Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/97

] present apes are in the habit of making stone implements or of cutting bones, although they use stones for cracking nuts.

From the preceding pages the reader will have realised how different Europe of the Meiocene age was from the Europe of to-day; that the climate was much warmer, and that it was connected with Greenland, Spitzbergen, and North America; and that on the land so constituted, during the Eocene and Meiocene ages, luxuriant forests extended northwards far into the Polar regions. He will also have realised that, in the European part of this vast forest-covered continent, there was not one living species of mammal to be seen in the strange and varied fauna to herald the order of things that was to be, although there were many familiar trees and some reptiles, such as the alligator and crocodile. When all this is taken into account, it will be seen how improbable, nay, how impossible, it is that man, as we know him now, the highest and most specialised of all created forms, should have had a place in the Meiocene world. The evolution of the animal kingdom, recorded in the rocks, had at this time advanced as far as, but no farther than, the Quadrumana, and it seems to me not improbable that some of the extinct higher apes may have possessed qualities not now found in living members of their order.