This is a picture of many phases in the life of primitive man: his powerful frame, his ignorance of agriculture, his dependence on the fruits and animal products of the earth, his discovery of fire and of clothing, his chase of wild beasts with clubs and missile stones, his repair to caverns, his contests with the lion and the boar, his invention of rude huts and dwellings, the softening of his nature through the sweet influence of family life and of children, all these are veritable stages in our prehistoric development. The influence of Greek thought is also reflected in the Satires of Horace,[D] and the Greek conception of the natural history of man, voiced by Æschylus[E] as early as the fifth century B. C., prevailed widely before the Christian era, when it gradually gave way to the Mosaic conception of special creation, which spread all over western Europe. RISE OF MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY As the idea of the natural history of man again arose, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it came not so much from previous sources as from the dawning science of comparative anatomy. From the year 1597, when a Portuguese sailor's account of an animal resembling the chimpanzee was embodied in Filippo Pigafetta's _Description of the Kingdom of the Congo_, the many points of likeness between the anthropoid apes and man were treated both in satire and caricature and in serious anatomical comparison as evidence of kinship. The first French evolutionist, Buffon,[F] observed in 1749: "The first truth that makes itself apparent on serious study of nature is one that man may perhaps find humiliating; it is this--that he, too, must take his place in the ranks of animals, being, as he is, an animal in every material point." Buffon's convictions were held in check by clerical and official influences, yet from his study of the orang in 1766 we can entertain no doubt of his belief that men and apes are descended from common ancestors.