The impossibility of measuring time and space together should be clear enough if you consider merely the matter of how the invention of writing in the Near East is related to written records in other parts of the world. Again we quote Childe: “In England they take us back to A.D. 40, in France to 60 B.C., in Italy a little beyond 500 B.C., in Greece before 700, but nowhere in our continent before 1000. In China written records are available as early as 1400 B.C., in Asia Minor to 1800, only in Egypt and Mesopotamia to 3000 B.C.”[29] Thus the use of writing would give us no time scale for the Old World. Fortunately, we have never tried to date the history of nations in terms of an Illiterate Age, a Writing Age, and a Printing Age. There is similar difficulty over the fossils of extinct mammals which help to date man in Europe. They do fairly well as an index to whether a tool was used in a glacial or an interglacial period. But they sometimes create scientific disagreements when they are used to place the tool in one glacial period or another. And when we reach the crucial time of the end of the last glaciation, and the extinction of the last great beasts, we are in most serious trouble. Here we are dealing with tens of thousands of years instead of hundreds of thousands, and the evidence is simply not that sharp. We do not know when Magdalenian man saw and painted his last mammoth. The mammoths died by inches—or by miles, geographically speaking. They were still alive in one area when they had died out in another. And when we reach the New World, we have still less basis for setting our watches by the fossils—as will be seen in a later chapter. [Illustration: A CHART OF OLD STONE AGE CULTURES _The first section covers 50,000 years, the next page almost 500,000. Both are based on a logarithmic time scale in which the years nearest the present are exaggerated in length._] Our knowledge of early man in the Old World is still shifting and developing. There has never been too much agreement—as the charts on pages 116 and 117 demonstrate in the area of time—and there probably never will be. We have risked this somewhat oversimplified sketch of a much disputed and complex subject only to provide some sort of background for the facts, the theories, and the dogmas that are involved in the story of early man in the New World. 6 WHAT THE BONES HAVE TO SAY _Prophesy upon these bones._ —EZEKIEL 37:4 Early Man as Adam’s Progeny