Page:The Outline of History Vol 1.djvu/111

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THE FIRST TRUE MEN
87

more remains are collected and evidence accumulates, men will learn more of their early stages. At present we can only guess where and how, through the slow ages, parallel with the Neanderthal cousin, these first true men arose out of some more ape-like progenitor. For hundreds of centuries they were acquiring skill of hand and limb, and power and bulk of brain, in that still unknown environment. They were already far above the Neanderthal level of achievement and intelligence, when first they come into our ken, and they had already split into two or more very distinctive races.

These new-comers did not migrate into Europe in the strict sense of the word, but rather, as century by century the climate ameliorated, they followed the food and plants to which they were accustomed, as those spread into the new realms that opened to them. The ice was receding, vegetation was increasing, big game of all sorts was becoming more abundant. Steppe-like conditions, conditions of pasture and shrub, were bringing with them vast herds of wild

    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.