es of time
vary from a hundred to five hundred thousand years. And before this
there is the vast stretch of time in which the ape slowly became a
primitive human.

This long, early period is, as we saw, still wrapped in mist and
controversy. A few bones tell of a race living, in semi-human shape, in
the region of the Indian Ocean; a few crude stones are held by many to
indicate that a more advanced, but very lowly race, wandered over the
south of Europe and north of Africa before the Ice-Age set in. The
starting-point or cradle of the race is not known. The old idea of
seeking the patriarchal home on the plains to the north of India is
abandoned, and there is some tendency to locate it in the land which has
partly survived in the islands of the Indian Ocean. The finding of early
remains in Java is not enough to justify that conclusion, but it obtains
a certain probability when we notice the geographical distribution of
the Primates. The femurs and the apes are found to-day in Africa and
Asia alone; the monkeys have spread eastward to America and westward to
Europe and Africa; the human race has spread north-eastward into Asia
and America, northwestward into Europe, westward into Africa, and
southward to Australia and the islands. This distribution suggests
a centre in the Indian Ocean, where there was much more land in the
Tertiary Era than there is now. We await further exploration in that
region and Africa.

There is nothing improbable in the supposition that man wandered into
Europe in the Tertiary, and has left in the Eoliths the memorials of his
lowly condition. The anthropoid apes certainly reached France. However
that may be, the Ice-Age would restrict all the Primates to the south.
It will be seen, on a glance at the map, that a line of ice-clad
mountains would set a stern barrier to man's advance in the early
Pleistocene, from the Pyrenees to the Himalaya, if not to the Pacific.
He therefore spread westward and southward. One branch wandered into
Australia, and was afterwards pressed by more advanced invaders (the
present blacks of Australia) into Tasmania, which seems to have been
still connected by land. Another branch, or branches, spread into
Africa, to be driven southward, or into the central forests, by later
and better equipped invaders. They survive, little changed (except by
recent contact with Europeans), in the Bushmen and in large populations
of Central Africa which are below the level of tribal o