It would therefore seem that the precursors of man made singularly little, if any, progress during the vast span of time between the Miocene and the Ice-Age, and that then something occurred which quickened the face of human evolution. From the Neanderthal level man will advance to the height of modern civilisation in about one-tenth the time that it took him to advance from the level of the higher ape to that of the lowest savage. Something has broken into the long lethargy of his primitive career, and set him upon a progressive path. Let us see if a careful review of the stages of his culture confirms the natural supposition that this "something" was the fall in the earth's temperature, and how it may have affected him.
CHAPTER XX. THE DAWN OF CIVILISATION
The story of man before the discovery of metal and the attainment of civilisation is notoriously divided into a Palaeolithic (Old Stone) Age, and a Neolithic (New Stone) Age. Each of these ages is now subdivided into stages, which we will review in succession. But it is important to conceive the whole story of man in more correct proportion than this familiar division suggests. The historical or civilised period is now computed at about ten thousand years. The Neolithic Age, which preceded civilisation, is usually believed to be about four or five times as long, though estimates of its duration vary from about twenty to a hundred thousand years. The Palaeolithic Age in turn is regarded as at least three or four times as long as the Neolithic; estimates of time vary from a hundred to five hundred thousand years. And before this there is the vast stretch of time in which the ape slowly became a primitive human.
This long, early period is, as we saw, still wrapped in mist and controversy. A few bones tell of a race living, in semi-human shape, in the region of the Indian Ocean; a few crude stones are held by many to indicate that a more advanced, but very lowly race, wandered over the south of Europe and north of Africa before the Ice-Age set in. The starting-point or cradle of the race is not known. The old idea of seeking the patriarchal home on the plains to the north of India is abandoned, and there is some tendency to locate it in the land which has partly survived in the islands of the Indian Ocean. The finding of early remains in Java is not enough to justify that conclusion, but it obtains a certain probability when we notice the geographical distribution of the Primates. The femurs and the apes are found to-day in Africa and Asia alone; the monkeys have spread eastward to America and westward to Europe and Africa; the human race has spread north-eastward into Asia and America, northwestward into Europe, westward into Africa, and southward to Australia and the islands. This distribution suggests a centre in the Indian Ocean, where there was much more land in the Tertiary Era than there is now. We await further exploration in that region and Africa.
There is nothing improbable in the supposition that man wandered into Europe in the Tertiary, and has left in the Eoliths the memorials of his lowly condition. The anthropoid apes certainly reached France. However that may be, the Ice-Age would restrict all the Primates to the south. It will be seen, on a glance at the map, that a line of ice-clad mountains would set a stern barrier to man's advance in the early Pleistocene, from the Pyrenees to the Himalaya, if not to the Pacific. He therefore spread westward and southward. One branch wandered into Australia, and was afterwards pressed by more advanced invaders (the present blacks of Australia) into Tasmania, which seems to have been still connected by land. Another branch, or branches, spread into Africa, to be driven southward, or into the central forests, by later and better equipped invaders. They survive, little changed (except by recent contact with Europeans), in the Bushmen and in large populations of Central Africa which are below the level of tribal organisation. Others remained in the islands, and we seem to have remnants of them in the Kalangs, Veddahs, etc. But these islands have been repeatedly overrun by higher races, and the primitive life has been modified.
Comparing the most isolated of these relics of early humanity, we obtain many suggestions about the life of that remote age. The aboriginal Tasmanians, who died out about forty years ago, were of great evolutionary interest. It is sometimes said that man is distinguished from all other animals by the possession of abstract ideas, but the very imperfect speech of the Tasmanians expressed no abstract ideas. Their mind seems to have been in an intermediate stage of development. They never made fire, and, like the other surviving fragments of early humanity, they had no tribal organisation, and no ideas of religion or morality.
The first effect of the Ice-Age on this primitive humanity would be to lead to a beginning of the development of racial characters. The pigment under the skin of the negro is a protection against the actinic rays of the tropical sun; the white man, with his fair hair and eyes, is a bleached product of the northern regions; and the yellow or brown skin seems to be the outcome of living in dry regions with great extremes of temperature. As the northern hemisphere divided into climatic zones these physical characters were bound to develop. The men who went southward developed, especially when fully exposed to the sun on open plains, the layer of black pigment which marks the negroid type. There is good reason, as we shall see to think that man did not yet wear clothing, though he had a fairly conspicuous, if dwindling, coat of hair. On the other hand the men who lingered further north, in South-western Asia and North Africa, would lose what pigment they had, and develop the lighter characters of the northerner. It has been noticed that even a year in the arctic circle has a tendency to make the eyes of explorers light blue. We may look for the genesis of the vigorous, light-complexioned races along the fringe of the great ice-sheet. It must be remembered that when the limit of the ice-sheet was in Central Germany and Belgium, the climate even of North Africa would be very much more temperate than it is to-day.
As the ice-sheet melted, the men who were adapted to living in the temperate zone to the south of it penetrated into Europe, and the long story of the Old Stone Age opened. It must not, of course, be supposed that this stage of human culture only began with the invasion of Europe. Men would bring their rough art of fashioning implements with them, but the southern regions are too little explored to inform us of the earlier stage. But as man enters Europe he begins to drop his flints on a soil that we have constant occasion to probe—although the floor on which he trod is now sometimes forty or fifty feet below the surface—and we obtain a surer glimpse of the fortunes of our race.
Most European geologists count four distinct extensions of the ice-sheet, with three interglacial periods. It is now generally believed that man came north in the third interglacial period; though some high authorities think that he came in the second. As far as England is concerned, it has been determined, under the auspices of the British Association, that our oldest implements (apart from the Eoliths) are later than the great ice-sheet, but there is some evidence that they precede the last extension of the ice.