Be that as it may, the evidences for the antiquity of the Neanderthaloid man prove, at most, that he was prior to the Crô-Magnon man in Europe, but they do not prove that the former was prior to the latter absolutely. Things may, for all we know, have been just the reverse in Asia. Hence we have no ground for regarding the Man of Neanderthal as ancestral to the race of artists, who frescoed the caves of France and Spain. In fact, to the unprejudiced mind the Neanderthal type conveys the impression of a race on the downward path of degeneration rather than an embodiment of the promise of better things. “There is another view,” says Dwight, “ ... though it is so at variance with the Zeitgeist that little is heard of it. May it not be that many low forms of man, archaic as well as contemporary, are degenerate races? We are told everything about progress; but decline is put aside. It is impossible to construct a tolerable scheme of ascent among the races of man; but cannot dark points be made light by this theory of degeneration? One of the most obscure, and to me most attractive of questions, is the wiping out of old civilizations. That it has occurred repeatedly, and on very extensive scales, is as certain as any fact in history. Why is it not reasonable to believe that bodily degeneration took place in those fallen from a higher estate, who, half-starved and degraded, returned to savagery? Moreover, the workings of the soul would be hampered by a degenerating brain. For my part I believe the Neanderthal man to be a specimen of a race, not arrested in its upward climb, but thrown down from a higher position.” (_Op. cit._, pp. 169, 170.) The view, however, that the Neanderthaloid type had degenerated from a previous higher human type was not at all in accord with the then prevalent opinion that this type was far more ancient than any other. And Dwight himself admitted the force of the “objection ... that the Neanderthal race was an excessively old one and that skeletons of the higher race which, according to the view which I have offered, must have existed at the same time as the degenerate ones, are still to be discovered.” (_Op. cit._, p. 170.) In fact, the Neanderthal ancestry of the present human race was so generally accepted that, in the very year in which Dwight’s book appeared, Sir Arthur Keith declared: “The Neanderthal type represents the stock from which all modern races have arisen.” Time, however, as Dr. James Walsh remarked (_America_, Dec. 15, 1917, pp. 230, 231), has triumphantly vindicated the expectations of Professor Dwight. For in his latest book, “The Antiquity of Man” (1916), Sir Arthur Keith has a chapter of Conclusions, in which the following recantation appears: “We were compelled to admit,” he owns, “that men of the modern type had been in existence long before the Neanderthal type.”