Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/63

 Monkeys, Apes and Sub-men 43 edge. These things have been called " Eoliths " (= dawn stones). In Europe there are no bones nor other remains of the creature which made these objects, simply the objects themselves. For all the cer- tainty we have it may have been some entirely un-human but intelli- gent monkey. But at Trinil in Java, in accumulations of this age a piece of a skull and various teeth and bones have been found of a sort of ape-man, with a brain case bigger than that of any living apes, which seems to have walked erect. This creature is now called Pithecan- thropus erectus, the walking ape-man, and the little trayful of its bones is the only help our imaginations have as yet in figuring to ourselves the makers of the Eoliths. It is not until we come to sands that are almost a quarter of a million years old that we find any other particle of a sub-human being. But there are plenty of implements, and they are steadily improving in quality as we read on through the record. They are no longer clumsy Eoliths ; they are now shapely instruments made with considerable skill. And they are much bigger than the similar implements afterwards made by true men. Then, in a sandpit at Heidelberg, appears a single quasi human jaw-bone, a clumsy jaw-bone, absolutely chinless, far heavier than a true human jaw- bone and narrower,' so that it is improbable the creature's tongue could have moved about for articulate speech. On the strength of this jaw-bone, scientific men suppose this creature to have been a heavy, almost human monster, possibly with huge limbs and hands, possibly with a thick felt of hair, and they call it the Heidelberg man. This jaw-bone is, I think, one of the most tormenting objects in the world to our human curiosity. To see it is like looking through a defective glass into the past and catching just one blurred and tantalizing glimpse of this Thing, shambling through the bleak NaL Hist. Mtcs. FLINT IMPLEMENTS FOUND IN PILTDOWN REGION