On the most modest estimate men had by that time been chipping
flints for several hundred thousand years, and it is no argument
of general intelligence that some skill in the one industry of
the age had been developed. The true measure of Neanderthal man's
capacity is that, a million years or so after passing the
anthropoid-age level, he chipped his stones more finely and gave
them a better edge and contour. There is no evidence that he as
yet hefted them. It is flattering to him to compare him with the
Australian aboriginal. The native art, the shields and spears and
boomerangs, and the elaborate tribal and matrimonial arrangements
of the Australian black are not known to have had any counterpart
in his life.
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.
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