The earliest bones of men we now have--upon which all the experts would probably agree--are those of _Meganthropus_, from Java, of about 450,000 years ago. The earlier australopithecines of Africa were possibly not tool-users and may not have been ancestral to men at all. But there is an alternate and evidently increasingly stronger chance that some of them may have been. The Kanam jaw from Kenya, another early possibility, is not only very incomplete but its find-spot is very questionable. Java man proper, _Pithecanthropus_, comes next, at about 400,000 years ago, and the big Heidelberg jaw in Germany must be of about the same date. Next comes Swanscombe in England, Steinheim in Germany, the Ternafine jaws in Algeria, and Peking man, _Sinanthropus_. They all date to the second great interglacial period, about 350,000 years ago. Piltdown and Galley Hill are out, and with them, much of the starch in the old idea that there were two distinct lines of development in human evolution: (1) a line of “paleoanthropic” development from Heidelberg to the Neanderthalers where it became extinct, and (2) a very early “modern” line, through Piltdown, Galley Hill, Swanscombe, to us. Swanscombe, Steinheim, and Ternafine are just as easily cases of very early pre-neanderthaloids. The pre-neanderthaloids were very widespread during the third interglacial: Ehringsdorf, Saccopastore, some of the Mount Carmel people, and probably Fontéchevade are cases in point. A variety of their descendants can be seen, from Java (Solo), Africa (Rhodesian man), and about the Mediterranean and in western Europe. As the acute cold of the last glaciation set in, the western Europeans found themselves surrounded by water, ice, or bitter cold tundra. To vastly over-simplify it, they “bred in” and became classic neanderthaloids. But on Mount Carmel, the Skhul cave-find with its 70 per cent modern features shows what could happen elsewhere at the same time. Lastly, from about 40,000 or 35,000 years ago--the time of the onset of the second phase of the last glaciation--we begin to find the fully modern skeletons of men. The modern skeletons differ from place to place, just as different groups of men living in different places still look different. What became of the Neanderthalers? Nobody can tell me for sure. I’ve a hunch they were simply “bred out” again when the cold weather was over. Many Americans, as the years go by, are no longer ashamed to claim they have “Indian blood in their veins.” Give us a few more generations and there will not be very many other Americans left to whom we can brag about it. It certainly isn’t inconceivable to me to imagine a little Cro-Magnon boy bragging to his friends about his tough, strong, Neanderthaler great-great-great-great-grandfather! Cultural BEGINNINGS [Illustration] Men, unlike the lower animals, are made up of much more than flesh and blood and bones; for men have “culture.” WHAT IS CULTURE?