The antiquity of man, from a geologist’s point of view, has been placed clearly and fully before the English reading public. In 1865, Lord Avebury approached the problem of man’s antiquity from another point of view. He was primarily interested in the culture, the industry, the civilization of ancient man; the geological details of the prehistoric landscape took a secondary place in his pictures of prehistoric times. He sought to follow the human army to its beginning in the remote past by tracing the possessions it had discarded while on the march. Lord Avebury wrote the story of the antiquity of man from the archaeologist’s point of view.The problem of man’s antiquity may be approached from another point of view-that of the human anatomist. The anatomist gives ancient man the centre of the stage; he depends on the geologist and archaeologist to provide him with the scenery and stage accessories. It is from the anatomist’s point of view that the problem of a man’s antiquity is dealt with in this book. This method of approach has its difficulties. The anatomist has to trace man into the past by means of fossil skulls, teeth and limb bones-intelligible documents to him, but complex and repulsive hieroglyphs in the eyes of most people. The mystery of man’s antiquity stands in a different position. Every year brings new evidence to light-places facts at our disposal which take us a step nearer to a true solution. In recent years discoveries of fossil man have crowded in upon us, yielding such an abundance of new evidence that we have had to reconsider and recast our estimates of the antiquity of man. No discovery of recent date has had such a wide-reaching effect. Hence the reader will find that a very considerable part of this book is devoted to the significance of that specimen of humanity.
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