ARKCODEX
On Prehistoric Man
In a sense it would be better if history were more superficial. What is wanted is a reminder of the things that are seen so quickly that they are forgotten almost as quickly. The one moral of this book, in a manner of speaking, is that first thoughts are best. So a flash might reveal a landscape; with the Eiffel Tower or the Matterhorn standing up in it as they would never stand up again in the light of common day. I ended the book with an image of everlasting lightning; in a very different sense, alas, this little flash has lasted only too long. But the method has also certain practical disadvantages upon which I think it well to add these two notes. It may seem to simplify too much and to ignore out of ignorance. I feel this especially in the passage about the prehistoric pictures; which is not concerned with all that the learned may learn from prehistoric pictures, but with the single point of what anybody could learn from there being any prehistoric pictures at all. I am conscious that this attempt to express it in terms of innocence may exaggerate even my own ignorance. Without any pretence of scientific research, I should be sorry to have it thought that I knew no more than I had occasion to say in that passage of the stages into which primitive humanity has been divided. I am aware, of course, that the story is elaborately stratified; and that there were many such stages before the Cro-Magnon or any peoples with whom we associate such pictures. Indeed recent studies about the Neanderthal and other races rather tend to repeat the moral that is here most relevant. The notion, noted in these pages, of something necessarily slow or late in the development of religion will gain little indeed from these later revelations about the precursors of the reindeer picture-maker. The learned appear to hold that, whether the reindeer picture could be religious or not, the people that lived before it were religious already. Men were already burying their dead with the care that is the significant sign of mystery and hope. This obviously brings us back to the same argument; an argument that is not approached by any measurement of the earlier man’s skull. It is little use to compare the head of the man with the head of the monkey, if it certainly has never come into the head of the monkey to bury another monkey with nuts in his grave to help him towards a heavenly monkey-house. Talking of skulls, we all know the story of the finding of a Cro-Magnon skull that is much larger and finer than a modern skull. It is a very funny story; because an eminent evolutionist, awakening to a somewhat belated caution, protested against anything being inferred from one specimen. It is the duty of a solitary skull to prove that our fathers were our inferiors. Any solitary skull presuming to prove that they were superior is felt to be suffering from swelled head.