That is to lay a superfluous strain on the
imagination. The proper term of comparison is the lowest type of
human being known to us, since the higher types of living men
have confessedly evolved from the lower. But even the lowest type
of existing or recent savage is not the lowest level of humanity.
Whether or no the Tasmanian or the Yahgan is a primitive remnant
of the Old Stone Age, we have a far lower depth in the Java race.
What we have first to do is to explain the advance to that level,
in the course of many hundreds of thousands of years: a period
fully a hundred times as long as the whole history of
civilisation. Time itself is no factor in evolution, but in this
case it is a significant condition. It means that, on this view
of the evolution of man, we are merely assuming that an advance
in brain-development took place between the Miocene and the
Pleistocene, not similar to, but immeasurably less than, the
advance which we know to have been made in the last fifty
thousand years. In point of fact, the most mysterious feature of
the evolution of man was its slowness. We shall see that, to meet
the facts, we must suppose man to have made little or no progress
during most of this vast period, and then to have received some
new stimulation to develop.
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