I have no doubt that he even knew how to brew and to
distil; and he was probably acquainted with the noble art of cookery as
applied to the persons of his human fellow creatures. Such a personage
cannot reasonably be called primitive; cannibalism, as somebody has
rightly remarked, is the first step on the road to civilisation.
No, if we want to get at genuine, unadulterated primitive man we must go
much further back in time than the mere trifle of 250,000 years with
which Dr. Croll and the cosmic astronomers so generously provide us for
pre-Glacial humanity. We must turn away to the immeasurably earlier
fire-split flints which the Abbe Bourgeois--undaunted mortal!--ventured
to discover among the Miocene strata of the _calcaire de Beauce_. Those
flints, if of human origin at all, were fashioned by some naked and
still more hairy creature who might fairly claim to be considered as
genuinely primitive. So rude are they that, though evidently artificial,
one distinguished archaeologist will not admit they can be in any way
human; he will have it that they were really the handiwork of the great
European anthropoid ape of that early period. This, however, is nothing
more than very delicate hair-splitting; for what does it matter whether
you call the animal that fashioned these exceedingly rough and
fire-marked implements a man-like ape or an ape-like human being? The
fact remains quite unaltered, whichever name you choose to give to it.
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