As Professor Sollas points out, “the primitive inhabitants of France were distinguished from the highest civilized races, not by a smaller, but by a larger, cranial capacity; in other words, as we proceed backwards in time the human brain increases in volume.”[55] We know that they buried their dead, and in some cases provided weapons and food for use in a future state. Their inventiveness is proved by the variety and gradual improvement in the technique of their tools and weapons. Their carvings in the round or low relief, their spirited engravings on bone and ivory, and their wonderful mural paintings, whether in outline, shaded monochrome, or polychrome, evince an astonishing æsthetic sense and technical skill. Footnote 55: _Quart. Journ. Geol. Sci._, vol. 66, 1910, p. lxii. As the diggers in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Crete, and elsewhere, have proved that civilisation was far more ancient than could have been conceived even fifty years ago, so the cave explorers have shown us that during the latter half of the Palæolithic age there lived mighty hunters, skilful artists, big-brained men, who laid the foundations upon which subsequent generations have built. This, then, is the lesson that the latest results of investigations into the antiquity of man has taught us—that brain, not brawn, has been the essential factor in the evolution of man. The human brain had developed at a greater rate than the body, which even then retained unmistakable evidence of man’s lowly origin. How long had this evolution been progressing before Mousterian times?[56] The ruder stone implements of the Acheulian and Chellian epochs carry us an appreciable time backward; and if even some of the eoliths are artifacts, we can project tool-using man to yet earlier times. Then the record becomes blurred, as it is manifestly impossible to decide whether simple bruising of stones was caused by man or natural agencies. Footnote 56: W. L. H. Duckworth, _Morphology and Anthropology_, 1904, p. 520. [Sidenote: =Pithecanthropus erectus.=]