Thus in respect of every characteristic and every special attainment of Greek life we can trace external causation, from the geographical conditions upwards, without being once tempted to resort to the verbalist explanation of "race qualities" or "national genius." If Hellas developed otherwise than Phoenicia from any given date onwards, the causes lay either in the environment or in the set previously given to Phoenician life by its special antecedents, which in turn were determined by environment. To suppose that "the Greeks" started primordially with a unique connatural bent to a relatively "ideal" method of life, preferring culture to riches and art to luxury, is to entail the further assumption of a separate biological evolution from the pre-human stage. To put the problem clearly, let us say that if we suppose the ancestors of the Greeks three millenniums before Homer to have been planted in Australia, with none of the domesticable animals which have played so decisive a part in the development of human societies, there is no good reason to think that the "race" would have risen to any higher levels than had been reached by the Australian aborigines at the time of their discovery by Europeans. One of the most remarkable things about those aborigines is their disproportionately high cranial capacity, which seems compatible with a mental life that their natural environment has always precluded. Many plain traces of gross primeval savagery remain in Greek literature and religion; and to credit all Greek progress to a unique racial faculty is to turn the back upon all the accumulating evidence which goes to show that from the first entrance of the Greeks into Greece they blended with and assimilated the culture of the races whom they found there.[334] The futility of the whole racial thesis becomes evident, finally, the moment we reflect how unequal Greek culture was; how restricted in Hellas, how special to Athens was it on the intellectual side when once Athens had reached her stature; how blank of thought and science was all Hellenic life before the contact of Semitic survivals in Ionia; how backward were many sections of the pagan Hellenic stock to the last; and how backward they have been since the political overturn in antiquity.