t does not lead us far perhaps, but it certainly acts
as a finger post in the inquiry, for Dr. Kollmann, rejecting the
evidence of the Java _Pithecanthropus erectus_ as the earliest
palaeontological evidence of man, advances the opinion that the direct
antecedents of man should not be sought among the species of
anthropoid apes of great height and with flat skulls, but much further
back in the zoological scale, in the small monkeys with pointed
skulls; from which, he believes, were developed the human pygmy races
of prehistoric ages with pointed skulls, and from these pygmy races
finally developed the human race of historic times. And he relies upon
folklore for one part of his evidence, for it is this descent of man,
he thinks, which explains the persistency with which mythology and
folklore allude to the subject of pygmy people, as well as the
relative frequency with which recently the fossils of small human
beings belonging to prehistoric times have been discovered.[329] It
must not be forgotten, too, that this remote period is found in
another class of tradition, namely, that to which Dr. Tylor refers as
containing the memory of the huge animals of the quaternary
period.[330]

It must be confessed that we do not get far with this evidence alone.
If it proves that the true starting point is to be found in folklore,
it also proves that folklore alone is not capable of working through
the problem. Anthropology must aid here, and I will suggest the lines
on which it appears to me it does this.

Our first effort must be made by the evidence suggested by the
conjectural method. This leads us to small human groups, each headed
by a male who drives out all other males and himself remains with his
females and his children. Sexual selection thus acts with primitive
economics[331] in keeping the earliest groups small in numbers, and
creating a spreading out from these groups of the males cast out. We
have male supremacy in its crudest form accompanied by an enforced
male celibacy, so far as the group in which the males are born is
concerned, on the part of those who survive the struggle for supremacy
and wander forth on their own account. Marking the stages from point
to point, in order to arrive at a systematic method of stating the
complex problem presented by the subject we are investigating, we can
project from this earliest condition of man's life two important
elements of social evolution, namely--

(a) Younger