The story of man before the discovery of metal and the attainment of civilisation is notoriously divided into a Palaeolithic (Old Stone) Age, and a Neolithic (New Stone) Age. Each of these ages is now subdivided into stages, which we will review in succession. But it is important to conceive the whole story of man in more correct proportion than this familiar division suggests. The historical or civilised period is now computed at about ten thousand years. The Neolithic Age, which preceded civilisation, is usually believed to be about four or five times as long, though estimates of its duration vary from about twenty to a hundred thousand years. The Palaeolithic Age in turn is regarded as at least three or four times as long as the Neolithic; estimates of time vary from a hundred to five hundred thousand years. And before this there is the vast stretch of time in which the ape slowly became a primitive human.
This long, early period is, as we saw, still wrapped in mist and controversy. A few bones tell of a race living, in semi-human shape, in the region of the Indian Ocean; a few crude stones are held by many to indicate that a more advanced, but very lowly race, wandered over the south of Europe and north of Africa before the Ice-Age set in. The starting-point or cradle of the race is not known. The old idea of seeking the patriarchal home on the plains to the north of India is abandoned, and there is some tendency to locate it in the land which has partly survived in the islands of the Indian Ocean. The finding of early remains in Java is not enough to justify that conclusion, but it obtains a certain probability when we notice the geographical distribution of the Primates. The femurs and the apes are found to-day in Africa and Asia alone; the monkeys have spread eastward to America and westward to Europe and Africa; the human race has spread north-eastward into Asia and America, northwestward into Europe, westward into Africa, and southward to Australia and the islands. This distribution suggests a centre in the Indian Ocean, where there was much more land in the Tertiary Era than there is now. We await further exploration in that region and Africa.
There is nothing improbable in the supposition that man wandered into Europe in the Tertiary, and has left in the Eoliths the memorials of his lowly condition. The anthropoid apes certainly reached France. However that may be, the Ice-Age would restrict all the Primates to the south. It will be seen, on a glance at the map, that a line of ice-clad mountains would set a stern barrier to man's advance in the early Pleistocene, from the Pyrenees to the Himalaya, if not to the Pacific. He therefore spread westward and southward. One branch wandered into Australia, and was afterwards pressed by more advanced invaders (the present blacks of Australia) into Tasmania, which seems to have been still connected by land. Another branch, or branches, spread into Africa, to be driven southward, or into the central forests, by later and better equipped invaders. They survive, little changed (except by recent contact with Europeans), in the Bushmen and in large populations of Central Africa which are below the level of tribal organisation. Others remained in the islands, and we seem to have remnants of them in the Kalangs, Veddahs, etc. But these islands have been repeatedly overrun by higher races, and the primitive life has been modified.
Comparing the most isolated of these relics of early humanity, we obtain many suggestions about the life of that remote age. The aboriginal Tasmanians, who died out about forty years ago, were of great evolutionary interest. It is sometimes said that man is distinguished from all other animals by the possession of abstract ideas, but the very imperfect speech of the Tasmanians expressed no abstract ideas. Their mind seems to have been in an intermediate stage of development. They never made fire, and, like the other surviving fragments of early humanity, they had no tribal organisation, and no ideas of religion or morality.