§ 6. SOME FURTHER CONSEQUENCES OF THE HUNTING-LIFE
Between the remote age when our hypothetical ancestor became a hunter and the time to which probably belong the remains of the oldest known men, there lies a gap of (say) one (or two) and a half million years, concerning which we have not only no direct evidence but not even any parallel in the world by means of which to apply the comparative method. Just at the beginning, the parallel of the wolf-pack sheds some light upon our path; but the light soon grows faint; for the primitive human, from the first more intelligent than wolves, and inheriting from the ape-stock qualities of character which the new life greatly modified but could not extirpate, must under pressure of selection have become, after not many ages, an animal unlike any other. Just at the end, again, something concerning those who lived many thousand years before the beginning of history may be inferred from the parallel of existing savage customs; from their rock-dwellings, drawings, tools, weapons, hearths, something about their way of life; from evidence of their burial-customs, something of their beliefs. But what can be said of our ancestors during all those years that intervene between the beginning and the end?
Having been a hunter at the first and at the last, we may reasonably suppose that he had been so all the time. But, with our present knowledge, our chief guide as to other matters seems to be the fact that the most backward of existing savages possess powers of body and mind, and forms and products of culture, which must have been acquired gradually through a long course of development from no better origins than are traceable in apes and wolves. As the use of good stone weapons by living savages and the occurrence of stone weapons in deposits of various age in the Pleistocene—less and less perfectly made the further we go back—justify us in assuming that there must have been eoliths of even cruder workmanship at remoter dates, so the possession by savages of extensive languages, intricate customs, luxuriant myths, considerable reasoning powers and even humane sentiments, compel us to imagine such possessions as belonging to our prehistoric ancestors, in simpler and simpler forms, as we go back age by age toward the beginning. A tentative reconstruction of the lost series of events may sometimes be supported by what has been observed of the individual development of our children.