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
The appearance of these truly human postglacial Palæolithic peoples was
certainly an enormous leap forward in the history of mankind. Both of
these main races had a human fore-brain, a human hand, an intelligence
very like our own. They dispossessed _Homo Neanderthalensis_ from his
caverns and his stone quarries. And they agreed with modern
ethnologists, it would seem, in regarding him as a different species.
Unlike most savage conquerors, who take the women of the defeated side
for their own and interbreed with them, it would seem that the true men
would have nothing to do with the Neanderthal race, women or men. There
is no trace of any intermixture between the races, in spite of the fact
that the newcomers, being also flint users, were establishing themselves
in the very same spots that their predecessors had occupied. We know
nothing of the appearance of the Neanderthal man, but this absence of
intermixture seems to suggest an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a
repulsive strangeness in his appearance over and above his low forehead,
his beetle brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature. Or he--and
she--may have been too fierce to tame. Says Sir Harry Johnston, in a
survey of the rise of modern man in his _Views and Reviews_: “The dim
racial remembrance of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains,
shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibalistic
tendencies, may be the germ of the ogre in folklore....”
These true men of the Palæolithic Age, who replaced the Neanderthalers,
were coming into a milder climate, and although they used the caves and
shelters of their predecessors, they lived largely in the open. They
were hunting peoples, and some or all of them appear to have hunted the
mammoth and the wild horse as well as the reindeer, bison, and aurochs.
They ate much horse. At a great open-air camp at Solutré, where they
seem to have had animal gatherings for many centuries, it is estimated
that there are the bones of 100,000 horses, besides reindeer, mammoth,
and bison bones. They probably followed herds of horses, the little
bearded ponies of that age, as these moved after pasture. They hung
about on the flanks of the herd, and became very wise about its habits
and dispositions. A large part of these men’s lives must have been spent
in watching animals.
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