[27] We follow Penck.
[28] For sixpence and postage the reader can get from the British Museum, South Kensington, a very fully illustrated pamphlet A Guide to the Fossil Remains of Man, showing the Piltdown material in great detail.
[29] 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 Palæolithic Age (old stone implements), and finally an age in which the implements are skilfully made and frequently well finished and polished (Neolithic Age). The Palæolithic period is further divided into an earlier (sub-human) and a later (fully human) period. We shall comment on these divisions later.
[30] From Chelles and Le Moustier in France.
[31] Osmond Fisher, quoted in Wright’s Quaternary Ice Age.
[32] Social Origins, by Andrew Lang, and Primal Law, by J. J. Atkinson. (Longmans, 1903.)
[33] 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 palæolithic settlements near the remains of mammoths.”
[34] But compare Sollas’ Ancient Hunters. Elliot Smith (Primitive Man, Proceedings Brit. Acad., vol. vii) says they approach the Neanderthal type.
[35] What is known of the Tasmanian Old Stone men is to be found in Roth and Butler’s Aborigines of Tasmania. See also footnote on the Tasmanian language to Chapter XIII.
[36] The opinion that the Neanderthal race (Homo Neanderthalensis) is an extinct species which did not interbreed with the true men (Homo sapiens) is held by Professor Osborn, and it is the view to which the writer inclines and to which he has pointed in the treatment of this section; but it is only fair to the reader to note that many writers do not share this view. They write and speak of living “Neanderthalers” in contemporary populations. One observer has written in the past of such types in the west of Ireland; another has observed them in Greece. These so-called “living Neanderthalers” have neither the peculiarities of neck, thumb, nor teeth that distinguish the Neanderthal race of pro-men. The cheek teeth of true men, for instance, have what we call fangs, long fangs; the Neanderthaler’s cheek tooth is a more complicated and specialized cheek tooth, a long tooth with short fangs, and his canine teeth were less marked, less like dog-teeth, than ours. Nothing could show more clearly that he was on a different line of development. We must remember that so far only western Europe has been properly explored for Palæolithic remains, and that practically all we know of the Neanderthal species comes from that area (see Map, p. 89). No doubt the ancestor of Homo sapiens (which species includes the Tasmanians) was a very similar and parallel creature to Homo Neanderthalensis. And we are not so far from that ancestor as to have eliminated not indeed “Neanderthal,” but “Neanderthaloid” types. The existence of such types no more proves that the Neanderthal species, the makers of the Chellean and Mousterian implements, interbred with Homo sapiens in the European area than do monkey-faced people testify to an interbreeding with monkeys; or people with faces like horses, that there is an equine strain in our population.