Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/523

] that he lived in Europe in the Pleiocene age, after the land connecting Britain with Greenland had been submerged, and the Atlantic was united to the North Sea and the Arctic Ocean, because the living species of mammalia are so few. When the living species became abundant, he appears just in the Pleistocene stage in the evolution of mammalian life in which he might be expected to appear. The River-drift man first comes before us, endowed with all human attributes, and without any signs of a closer alliance with the lower animals than is presented by the savages of to-day; as a hunter, armed with rude stone implements, living not merely in Britain but throughout western and southern Europe, northern Africa, Asia Minor, and India. Next follows the Cave- man, possessed of better implements, and endowed with the faculty of representing animal forms with extraordinary fidelity, living in Europe north of the Alps and Pyrenees as far as Derbyshire, and probably belonging to the same race as the Eskimos. The disappearance of the Cave-man from Britain coincided with the geographical change by which it became an island, the change from a severe to a temperate climate, the extinction of some animals, and the retreat of others to northern and to southern regions. In the Prehistoric age the earliest of the present inhabitants arrived in Britain. The small, dark, non-Aryan peoples, who spread over France and Spain, brought with them into Britain the domestic animals and the cultivated plants and seeds, and laid the foundation of our present culture. The next invaders were the bronze-using Celtic tribes composing the van of the Aryan race. They crossed over from the Continent and introduced a higher civilisation than that of the Neolithic age. In the course of time