggestion, that Palaeolithic man ranged widely and was distributed thinly indeed but uniformly, throughout the world, that the Palaeolithic remains we find are everywhere astonishingly uniform. To quote Sir John Evans, "The implements in distant lands are so identical in form and character with the British specimens that they might have been manufactured by the same hands. . . . On the banks of the Nile, many hundreds of feet above its present level, implements of the European types have been discovered ; while in Soma- liland, in an ancient river-valley at a great elevation above the sea, Sir H. W. Seton-Karr has collected a large number of implements formed of flint and quartzite, which, judging from their form and character, might have been dug out of the drift- deposits of the Somme and the Seine, the Thames or the ancient Solent." Phases of spreading and intermixture have probably alter nated with phases of settlement and specialization in the history of mankind. But up to a few hundred years ago it is probable that since the days of the Palaeolithic Age at least mankind has on the whole been differentiating. The species has differentiated in that' period into a very great number of varieties, many of which have reblended with others, which have spread and under- 108 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY gone further differentiation or become extinct. Wherever there has been a strongly marked local difference of condi tions and a check upon intermixture, there one is almost obliged to assume a variety of mankind must have appeared. Of such local varieties there must have been a great multitude. In one remote corner of the world, Tasmania, a little cut off population of people remained in the early Palaeolithic stage until the discovery of that island by the Dutch in 1642. They are now, unhappily, extinct. The last Tasmanian died in 1877. They may have been cut off from the rest of mankind for 15,000 or 20,000 or 25,000 years. But among the numerous obstacles and interruptions to in termixture there have been certain main barriers, such as the Atlantic Ocean, the highlands, once higher, and the now van ished seas of Central Asia and the like, which have cut off great groups of varieties from other great groups of varieties over long periods of time. These separated groups of varieties devel oped very early certain broad resemblances and differences. Most of the varieties of men in eastern Asia and America, but not all, have now this in common, that they have yellowish buff skins, straight black hair, and often high cheek-bones. Most of the native peoples of Africa south of the Sahara, but not all, have black or blackish skins, flat noses, thick lips, and frizzy hair. In north and western Europe a great number of peoples have fair hair, blue eyes, and ruddy complexions; and about the Mediterranean there is a prevalence of white-skinned peoples with dark eyes and black hair. The black hair of many of these dark whites is straight, but never so strong and wave- less as the hair of the yellow peoples. It is straighter in the east than in the west. In southern India we find brownish and darker peoples with straight black hair, and these as we pass eastward give place to more distinctly yellow peoples. In scattered islands and in Papua and New Guinea we find another series of black and brownish peoples of a more lowly type with frizzy hair. But it must be borne in mind that these are very loose- fitting generalizations. Some of the areas and isolated pockets of mankind in the Asiatic area may have been under conditions more like those in the European area; some of the African areas are of a more Asiatic and less distinctively African type. We find a wavy-haired, fairish, hairy-skinned race, the Ainu. THE RACES OF MANKIND 109 in Japan. They are more like the Europeans in their facial type than the surrounding yellow Japanese. They may be a drifted patch of the whites or they may be a quite distinct people. We find primitive black people in the Andaman Islands far away from Australia and far away from Africa. There is a streak of very negroid blood traceable in south Persia and some parts of India. These are the "Asiatic" negroids. There Auftraloul *tn*z^ is little or no proof that all black people, the Australians, the Asiatic negroids, and the negroes, derive from one origin, but only that they have lived for vast periods under similar con ditions. We must not assume that human beings in the east ern Asiatic area were all differentiating in one direction and all the human beings in Africa in another. There were great currents of tendency, it is true, but there were also backwaters, eddies, admixtures, readmixtures, and leakages from one main area to the other. A coloured map of the world to show the races would not present just four great areas of colour; it would have to be dabbed over with a multitude of tints and intermediate shades, simple here, mixed and overlapping there. In 'the early Neolithic Period in Europe — it may be 10,000 or 12,000 years ago or so — man was differentiating all over the world, and he had already differentiated into a number of varieties, but he has never differentiated into different species. A "species," we must remember, in biological language is dis- 110 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY tinguished from a "variety" by the fact that varieties can interbreed, while species either do not do so or produce off spring which, like mules, are sterile.. All mankind can inter breed freely, can learn to understand the same speech, can adapt itself to co-operation. And in the present age, man is probably no longer undergoing differentiation at. all. Re- admixture is now a far stronger force than differentiatiop. Men mingle more and more. Mankind from the view of a biologist is an animal species in a state of arrested differentiation ; and possible readmixture. §-2 It is only in the last fifty or sixty years that the varieties of men came to be regarded in this light, as a tangle of differ entiations recently arrested or still in progress. Before that time students of mankind, influenced, consciously or uncon sciously, by the story of Noah and the Ark and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, were inclined to classify men into v three or four great races and they were disposed to regard these races as having always . been separate things, descended from originally separate ancestors. They ignored the great possi bilities of blended races and of special local. isolations and varia-; tions. . The classification has varied considerably, but there has fbeen rather too' much readiness to assume that mankind must be completely divisible into three or four main groups. Ethnologists ( students of race) have fallen into grievous dis putes about a multitude of minor peoples, as to whether they were of this or that primary race or "mixed," or strayed early forms, or what not. But all races are more or less mixed. There are, no doubt, four main groups, but each is a miscellany, and there are little groups that will not go into any of the four main divisions. Subject to these reservations, when it is clearly understood that .when we speak of these main divisions we mean not simple and pure races, but groups of races, then they have a certain convenience in discussion. Over the European and Mediter ranean area and western Asia there are, and have been for .many thousand years, white peoples, usually called the Caucasians, subdivided into two or three subdivisions, the northern blonds or Nordic race, an alleged intermediate race about which many authorities are doubtful, the so-called Alpine race, and the THE RACES OF MANKIND 111 southern dark whites, the Mediterranean or Iberian race ;¦ over eastern Asia and America a second group of races prevails, the Mongolians, generally with yellow skins, straight black hair, and sturdy bodies ; over Africa the Negboes, and in the region of Australia and New Guinea the black, primitive Atrs- tbaloids. These are convenient terms, provided the student bears in mind that they are not exactly , defined terms. They represent only the common characteristics of certain main groups of races ; they leave out a number of little peoples who belong properly to none- of these divisions, and they disregard the perpetual mixing where the main groups overlap. § 3 i Tlie Mediterranean or Iberian division of the Caucasian race had a wider range in early times, and was a less spe cialized and distinctive type than the Nordic. It is very hard to define its southward boundaries from the Negro, or to mark off its early traces in Central Asia from those of early Mongolians. Wilfred Scawen Blunt * says that Huxley "had long suspected a common origin of the Egyptians and the Dravidians of India, perhaps a long belt of brown-skinned men from India to' Spain in very early days." It is possible that this "belt" of Huxley's of dark-white and brown-skinned men, this race of brunet-bfown folk, ultimately spread even farther than India; that they reached to the shores of the Pacific, and that they were everywhere the original possessors of the Neolithic culture and the beginners of what we call civilization. It is possible that these Brunei; peoples are so to speak the basic peoples of our modern world. The Nordic and the Mongolian peoples may have been but north-. western' and north-eastern branches from this ; more funda- 1 My Diaries, under date of July 25, 1894. 112 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY mental stem. Or the Nordic race may have been a branch, while the Mongolian, like the Negro, may have been another equal and distinct stem with which the brunet-browns met and mingled in South China. Or the Nordic peoples also may have developed separately from a palaeolithic stage. At some period in human history (see Elliot Smith's Migra tions, of Early Culture) there seems to have been a special type of Neolithic culture widely distributed in the world which had a group of features so curious and so unlikely to have been independently developed in different 'regions of the earth, as to compel us to believe that it was in effect one culture. It reached through all the regions inhabited by the brunet Medi terranean race, and beyond through India, Further India, up the Pacific coast of China, and it spread at last across the Pacific and to Mexico and Peru. It was a coastal culture not reaching deeply inland. This peculiar development of the Neolithic culture, which Elliot Smith called the heliolithic * culture, included many or all of the following odd practices: (1) circumcision, (2) the very queer custom of sending the father to bed when a child 1 "Sunstone" culture became of the sun worship and the megaliths. This is not a very happily chosen term. It suggests a division equivalent to palaeolithic (old stone) and neolithic (new stone), whereas it is a sub division of the neolithic culture. THE RACES OF MANKIND 113 is born, known as the couvade, (3) the practice of massage, (4) the making of mummies, (5) megalithic monuments 1 (e.g. Stonehenge), (6) artificial deformation of the heads of the -Moti^olLtti -topetf' young by bandages, (7) tattooing, (8) religious association of the sun and the serpent, and (9) the use of the symbol known as the swastika (see figure) for good luck. This odd little Caucas ian. *W* "Mediterranean. "Nordic Mediterranean. (Jew of Algiers) (Englishman) (-Ber*ep)«j.u'.ii symbol spins gaily round the world; it seems incredible that men would have invented and made a pet of it twice over. Elliot Smith traces these associated practices in a sort of * Megalithic monuments have been made quite recently by primitive Indian peoples. ,114 THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY THE RACES' OF MANKIND 115 constellation all over this great Mediterranean-India Ocean-Pa cific area. Where one occurs, most of the others occur. They link Brittany with Borneo and Peru." But this constellation of practices does not crop up in the primitive homes of Nordic or Mongolian peoples, nor does it extend southward "much be yond equatorial Africa. For thousands :of years, from 15,000 to 1,000 b.c, siich a heliolithic Neolithic culture and its brownish possessors' maj have been oozing round the world through the warmer regions of the world, drifting by canoes often across wide stretches of sea. It was then the highest cjilture in the world ; it sustained the largest, most highly . de veloped communities. And its region of origin may have been, as Elliot. Smith: sug gests, the Mediterranean and North African ' i^, - I .~ j ijegion. It migrated slowly age; by age. It h '¦, , astUsa.^ ipust have been spreading up the Pacific Coast and across the inland stepping-stones to America, long after it had passed on into other developments in its areas of ''origin. ; Manv °f the peoples of the East Indies, Melanesia and Polynesia were still in this heliolithie stage of development when they were discovered by European navigators in the eighteenth century. The : first civilizations in Egypt and the Euphrates-Tigris val ley probably developed directly out of this widespread culture. ^fVe will discuss later whether the Chinese civilization had a different origin. The Semitic nomads of the Arabian deserj; seem also to have had a heliolithic stage. ~Mexiram "Peruvians 9 x&oiLirAiie ~\i&p6S \ *\ Ineoroid CROMAONARDtirpcir] feRIMftLDl NeanderihaL Tra&Wzn. Man 'Maori c£ -Australciuas KZealand -Tasmanians I PUfcinvn. Man ^~~^? \ M. ' */ Pithecanthropus «.o.w.