Chapter 1695

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“The most clever sculptor of modern times would probably not succeed very much better, if his graver were a splinter of flint, and stone and bone were the materials to be engraved”! (Prof. Boyd Dawkins’ Cave-Hunting, p. 344.) It is needless after such a concession to further insist on Huxley’s, Schmidt’s, Laing’s, and others’ statements to the effect that Palæolithic man cannot be considered to lead us back in any way to a pithecoid human race; thus they demolish the fantasies of many superficial evolutionists. The relic of artistic merit here reäppearing in the Chipped-Stone-age men, is traceable to their Atlantean ancestry. Neolithic man was a fore-runner of the great Âryan invasion, and immigrated from quite another quarter—Asia, and in a measure Northern Africa. The tribes peopling the latter towards the North-West, were certainly of an Atlantean origin—dating back hundreds of thousands of years before the Neolithic Period in Europe—but they had so diverged from the parent type as to present no longer any marked characteristic peculiar to it. As to the contrast between Neolithic and Palæolithic man, it is a remarkable fact that, as Carl Vogt points out, the former was a cannibal, the much earlier man of the Mammoth era was not. Human manners and customs do not seem to improve with time, then? Not in this instance at any rate.