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"Before God," said Graham, suddenly, "I would rather be a wounded sentinel freezing in the snow than one of these painted fools!" "In the snow," said Asano, "one might think differently." "I am uncivilised," said Graham, not heeding him. "That is the trouble. I am primitive Palaeolithic.
It is true that by the side of all this civilisation there were still races living in the lowest barbarism of the Stone Age, just as there were Tasmanians who employed stone weapons of palaeolithic shape less than sixty years ago; but between the civilised man of the Babylonian plain and the barbarians around him there existed the same gulf that exists to-day between the European and the savage.
The palaeolithic stone implements are found in river gravels and clays, along the higher levels of our own Thames Valley, that of the Somme in France, and in other places. They are also found at the bottom of various natural caverns. No human bones have been found as yet with the implements, but the bones of large numbers of animals have.
The Abbe Ducrost, however, in an important essay asserts that he has found incontrovertible proofs of the interment of Solutreens on the hearths of their homes in Palaeolithic times.
Whether palaeolithic man survived the Ice Age in Britain has not so far been satisfactorily decided. In Gaul, however, there is fair evidence of continuity between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods, and this continuity must obviously have existed somewhere.
If we set aside the Java man, as a possible survivor of an earlier phase, we should still have to say that, much more than a million years after his departure from the chimpanzee level, man had merely advanced far enough to chip stone implements; because we find no other trace whatever of intelligence than this until near the close of the Palaeolithic period.
It would be fatal to forget, however, that, with this trifling difference, go many others which testify more clearly to the contrast between the older and newer types of culture. Thus it has still to be proved that the palaeolithic races ever used pottery, or that they domesticated animals for instance, the fat ponies which they were so fond of eating; or that they planted crops.
The world has been chronically overcrowded. Belgium with her 572 persons to the square mile is no more crowded than was Denmark when it supported only 500 palaeolithic people. According to Mr. Woodruff, cultivated land will produce 1600 times as much food as hunting land. From the time of the Norman Conquest, for centuries Europe could support no more than 25 to the square mile.
The dawn of civilisation is as gradual as the dawn of the day. The whole gamut of culture Eolithic, Palaeolithic, Neolithic, and civilised is struck in the successive layers of Egyptian remains. But to give even a summary of its historical development is neither necessary nor possible here. The maintenance of its progress is as intelligible as its initial advance.
The fact is, he was, under this standing irritation, getting down to the natural man in himself for once, and the natural man in himself, in spite of Oxford and the junior Reviewers' Club, was a Palaeolithic creature of simple tastes and violent methods. "I'll be level with you yet," ran like a plough through the soil of his thoughts. Then there was this infernal detective.
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