The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and MankindWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
World history
This jaw-bone was found in a sandpit near Heidelberg, at a depth of
eighty feet from the surface,[26] and it is not the jaw-bone of a man as
we understand man, but it is man-like in every respect, except that it
has absolutely no trace of a chin; it is more massive than a man’s, and
its narrowness behind could not, it is thought, have given the tongue
sufficient play for articulate speech. It is not an ape’s jaw-bone; the
teeth are human. The owner of this jaw-bone has been variously named
_Homo Heidelbergensis_ and _Palæoanthropus Heidelbergensis_, according
to the estimate formed of its humanity or sub-humanity by various
authorities. He lived in a world not remotely unlike the world of the
still earlier sub-man of the first implements; the deposits in which it
is found show that there were elephants, horses, rhinoceroses, bison, a
moose, and so forth with it in the world, but the sabre-toothed tiger
was declining and the lion was spreading over Europe. The implements of
this period (known as the Chellean period) are a very considerable
advance upon those of the Pliocene Age. They are well made but _very
much bigger_ than any truly human implements. The Heidelberg man may
have had a very big body and large forelimbs. He may have been a woolly
strange-looking creature.
§ 4
We must turn over the Record for, it may be, another 100,000 years for
the next remains of anything human or sub-human. Then in a deposit
ascribed to the Third Interglacial period, which may have begun 100,000
years ago and lasted 50,000 years,[27] the smashed pieces of a whole
skull turn up. The deposit is a gravel which may have been derived from
the washing out of still earlier gravel strata and this skull fragment
may be in reality as old as the First Glacial period. The bony remains
discovered at Piltdown in Sussex display a creature still ascending only
very gradually from the sub-human.
The first scraps of this skull were found in an excavation for road
gravel in Sussex. Bit by bit other fragments of this skull were hunted
out from the quarry heaps until most of it could be pieced together. It
is a thick skull, thicker than that of any living race of men, and it
has a brain capacity intermediate between that of Pithecanthropus and
man. This creature has been named _Eoanthropus_, the dawn man. In the
same gravel-pits were found teeth of rhinoceros, hippopotamus, and the
leg-bone of a deer with marks upon it that may be cuts. A curious
bat-shaped instrument of elephant bone has also been found.[28]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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