Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/69

The Neanderthaler and Rhodesian Man 49 or thirty-five thousand years ago as the climate grew warmer a race of kindred beings, more intelligent, knowing more, talking and co- operating together, came drifting into the Neanderthaler's world from the south. They ousted the Neanderthalers from their caves and squatting places ; they hunted the same food ; they probably made war upon their grisly predecessors and killed them off. These newcomers from the south or the east — for at present we do not know their region of origin — ^who at last drove the Neanderthalers out of existence altogether, were beings of our own blood and kin, the first True Men. Their brain-cases and thumbs and necks and teeth were anatomically the same as our own. In a cave at Cro-Magnon and in another at Grimaldi, a number of skeletons have been found, the earliest truly human remains that are so far known. So it is our race comes into the Record of the Rocks, and the story of mankind begins. The world was growing liker our own in those days though the climate was still austere. The glaciers of the ice age were receding in Europe ; the reindeer of France and Spain presently gave way to great herds of horses as grass increased upon the steppes, and the mammoth became more and more rare in southern Europe and finally receded northward altogether. . . . We do not know where the True Men first originated. But in the summer of 1921, an extremely interesting skull was found to- gether with pieces of a skeleton at Broken Hill in South Africa, which seems to be a relic of a third sort of man, intermediate in its 1. Nat. Hist, Mas COMPARISON OF (1) MODERN SKULL AND (2) RHODESIAN SKULL E