Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/71

XI The First True Men THE earliest signs and traces at present known to science, of a humanity which is indisputably kindred with ourselves, have been found in western Europe and particularly in France and Spain. Bones, weapons, scratchings upon bone and rock, carved fragments of bone, and paintings in caves and upon rock surfaces dating, it is supposed, from 30,000 years ago or more, have been discovered in both these countries. Spain is at present the richest country in the world in these first relics of our real human ancestors. Of coTurse our present collections of these things are the merest beginnings of the accimiulations we may hope for in the future, when there are searchers enough to make a thorough examination of aU possible sources and when other countries in the world, now inaccessible to archaeologists, have been explored in some detail. The greater part of Africa and Asia has never even been traversed yet by a trained observer interested in these matters and free to explore, and we must be very careful therefore not to conclude that the early true men were distinctively inhabitants of western Europe or that they first appeared in that region. In Asia or Africa or submerged beneath the sea of to-day there may be richer and much earlier deposits of real human remains than anything that has yet come to light. I write in Asia or Africa, and I do not mention America because so far, except for one tooth, there have been no finds at all of any of the higher Primates, either of great apes, sub-men, Neanderthalers nor early true men. This de- velopment of life seems to have been almost exclusively an old world development, and it was only apparently at the end of the Old Stone Age that human beings first made their way across the land connexion that is now cut by Behring Strait, into the American continent. These first real human beings we know of in Europe appear already to have belonged to one or other of at least two very distinct SI