This class of evidence is therefore merely negative. We certainly cannot pronounce that man of the old stone age was of a lower type than low types of savages of the present day; we cannot even say that he was as undeveloped as are the Lapps of modern Europe; but in this negative evidence there is a certain amount of satisfaction. We might be not unwilling to place on the level of the Eskimo or the Lapp the fashioners of the rudest of the stone implements, but the _artists_ of the caves we may well imagine to have attained a higher development. And there is nothing at all unreasonable or opposed to our experience of Nature in supposing a race of human beings to have flourished in Europe in these old times, to have been possessed of a certain amount of civilization, but not to have advanced from that towards any very great improvement before they were at last extinguished by some other race with a greater faculty for progress. As we shall come to see later on, there is some reason for connecting man of the later stone age as regards race with the Eskimo or Lapp of to-day. Yet even if this be admitted, we must look upon the latter rather as the dregs of the races they represent. It is not always the highest types of any particular race, whether of men, of animals, or of plants, which live the longest. Species which were once flourishing are often only represented by stunted and inferior descendants; just as the animals of the lizard class once upon a time, and long before the coming of man upon the earth, had their age of greatest development and reached proportions which are unknown in these days.
So we may imagine man spreading out at various times and in many different streams from his first home in Asia. The earlier races to leave this nursing-place did not, we may suppose, contain sufficient force to carry them beyond a low level of culture; very likely they sank in civilization and in the end got pushed on one side by more energetic people who came like a second wave from the common source. When, in the history of the world, we come to speak of races of whom we know more, we shall see strong reasons to believe that this was the rule followed; nay, it is even followed at the present day, where European races are spreading over all the world, and gradually absorbing or extinguishing inferior members of the human family. We must, therefore, in our present state of ignorance, be content to look upon palæolithic man merely as we find him, and not to advance vague surmises whether he gradually advanced to the use of better stone weapons, and at last to metals, or whether he was extinguished by subsequent races who did thus advance.