 Chapter one of a short history of the world. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A short history of the world by H. G. Wells. Chapter one, the world in space. The story of our world is a story that is still very imperfectly known. A couple of hundred years ago, men possessed the history of little more than the last 3,000 years. What happened before that time was a matter of legend and speculation. Over a large part of the civilized world, it was believed and taught that the world had been created suddenly. In 404 BC, though authorities differed as to whether this had occurred in the spring or autumn of that year. This fantastically precise misconception was based upon a too literal interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and upon rather arbitrary theological assumptions connected therewith. Such ideas have long since been abandoned by religious teachers and it is universally recognized that the universe in which we live has to all appearances existed for an enormous period of time and possibly for endless time. Of course, there may be deception in these appearances as a room may be made to seem endless by putting mirrors facing each other at either end but that the universe in which we live has existed only for 6 or 7,000 years may be regarded as an altogether exploded idea. The Earth, as everybody knows nowadays, is a spheroid, a sphere, slightly compressed, orange fashion, with a diameter of nearly 8,000 miles. Its spherical shape has been known at least to a limited number of intelligent people for nearly 2,500 years. But before that time it was supposed to be flat and various ideas which now seem fantastic were entertained about its relation to the sky and the stars and planets. We know now that it rotates upon its axis which is about 24 miles shorter than its equatorial diameter every 24 hours and that this is the cause of the alternations of day and night that it circles about the sun in a slightly distorted and slowly variable oval path in a year. Its distance from the sun varies between 91 and a half millions at its nearest and 94 and a half million miles. About the Earth circles a smaller sphere, the moon, at an average distance of 239,000 miles. Earth and moon are not the only bodies to travel around the sun. There are also the planets Mercury and Venus at distances of 36 and 67 millions of miles and beyond the circle of the Earth and disregarding a belt of numerous smaller bodies, the planetoids. There are Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune at mean distances of 141, 483, 886, 1782 and 1793 millions of miles respectively. These figures and millions of miles are very difficult for the mind to grasp. It may help the reader's imagination if we reduce the sun and planets to a smaller, more conceivable scale. If then, we represent our Earth as a little ball of one inch diameter. The sun would be a big globe nine feet across and 323 yards away. That is about a fifth of the mile, four or five minutes walking. The moon would be a small pea two feet and a half from the world. Between Earth and Sun there would be the two inner planets Mercury and Venus at distances of 125 and 250 yards from the sun. All round and about these bodies there would be emptiness until you came to Mars, 175 feet beyond the Earth. Jupiter nearly a mile away, a foot in diameter. Saturn a little smaller, two miles off. Uranus four miles off and Neptune six miles off. Then nothingness and nothingness except for small particles and drifting scraps of attenuated vapor for thousands of miles. The nearest star to Earth on this scale would be 40,000 miles away. These figures will serve perhaps to give one some conception of the immense emptiness of space in which the drama of life goes on. For in all this enormous vacancy of space we know certainly of life only upon the surface of our Earth. It does not penetrate much more than three miles down into the 4,000 miles that separate us from the center of our globe and it does not reach more than five miles above its surface. Apparently all the limitlessness of space is otherwise empty and dead. The deepest ocean dredgings go down to five miles. The highest recorded flight of an airplane is little more than four miles. Men have reached the seven miles up in balloons, but at a cost of great suffering. No bird can fly so high as five miles and small birds and insects which have been carried up by airplanes drop off insensible far below that level. Chapter 2 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 2 The World in Time In the last 50 years there has been much very fine and interesting speculation on the part of scientific men upon the age and origin of our Earth. Here we cannot pretend to give even a summary of such speculations because they involve the most subtle mathematical and physical considerations. The truth is that the physical and astronomical sciences are still too undeveloped as yet to make anything of the sort more than an illustrative guesswork. The general tendency has been to make the estimated age of our globe longer and longer. It now seems probable that the Earth has had an independent existence on a spinning planet flying round and round the Sun for a longer period than two billion years. It may have been much longer than that. This is a length of time that absolutely overpowers the imagination. Before that, whilst period of separate existence, the Sun and Earth and other planets that circulate round the Sun may have been a great swirl of diffused matter in space. The telescope reveals to us in various parts of the heavens luminous spiral clouds of matter, the spiral nebulae, which appear to be in rotation about a center. It is supposed by many astronomers that the Sun and its planets were once such a spiral and that their matter has undergone concentration into its present form. Through majestic aeons that concentration went on in that vast remoteness of the past for which we have given figures, the world and its moon were distinguishable. They were spinning then much faster than they are spinning now. They were at a lesser distance from the Sun. They traveled round it very much faster and they were probably incandescent or molten on the surface. The Sun itself was a much greater place in the heavens. If we could go back through that infinitude of time and see the Earth in this earlier stage of its history, we should behold a steam more like the interior of a blast furnace or the surface of a lava flow before it cools and cakes over than any other contemporary steam. No water would be visible because all the water there was would still be a superheated steam in a stormy atmosphere of sulfurous and metallic vapors. Beneath this would swirl and boil an ocean of molten rock substance. Across the sky of fiery clouds the glare of the hurrying sun and moon would sweep swiftly like hot breath of flame. Slowly by degrees as one million of years followed another this fiery scene would lose its eruptive incandescence. The vapors in the sky would rain down and become less dense overhead. Great slaggy cakes of solidifying rock would appear upon the surface of the molten sea and sink under it to be replaced by other floating masses. The sun and moon growing now each more distant and each smaller would rush with diminishing swiftness across the heavens. The moon now, because of its smaller size, would be already cooled far below incandescence and would be alternately obstructing and reflecting the sunlight in a series of eclipses and full moons. And so with a tremendous slowness through the vastness of time the earth would grow more and more like the earth on which we live until at last an age would come when in the cooling air steam would begin to condense into clouds and the first rain would fall hissing upon the first rocks below. For endless millennia the greater part of the earth's water would still be vaporized in the atmosphere but there would now be hot streams running over the crystallizing rocks below and pools and lakes into which these streams would be carrying detritus and depositing sediment. At last a condition of things must have been attained in which a man might have stood up on earth and looked about him and lived. If we could have visited the earth at that time we should have stood on great lava-like masses of rock without a trace of soil or touch of living vegetation under a storm-ranned sky. Hot and violent winds exceeding the fiercest tornado that ever blows and dawn pours of rain such as our milder, slower earth today knows nothing of might have assailed us. The water of the downpour would have rushed by us muddy with the spoils of the rocks coming together into torrents cutting deep gorges and canyons as they hurried past to deposit their sediment in the earliest seas. Through the clouds we should have glimpsed a great sun moving visibly across the sky and in its wake and in the wake of the moon would have come a diurnal tide of earthquake and upheaval and the moon which nowadays keeps one constant face to earth would then have been rotating visibly and showing the side it now hides so inexorably. The earth aged one million years followed another and the day lengthened the sun grew more distant and milder the moon space in the sky slackened the intensity of rain and storm diminished and the water in the first seas increased and ran together into the ocean garment our planet henceforth wore but there was no life as yet upon the earth the seas were lifeless and the rocks were barren End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Chapter 3 The Beginnings of Life As everybody knows nowadays the knowledge we possess of life before the beginnings of human memory and tradition is derived from the markings and fossils of living things in the stratified rocks We find preserved in shale and slate limestone and sandstone bones, shells, fibers, stems, fruits, footmarks, scratchings and the like side by side with the ripple marks of the earliest tides and the pittings of the earliest rainfalls It is by the sedulous examination of this record of the rocks that the past history of the earth's life has been pieced together That much nearly everybody knows today The sedimentary rocks do not lie neatly stratum above stratum They have been crumpled, bent, thrust about, distorted and mixed together like the leaves of a library that has been repeatedly looted and burned And it is only as a result of many devoted lifetimes of work that the record has been put into order and read The whole compass of time represented by the record of the rocks is now estimated as one billion and six hundred million years The earliest rocks in the record are called by geologist the azoic rocks because they show no traces of life Great areas of these azoic rocks lie uncovered in North America and they are of such a thickness that geologists consider that they represent a period of at least half of the one billion and six hundred millions which they assign to the whole geological record Let me repeat this profoundly significant fact Half the great interval of time since land and sea were first distinguishable on earth has left us no traces of life There are riplings and rain marks still to be found in these rocks but no marks, no restages of any living thing As we come up the record signs of past life appear and increase The age of the world's history in which we find these past traces is called by geologists the lower paleozoic age The first indications that life was a stir are vestiges of comparatively simple and lowly things The shells of small shellfish the stems and flower-like heads of zoophytes seaweeds and the tracks and remains of sea worms and crustacea Very early appear certain creatures rather like plant lice crawling creatures which could roll themselves up into balls as the plant lice do the trilobites Later by a few million years or so come certain sea scorpions more mobile and powerful creatures than the world had ever seen before None of these creatures were of very great size Among the largest were certain of the sea scorpions which measured 9 feet in length There are no signs whatever of land life of any sort plant or animal There are no fishes nor any vertebrated creatures in this part of the record Essentially all the plants and creatures which have left us their traces from this period of the Earth's history are shallow water and intertidal beings If we wish to parallel the flora and fauna of the lower paleozoic rocks on the Earth today we should do it best except in the matter of size by taking a drop of water from a rock pool or scummy ditch and examining it under a microscope The little crustacea, the small shellfish the zoophytes and algae we should find there would display a quite striking resemblance to these clumsier larger prototypes that once were the crown of life upon our planet It is well, however, to bear in mind that the lower paleozoic rocks probably do not give us anything at all representative of the first beginnings of life on our planet Unless a creature has bones or other hard parts Unless it wears a shell or is big enough and heavy enough to make characteristic footprints and trails in mud it is unlikely to leave any fossilized traces of its existence behind Today there are hundreds of thousands of species of small, soft-bodied creatures in our world which it is inconceivable can ever leave any mark for future geologists to discover In the world's past millions and millions of species of such creatures may have lived and multiplied and flourished and passed away without a trace remaining The waters of the warm and shallow lakes and seas of the so-called azoic period may have teamed with an infinite variety of lowly, jelly-like, shellless and boneless creatures and the multitude of green scummy plants may have spread over the sunlit intertidal rocks and beaches The record of the rocks is no more a complete record of life in the past than the books of a bank are a record of the existence of everybody in the neighborhood It is only when a species begins to secrete a shell or a specula or a carapace or a lime-supported stem and so put by something for the future that it goes upon the record But in rocks of an age prior to those which bear any fossil traces graphite, a form of unconvent carbon is sometimes found and some authorities consider that it may have been separated out from combination through the vital activities of unknown living things End of chapter 3 Chapter 4 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Chapter 4 The Age of Fishes In the days when the world was supposed to have endured for only a few thousand years it was supposed that the different species of plants and animals were fixed and final They had all been created exactly as they are today each species by itself But as men began to discover and study the record of the rocks this belief gave place to the suspicion that many species had changed and developed slowly through the course of ages and this again expanded into a belief in what is called organic evolution I believe that all species of life upon Earth animal and vegetable alike are descended by slow continuous processes of change from some very simple ancestral form of life some almost structureless living substance far back in the so-called azoic seas This question of organic evolution like the question of the age of the Earth has in the past been the subject of much better controversy There was a time when a belief in organic evolution was for rather obscure reasons supposed to be incompatible with sound Christian Jewish or Muslim doctrine That time has passed and the men of the most orthodox Catholic Protestant Jewish and Muhammedan belief are now free to accept this newer and broader view of a common origin of all living things No life seems to have happened suddenly upon Earth Life grew and grows Age by age through gulfs of time at which imagination reels Life has been growing from a mere stirring in the intertidal slime towards freedom, power and consciousness Life consists of individuals These individuals are definite things They are not like the lumps of unmasks nor even the limitless and motionless crystals of non-living matter and they have two characteristics no dead matter possesses They can assimilate other matter into themselves and make it part of themselves and they can reproduce themselves They eat and they breed They can give rise to other individuals for the most part like themselves but always also a little different from themselves There's a specific and family resemblance between an individual and its offspring and there is an individual difference between every parent and every offspring it produces and this is true in every species and at every stage of life Now scientific men are not able to explain to us either why offspring should resemble or why they should differ from their parents But seeing that offspring do at once resemble and differ it is a matter rather of common sense than of scientific knowledge that if the conditions under which a species live are changed the species should undergo some correlated changes Because in any generation of the species there must be a number of individuals whose individual differences make them better adapted to the new conditions under which the species has to live and the number whose individuals whose individual differences make it rather harder for them to live and on the whole the former sort will live longer bear more offspring and reproduce themselves more abundantly than the latter and so generation by generation the average of the species will change in their favourable direction This process which is called natural selection is not so much a scientific theory as a necessary deduction from the facts of reproduction and individual difference There may be many forces at work varying destroying and preserving species about which science may still be unaware or undecided But the man who can deny the generation of this process of natural selection upon life since its beginning must be either ignorant of the elementary facts of life or incapable of ordinary thought Many scientific men have speculated about the first beginning of life and their speculations are often of great interest but there is absolutely no definite knowledge and no convincing guess yet of the way in which life began But nearly all authorities are agreed that it probably began upon mud or sand in warm, sunlit, shallow, brackish water and that it spread up the beaches to the intertidal lines and out to the open waters That early world was a world of strong tides and currents An incessant destruction of individuals must have been going on through there being swept up the beaches and dried or by there being swept out to sea and sinking down out of reach of air and sun Early conditions favoured the development of every tendency to root and hold on every tendency to form an outer skin and casing to protect the stranded individual from immediate desiccation From the very earliest any tendency to sensitiveness to taste would turn the individual in the direction of food and any sensitiveness to light would that assist it to struggle back out of the darkness of the sea-deep and caverns or to wriggle back out of the excessive glare of the dangerous shallows Probably the first shells and body armour of living things were protections against drying rather than against active enemies But tooth and claw come early into our earthly history We have already noted the size of the earlier water scorpions For long ages such creatures were the supreme lords of life Then in a division of these Paleozoic rocks called the Silurium Division which many geologists now suppose to be as old as 500 million years There appears a new type of being equipped with eyes and teeth and swimming powers of an altogether more powerful kind These were the first known backboneed animals the earliest fishes the first known vertebrata These fishes increased greatly in the next division of rocks the rocks known as the Devonian system They are so prevalent that this period of the record of the rocks has been called the Age of Fishes Fishes of a pattern now gone from the earth and fishes allied to the sharks and sturgeons of today rushed through the waters, leapt in the air browsed among the seaweeds pursued and preyed upon one another and gave a new liveliness to the waters of the world None of these very excessively big by our present standards Few of them were more than 2 or 3 feet long but there were exceptional forms which were as long as 20 feet We know nothing from geology of the ancestors of these fishes They do not appear to be related to any of the forms that preceded them Zoologists have the most interesting views of their ancestry but these they derive from the study of the development of the eggs of their still living relations and from other sources Apparently the ancestors of the vertebrata were soft bodied and perhaps quite small swimming creatures who began first to develop hard parts as teeth around and about their mouth The teeth of a skate or dogfish covers the roof and floor of its mouth and pass at the lip into the flattened tooth-like scales that encase most of its body As the fishes develop these teeth scales in the geological record they swim out of the hidden darkness of the past into the light the first vertebrated animals visible in the record End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells Chapter 5 The Age of the Coal Swamps The land during this age of fishes was apparently quite lifeless Crags and uplands of barren rock lay under the sun and rain There was no real soil, for as yet there were no earthworms which helped to make a soil and no plants to break up the rock particles into mold There was no trace of moss or lichen Life was still only in the sea Over this world of barren rock played great changes of climate The causes of these changes of climate were very complex and they have still to be properly estimated The changing shape of the earth's orbit the gradual shifting of the poles of rotation changes in the shapes of the continents Probably even fluctuation in the worms of the sun now conspired to plunge great areas of the earth's surface into long periods of cold and ice And now again, for millions of years spread a warm or equal climate over this planet There seem to have been phases of great internal activity in the world's history When in the course of a few million years the affected upthrusts would break out in lines of volcanic eruption and upheaval and rearrange the mountain and continental outlines of the globe increasing the depths of the sea and the heights of the mountains and exaggerating the extremes of climate And these would be followed by vast ages of comparative quiescence when frost, rain and river would wear down the mountain heights carry great masses of silt to fill and raise the sea bottoms and spread the seas ever shallower and wider over more and more of the land There have been high and deep ages in the world's history and low and level ages The reader must dismiss from his mind any idea that the surface of the earth has been growing steadily cooler since its crust grew solid After that much cooling had been achieved the internal temperature ceased to affect surface conditions There are traces of periods of superabundant ice and snow of glacial ages, that is, even in the azoic period It was only towards the close of the Age of Fishes in a period of extensive shallow seas and lagoons that life spread itself out in any effectual way from the waters on to the land No doubt the earlier types of the forms that now begin to appear in great abundance had already been developing in a rare and obscure manner for many scores of millions of years but now came their opportunity Plants, no doubt, preceded animal forms in this invasion of the land but the animals probably followed up the plant immigration very closely The first problem that the plant had to solve was the problem of some sustaining, stiff support to hold up its fronds to the sunlight when the buoyant water was withdrawn The second was the problem of getting water from the swampy ground below to the tissues of the plant Now that it was no longer close at hand The two problems were solved by the development of woody tissue which both sustained the plant and acted as water carrier to the leaves The record of the rocks is suddenly crowded by a vast variety of woody swamp plants many of them of great size big tree mosses, tree ferns gigantic horse tails and the like and with these age by age they're crawled out of the water a great variety of animal forms There were centipedes and millipedes There were the first primitive insects There were creatures related to the ancient king crabs and sea scorpions which became the earliest spiders and land scorpions and presently there were vertebrated animals Some of the earliest insects were very large There were dragonflies in this period with wings that spread out to 29 inches In various ways these new orders and genera had adapted themselves to breathing air Hiser too all animals had breathed air dissolved in water and that indeed is what all animals still have to do But now in diverse fashions the animal kingdom was acquiring the power of supplying its own moisture when it was needed A man with a perfectly dry lung would suffocate today His lung surfaces must be moist in order that air may pass through them into his blood The adaptation to air breathing consists in all cases either in the development of a cover to the old fashioned gills to stop evaporation or in the development of tubes or other new breathing organs lying deep inside the body and moistened by a watery secretion The old gills with which the ancestral fish of the vertebrated line had breathed were inadaptable to breathing upon land and in the case of this division of the animal kingdom it is the swimming bladder of the fish which becomes a new, deep-seated breathing organ the lung The kind of animals known as amphibia the frogs and nudes of today begin their lives in the water and breathe by gills and subsequently the lung developing in the same way as the swimming bladder of many fishes do as a bag-like outgrowth from the throat takes over the business of breathing The animal comes out on land and the gills dwindle and the gills slits disappear all except an outgrowth of one gill slit which becomes the passage of the ear and eardrum The animal can now live only in the air but it must return at least to the edge of the water to lay its eggs and reproduce its kind All the air-breathing vertebrata of this age of swamps and plants belonged to the class amphibia They were nearly all of them forms related to the nudes of today and some of them attained a considerable size They were land animals, it is true but they were land animals needing to live in and near moist and swampy places and all the great trees of this period were equally amphibious in their habits None of them had yet developed fruits and seeds of a kind that could fall on land and develop with the help only of such moisture as dew and rain could bring They all had to shed their spores in water It would seem if they were to germinate It is one of the most beautiful interests of that beautiful science comparative anatomy to trace the complex and wonderful adaptations of living things to the necessities of existence in air All living things, plants and animals alike are primarily water things For example, all the higher vertebrated animals above the fishes, up to and including man pass through a stage in their development in the egg or before birth in which they have gill slits which are obliterated before the young emerge The bear, water washed eye of the fish is protected in the higher forms from drying up by eyelids and glands which secrete moisture The weaker sound vibrations of air necessitate an eardrum In nearly every organ of the body similar modifications and adaptations are to be detected Similar patchings up to meet aerial conditions This carboniferous age this age of the amphibia was an age of life in the swamps and lagoons and on the low banks among these waters Thus far life had now extended The hills and high lands were still quite barren and lifeless Life had learned to breathe air indeed but it still had its roots in its native water it still had to return to the water to reproduce its kind End of chapter 5 Chapter 6 of a short history of the world by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Chapter 6 The Age of Reptiles The abundant life of the carboniferous period was succeeded by a vast cycle of dry and bitter ages They are represented in the record of the rocks by thick deposits of sandstones and the like in which fossils are comparatively few The temperature of the world fluctuated widely and there were long periods of glacial cold Over great areas the former profusion of swamp vegetation ceased and, overlaid by these newer deposits it began that process of compression and mineralization that gave the world most of the cold deposits of today But it is during periods of change that life undergoes its most rapid modifications and under hardship that it learns its hardest lessons As conditions revert towards warmth and moisture again we find a new series of animal and plant forms established We find in the record the remains of vertebrated animals that laid eggs which, instead of hatching out tadpoles which needed to live for a time in water carried on their development before hatching to a stage so nearly like the adult form that the young could live in air from the first moment of independent existence Gills had been cut out altogether and the gill slits only appeared as an embryonic phase These new creatures without a tadpole stage were the reptiles Concurrently there had been a development of seed-bearing trees which could spread their seed independently of swamp or lakes There were now palm-like sickads and many tropical conifers though as yet there were no flowering plants and no grasses There was a great number of ferns and there was now also an increased variety of insects There were beetles, though bees and butterflies had yet to come But all the fundamental forms of new real land fauna and flora had been laid down during these vast ages of severity This new land life needed only the opportunity of favorable conditions to flourish and prevail Age by age and with abundant fluctuations that mitigation came The still incalculable movements of the earth's crust the changes in its orbit the increase and diminution of the mutual inclination of orbit and pole worked together to produce a great spell of widely diffused warm conditions The period lost it all together, it is now supposed upwards of 200 million years It is called the Mesozoic period to distinguish it from the altogether vast paleozoic and azoic periods together 1400 millions that preceded it and from the Kainozoic or new life period that intervened between its close and the present time and it is also called the Age of Reptiles because of the astonishing predominance and variety of this form of life It came to an end some 80 million years ago In the world today the genera of reptiles are comparatively few and their distribution is very limited They are more various it is true than are the few surviving members of the order of the amphibia which once in the Carboniferous period ruled the world We still have the snakes, the turtles and tortoises the selonia, the alligators and crocodiles and the lizards Without exception they are creatures requiring warmth all the year round They cannot stand exposure to cold and it is probable that all the reptilian beings of the Mesozoic suffered under the same limitation It was a hothouse fauna living amidst a hothouse flora It endured no frost But the world had at least attained a real dry land fauna and flora as distinguished from the mud and swamp fauna and flora of the previous heyday of life upon earth All the sorts of reptile we know now were much more abundantly represented then Great turtles and tortoises, big crocodiles and many lizards and snakes But in addition there was a number of series of wonderful creatures that have now vanished altogether from the earth There was a vast variety of beings called the dinosaurs Vegetation was now spreading over the lower levels of the world Reeds, breaks of fern and the like and browsing upon this abundance came a multitude of herbivorous reptiles which increased in size as the Mesozoic period rose to its climax Some of these beasts exceeded in size any other land animals that have ever lived They were as large as whales The Diplodocus Carnegie, for example measured 84 feet from snout to tail The Gigantosaurus were even greater It measured 100 feet Living upon these monsters was a swarm of carnivorous dinosaurs of a corresponding size One of these, the Tyrannosaurus is figured and described in many books and the last word in reptilian frightfulness While these great creatures pastured and pursued amidst the fronds and evergreens of the Mesozoic jungles another now vanished tribe of reptiles with a bad like development of the forelimbs pursued insects and one another first leapt and parachuted and presently flew amidst the fronds and branches of the forest trees These were the Pterodactyls These were the first flying creatures with backbones They mark a new achievement in the growing powers of vertebrated life Moreover, some of the reptiles were returning to the sea waters Three groups of big swimming beings had invaded the sea from which their ancestors had come The Mososaurus, the Pleziosaurus and Ictiosaurus Some of these again approached the proportions of our present whales The Ictiosaurus seemed to have been quite sea-going creatures but the Pleziosaurs were a type of animal that has no cognate form today The body was stout and big with paddles adapted either for swimming or crawling through marshes or along the bottom of shallow waters The comparatively small head was poised on a vast snake of neck altogether outdoing the neck of the swan Either the Pleziosaur swam and searched for food under the water and fed as the swan will do or it lurked under water and snatched at passing fish or beast Such was the predominant land life throughout the Mesozoic age It was by our human standards and advance upon anything that had preceded it It had reduced land animals greater in size, range, power and activity more vital, as people say, than anything the world had seen before In the seas there had been no such advance but a great proliferation of new forms of life An enormous variety of squid-like creatures with chambered shells for the most part coiled had appeared in the shallow seas the Ammonites They had had predecessors in the Paleozoic seas but now was their age of glory Today they have left no survivors at all Their nearest relation is the pearly Nautilus, an inhabitant of tropical waters and a new and more prolific type of fish with lighter, finer scales than the plate-like and tooth-like coverings that had hitherto prevailed became and has since remained predominant in the seas and rivers End of chapter 6 Chapter 7 Of a short history of the world by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Chapter 7 The First Birds and the First Mammals In a few paragraphs a picture of the lush vegetation and swarming reptiles of that first great summer of life the Mesozoic period has been sketched but while the dinosaurs lorded it over the hot selvas and marshy plains and the pterodactyls filled the forests with their flutterings and possibly with shrieks and croakings as they pursued the humming insect life of the still, flowerless shrubs and trees some less conspicuous and less abundant forms upon the margins of this abounding life where acquiring certain powers and learning certain lessons of endurance that were to be of the utmost value to their race when at last the smiling generosity of sun and earth began to fade A group of tribes and genera of hopping reptiles small creatures of the dinosaur type seem to have been pushed by competition and the pursuit of their enemies towards the alternatives of extinction or adaptation to colder conditions in the higher hills or by the sea Among these distressed tribes there was developed a new type of scale scales that were elongated into quill-like forms and that presently branched into the crude beginnings of feathers These quill-like scales lay over one another and formed a heat retaining covering more efficient than any reptilian covering that had his or two existed So they permitted an invasion of colder regions that were otherwise uninhabited Perhaps simultaneously with these changes there arose in these creatures a greater solicitude for their eggs Most reptiles are apparently quite careless about their eggs which are left for sun and season to hatch But some of the varieties upon this new branch of the tree of life were acquiring a habit of guarding their eggs and keeping them warm with the warmth of their bodies With these adaptations to cold other internal modifications were going on that made these creatures the primitive birds warm-blooded and independent of basking The very earliest birds seem to have been seabirds living upon fish and their forelimbs were not wings but paddles rather, after the penguin type That peculiarly primitive bird, the New Zealand kiwi has feathers of a very simple sort and neither flies nor appears to be descended from flying ancestors In the development of the birds feathers came before wings But once the feather was developed the possibility of making a light spread of feathers led inevitably to the wing We know of the fossil remains of one bird at least which had reptilian teeth in its jaw and a long reptilian tail but which also had a true bird's wing and which certainly flew and held its own among the pterodactyls of the Mesozoic time Nevertheless birds were neither varied nor abundant in Mesozoic times If a man could go back to typical Mesozoic country he might walk for days and never see or hear such a thing as a bird though he would see a great abundance of pterodactyls and insects among the fronds and reeds and another thing he would probably never see and that would be any sign of a mammal Probably the first mammals were in existence millions of years before the first thing one could call a bird but they were altogether too small and obscure and remote for attention The earliest mammals like the earliest birds were creatures driven by competition and pursuit into a life of hardship and adaptation too cold With them also the scale became quill-like and was developed into a heat retaining covering and they too underwent modifications similar in kind though different in detail to become warm-blooded and independent of busking Instead of feathers they developed hairs and instead of guarding and incubating their eggs they kept them warm and safe by retaining them inside their bodies until they were almost mature Most of them became altogether viviferous and brought their young into the world alive and even after their young were born they tended to maintain a protective and nutritious association with them Most, but not all mammals today have mamaya and sacovel young Two mammals still live which lay eggs and which have not proper mamaya though they nourish their young by a nutritive secretion of the underskin These are the duck-billed platypus and the ahidna The ahidna lays leatherly eggs and then puts them into a pouch under its belly and so carries them about warm and safe until they hatch But just as a visitor to the mesozoic world might have searched for days and weeks before finding a bird So, unless he knew exactly where to go and look he might have searched in vain for any traces of a mammal Both birds and mammals would have seemed very eccentric and secondary and unimportant creatures in mesozoic times The age of reptiles lasted, it is now west, 80 million years Had any quasi-human intelligence been watching the world through that inconceivable length of time How safe and eternal the sunshine and abundance must have seemed How assured the valuing prosperity of the dinosaurs and the flapping abundance of the flying lizards And then the mysterious rhythms and accumulating forces of the universe began to turn against the quasi-eternal stability that run of luck for life was running out Age by age, myriad of years after myriad of years with halts, no doubt and retrogressions came a change towards hardship and extreme conditions came great alterations of level and great redistributions of mountain and sea We find one thing in the record of the rocks against the decadence of the long mesozoic age of prosperity that is very significant of steadily sustained changes of condition and that is a violent fluctuation of living forms and the appearance of new and strange species Under the gathering strife of extinction the older orders and Janira are displaying their utmost capacity for variation and adaptation The ammonites, for example, in these last pages of the mesozoic chapter exhibit a multitude of fantastic forms Under settled conditions there is no encouragement for novelties They do not develop, they are suppressed What is best adapted is already there Under novel conditions it is the ordinary types that suffer and the novelty that may have a better chance to survive and establish itself There comes a break in the record of the rocks that may represent several million years There is a veil here still over even the outline of the history of life When it lifts again the age of reptiles is at an end The dinosaurs, the plesiosores and ichtiosores the pterodactyls The innumerable Janira and species of ammonite have all gone absolutely In all their stupendous variety they have died out and left no descendants The cold has killed them All their final variations were insufficient They had never hit upon survival conditions The world had passed through a phase of extreme conditions beyond their powers of endurance A slow and complete massacre of Mesozoic life has occurred And we find now a new scene A new and hard-eared flora and a new and hard-eared fauna in possession of the world It is still a bleak and impoverished scene with which this new volume of the book of life begins The sickads and tropical conifers have given place very largely to trees that shed their leaves to avoid destruction by the snows of winter and to flowering plants and shrubs and where there was formerly a profusion of reptiles an increasing variety of birds and mammals is entering into their inheritance End of Chapter 7 Chapter 8 of a short history of the world by H.G. Wells This Librivox recording is in the public domain Chapter 8 The Age of Mammals The opening of the next great period in the life of the earth the Kainozoic period was a period of upheaval and extreme volcanic activity Now it was that the vast masses of the Alps and Himalayas and the mountain backbone of the Rockies and Andes were thrust up and that the rude outlines of our present oceans and continents appeared The map of the world begins to display a first dim resemblance to the map of today It is estimated now that between 40 and 80 million years have elapsed from the beginnings of the Kainozoic period to the present time At the outset of the Kainozoic period the climate of the world was austere It grew generally warmer until a fresh phase of great abundance was reached after which conditions grew hard again and the earth passed into a series of extremely cold cycles the glacial ages from which apparently it is now slowly emerging But we do not know sufficient of the causes of climatic change at present to forecast the possible fluctuations of climatic conditions that lie before us We may be moving towards increasing sunshine or lapsing towards another glacial age Volcanic activity and the upheaval of mountain masses may be increasing or diminishing We do not know We lack sufficient science With the opening of this period the grasses appear For the first time there is pasture in the world and with the full development of the once obscure mammalian type appear a number of interesting grazing animals and of carnivorous types which prey upon these At first these early mammals seem to differ in a few characters from the great herbivorous and carnivorous reptiles that ages before had flourished and then vanished from the earth A careless observer might suppose that in this second long age of warmth and plenty that was now beginning nature was merely repeating the first with herbivorous and carnivorous mammals to parallel the herbivorous and carnivorous dinosaurs with birds replacing pterodactyls and so on But this would be an altogether superficial comparison The variety of the universe is infinite and incessant It progresses eternally History never repeats itself and no parallels are precisely true The differences between the life of the Kainozoic and Mesozoic periods are far profounder than the resemblances The most fundamental of all these differences lies in the mental life of the two periods It arises essentially out of the continuing contact of parent and offspring which distinguishes mammalian and in a lesser degree bird life from the life of the reptile With very few exceptions the reptile abandons its egg to hatch alone The young reptile has no knowledge whatever of its parent Its mental life, such as it is begins and ends with its own experiences It may tolerate the existence of its fellows but it has no communication with them It never imitates, never learns from them is incapable of concerted action with them Its life is that of an isolated individual What was the suckling and cherishing of young which was distinctive of the new mammalian and avian strains arose the possibility of learning by imitation, of communication by warning cries and other concerted action of mutual control and instruction A teachable type of life had come into the world The earliest mammals of the Kainozoic period are but little superior in brain size to the more active carnivorous dinosaurs But as we read on through the record towards modern times we find in every tribe and race of the mammalian animals a steady universal increase in brain capacity For instance, we find at a comparatively early stage that rhinoceros-like beasts appear There is a creature, the Titanosterium which lived in the earliest division of this period It was probably very like a modern rhinoceros in its habits and needs but its brain capacity was not one-tenth that of its living successor The earlier mammals probably parted from their offspring as soon as suckling was over But once the capacity for mutual understanding has arisen, the advantages of continuing the association are very great And we presently find a number of mammalian species displaying the beginnings of a true social life and keeping together in herds, packs and flocks watching each other, imitating each other taking warning from each other's acts and cries This is something that the world had not seen before among vertebrated animals Reptiles and fish may no doubt be found in swarms and shawls They have been hatched in quantities and similar conditions have kept them together But in the case of the social and gregarious mammals the association arises not simply from a community of external forces It is sustained by an inner impulse They are not merely like one another and so found in the same places at the same times They like one another and so they keep together This difference between the reptile world and the world of our human minds is one our sympathies seem unable to pass We cannot conceive in ourselves the swift uncomplicated urgency of a reptile's instinctive motives its appetites, fears and hates We cannot understand them in their simplicity because all our motives are complicated Ours are balances and resultants and not simple urgencies But the mammals and birds have self-restraint and consideration for other individuals a social appeal, a self-control that is at its lower level, after our own fashion We can in consequence establish relations with almost all sorts of them When they suffer, they utter cries and make movements that browse our feelings We can make understanding pets of them with a mutual recognition They can be tamed to self-restraint towards us, domesticated and taught That unusual growth of brain which is the central fact of kinozoic times marks a new communication and interdependence of individuals It foreshadows the development of human societies of which we shall soon be telling As the kinozoic period unrolled the resemblance of its flora and fauna to the plants and animals that inhabit the world today increased The big, clumsy, ointed theories and titanal theories the entelodons and herocodons big, clumsy brutes like nothing living disappeared On the other hand a series of forms led up by steady degrees from grotesque and clumsy predecessors to the giraffeies, camels, horses elephants, deer, dogs and lions and tigers of the existing world The evolution of the horse is particularly legible upon the geological record We have a fairly complete series of forms from a small, tapir-like ancestor in the early kinozoic Another line of development that has now been pieced together with some precision is that of the llamas and camels End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 of a short history of the world by H. G. Wells This Librivox recording is in the public domain Chapter 9 Monkeys, apes and submen Naturalists divide the class Mamalia into a number of orders At the head of these is the order primates which includes the lemurs, the monkeys, apes and men Their classification was based originally upon anatomical resemblances and took no account of any mental qualities Now the past history of the primates is one very difficult to decipher in the geological record They are for the most part animals which live in forests like the lemurs and monkeys or in bare rocky places like the baboons They are rarely drowned covered up by sediment nor are most of them very numerous species and so they do not figure so largely among the fossils as the ancestors of the horses, camels and so forth do But we know that quite early in the Kinozoic period that is to say some 40 million years ago or so primitive monkeys and lemuroid creatures had appeared poorer in brain and not so specialized as their later successors The great world summer of the Middle Kinozoic period drew at last to an end It was to follow those other two great summers in the history of life the summer of the coal swamps and the vast summer of the age of reptiles Once more the earth spun towards an ice age The world chilled grew milder for a time and chilled again In the warm past hippopotamia had wallowed through a lush sub-tropical vegetation and a tremendous tiger with fangs like sabers the sabre-toothed tiger had hunted its prey where now the journalists of Fleet Street go to and throw Now came a bleaker age and still bleaker ages A great weeding and extinction of species occurred A woolly rhinoceros adapted to a cold climate and the mammoth a big woolly cousin of the elephants the arctic musk ox and the reindeer passed across the scene Then century by century the arctic icecap the wintry des of the great ice age crept southward In England it came almost down to the Thames In America it reached Ohio There would be warmer spells of a few thousand years and relapses towards a bitterer cold Geologists talk of these wintry phases as the first, second, third and fourth glacial ages and of the interludes as interglacial periods We live today in a world that is still impoverished and scarred by that terrible winter The first glacial age was coming on 600,000 years ago The fourth glacial age reached its bitterest some 50,000 years ago and it was amidst the snows of this long universal winter that the first man-like beings lived upon our planet By the Middle Kinozoic period there have appeared various apes with many quasi-human attributes of the jaws and leg bones But it is only as we approach these glacial ages that we find traces of creatures that we can speak of as almost human These traces are not bones but implements In Europe, in deposits of this period between half a million and a million years old we find flints and stones that have evidently been chipped intentionally by our handy creature, desirous of hammering scraping or fighting with the sharpened edge These things have been called eolith dawn stones In Europe, there are no bones nor other remains of the creature which made these objects simply the objects themselves For all the certainty we have it may have been some entirely unhuman but intelligent monkey But at Trinil in Java in accumulations of this age a piece of a skull and various teeth and bones have been found of a sort of ape-man with a brain-case bigger than that of any living apes which seems to have walked erect This creature is now called pitecantropus erectus the walking ape-man and the little trifle of its bones is the only help our imagination have as yet in figuring to ourselves the makers of the eolith It is not until we come to sands that there are almost a quarter of a million years old that we find any other particle of a sub-human being But there are plenty of implements and they are steadily improving in quality as we read on through the record They are no longer clumsy eolith They are now shapely instruments made with considerable skill and they are much bigger than the similar implements afterwards made by a true man Then in a sand-pit at Heidelberg appears a single quasi-human jawbone a clumsy jawbone absolutely chinless far heavier than a true human jawbone and narrower so that it is improbable the creature's tongue have moved about for articulate speech On the strength of this jawbone scientific men suppose this creature to have been a heavy almost human monster possibly with huge limbs and hands possibly with a thick felt of hair and they call it the Heidelberg man This jawbone is, I think, one of the most tormenting objects in the world to our human curiosity To see it is like looking through a defective glass into the past and catching just one, blurred and tantalizing glimpse of this thing shambling through the bleak wilderness clumbering to avoid the saber-toothed tiger watching the woolly rhinoceros in the woods Then before we can scrutinize the monster he vanishes yet the soil is littered abundantly with the indestructible implements he chipped out for his uses Still more fascinatingly, enigmatic are the remains of a creature found at Piltdown in Sussex in a deposit that may indicate an age between 100 and 150,000 years ago Though some authorities would put these particular remains back in time to before the Heidelberg jawbone Here there are remains of a thick subhuman skull much larger than any existing apes and a chimpanzee-like jawbone which may or may not belong to it And in addition, a bat-shaped piece of elephant bone evidently carefully manufactured through which a hole had apparently been bored There's also the thigh bone of a deer which cuts upon it like a tally That is all What sort of beast was this creature which sat and bored holes in bones? Scientific men have named him Aeonsropus the dawn man He stands apart from his kindred a very different being either from the Heidelberg creature or from any living ape No other vestige like him is known but the gravels and deposits of from 100,000 years onward are increasingly rich in implements of flint and similar stone And these implements are no longer rude aeolists Their archaeologists are presently able to distinguish scrapers, borders, knives, darts throwing stones and hand axes We are drawing very near to man In our next section we shall have to describe the strangest of all these precursors of humanity the Neanderthalers the man who were almost but not quite true men But it may be well perhaps to state quite clearly here that no scientific man supposes either of these creatures the Heidelberg man or Aeonsropus to be direct ancestors of the men of today These are at the closest related forms End of Chapter 9 Chapter 10 of a short history of the world by H. G. Wells This Librivox recording is in the public domain Chapter 10 The Neanderthalers and the Rhodesian Man About 50 or 60,000 years ago before the climax of the fourth glacial age there lived a creature on earth so like a man that until a few years ago its remains were considered to be altogether human We have skulls and bones of it and a great accumulation of the large implements it made unused It made fires It sheltered in caves from the cold It probably dressed skins roughly and wore them It was right-handed as men are Yet now the ethnologists tell us these creatures were not true men They were of a different species of the same genus They had heavy protruding jaws and great brow ridges above the eyes and very low foreheads Their thumbs were not opposable to the fingers as men are Their necks were so poised that they could not turn back their heads and look up to the sky They probably slouched along, head down and forward Their chinless jaw bones resemble the Heidelberg jaw bone and are markedly unlike human jaw bones and there were great differences from the human pattern in their teeth Their cheek teeth were more complicated in structures and hours more complicated and not less so They had not the long fangs of our cheek teeth and also these quasi-men had not the marked canines dock teeth of an ordinary human being The capacity of their skulls was quite human but the brain was bigger behind and lower in front than the human brain Their intellectual faculties were differently arranged They were not ancestral to the human line Mentally and physically they were upon a different line from the human line Skulls and bones of this extinct species of men were found at Neanderthal, among other places and from that place these strange proto-men have been christened Neanderthal men or Neanderthalers They must have endured in Europe for many hundreds or even thousands of years At that time the climate and geography of our world was very different from what they are at the present time Europe, for example, was covered with ice reaching as far south as the Thames and into central Germany and Russia There was no channel separating Britain from France The Mediterranean and the Red Sea were great valleys which perhaps a chain of lakes in their deeper portions and a great inland sea spread from the present Black Sea across south Russia and far into Central Asia Spain and all of Europe not actually under ice consisted of bleak uplands under a harder climate than that of Labrador and it was only when North Africa was reached that one would have found a temperate climate Across the cold steppes of southern Europe with its sparse arctic vegetation drifted such hardy creatures as the woolly mammoth woolly rhinoceros, great oxen and reindeer no doubt following the vegetation northward in spring and southward in autumn Such was the scene through which the Neanderthaler wandered, gathering such substance as he could from small game or fruits and berries and roots Possibly he was mainly a vegetarian chewing twigs and roots These level elaborate teeth that just a largely vegetarian dietary But we also find the long marrow bones of great animals in his caves cracked to extract the marrow His weapons could not have been of much avail in open conflict with great beasts but it is supposed that he attacked them with spears at difficult river crossings and even constructed pitfalls for them Possibly he followed the herds and prayed upon any dead that were killed in fights and perhaps he played the part of jackal to the sabre-toothed tiger which still survived in his day Possibly in the bitter hardships of the glacial ages this creature had taken to attacking animals after long ages of vegetarian adaptation We cannot guess what this Neanderthal man looked like He may have been very hairy and very unhuman looking indeed It is even doubtful if he went erect He may have used his knuckles as well as his feet to hold himself up Probably he went about alone or in small family groups It is inferred from the structure of his jaw that he was incapable of speech as we understand it For thousands of years these Neanderthalers were the highest animals that the European area had ever seen And then, some 30 or 35 thousand years ago as the climate grew warmer a race of kindred beings more intelligent, knowing more talking and cooperating together came drifting into the Neanderthalers world from the south They ousted the Neanderthalers from their caves and squatting places They hunted the same food They probably made war upon their grisly predecessors and killed them off These newcomers from the south or the east for at present we do not know their region of origin who at last drew the Neanderthalers out of existence altogether were beings of our own blood and kin the first two men Their brain cases and thumbs and necks and teeth were anatomically the same as our own In a cave at Chroma Neune and in another at Grimaldi a number of skeletons have been found the earliest truly human remains that are so far known So it is our race comes into the record of the rocks and the story of mankind begins The world was growing like our own in those days though the climate was still austere The glaciers of the Ice Age were receding in Europe The reindeer of France and Spain presently gave way to great herds of horses as grass increased upon the steps and the mammoths became more and more rare in southern Europe and finally receded northward altogether We do not know where the true men first originated But in the summer of 1921 an extremely interesting skull was found together with pieces of a skeleton at Broken Hill in South Africa which seems to be a relic of a third sort of man intermediate in its characteristics between the Neanderthaler and the human being The brain case indicates a brain bigger in front and smaller behind than the Neanderthalers and the skull was poised erect upon the backbone in a quite human way The teeth also and the bones are quite human But the face must have been ape-like with enormous brorriages and a ridge along the middle of the skull The creature was indeed a true man so to speak with an ape-like Neanderthaler face This Rhodesian man is evidently still closer to real men than the Neanderthal man This Rhodesian skull is probably only the second of what in the end may prove to be a long list of finds of sub-human species which lived on the earth in the vast interval of time between the beginnings of the Ice Age and the appearance of their common heir and perhaps their common exterminator the true man The Rhodesian skull itself may not be very ancient Up to the time of publishing this book there has been no exact determination of its probable age It may be that this sub-human creature survived in South Africa until quite recent times The earliest science and traces at present known to science of a humanity which is indisputably kindred with ourselves have been found in Western Europe and particularly in France and Spain Bones, weapons, scratchings upon bone and rock carved fragments of bone and paintings in caves and upon rock surfaces dating it is supposed from 30,000 years ago or more have been discovered in both these countries Spain is at present the richest country in the world in these first relics of our real human ancestors Of course our present collections of these things are the nearest beginnings of the accumulations we may hope for in the future when there are searchers enough to make a thorough examination of all possible sources and when other countries in the world now inaccessible to archaeologists have been explored in some detail The greater part of Africa and Asia has never even been traversed yet by a trained observer interested in these matters and free to explore and we must be very careful therefore not to conclude that the early true men were distinctively inhabitants of Western Europe or that they first appeared in that region In Asia or Africa or submerged beneath the sea of today there may be richer and much earlier deposits of real human remains than anything that has yet come to the light I've write in Asia or Africa and I do not mention America because so far there have been no finds at all of any of the higher primates either of great apes, submen Neanderthalers, nor early true men This development of life seems to have been an exclusively old world development and it was only apparently at the end of the old stone age that human beings first made their way across the land connection and it is now cut by bearing straits into the American continent These first real human beings we know of in Europe appear already to have belonged to one or other of at least two very distinct races One of these races was of a very high type indeed it was tall and big brained One of the women's skulls found exceeds in capacity that of the average man of today One of the men's skeletons is over six feet in height The physical type resembled that of the North American Indian From the Chromagnon cave in which the first skeletons were found these people have been called Chromagnards They were savages, but savages of a high order The second race, the race of the Grimaldi cave remains was distinctly negroid in its characters Its nearest living affinities are the bushmen and hotentots of South Africa It is interesting to find at the very outset of the known human story that mankind was already racially divided into at least two main varieties and one is tempted to such unwarrantable guesses as that the former race was probably brownish rather than black and that it came from the east or north and that the latter was blackish rather than brown and came from the equatorial south And these savages of perhaps 40,000 years ago were so human that they pierced shells to make necklaces painted themselves carved images of bone and stone scratched figures on rocks and bones and painted rude but often very able sketches of beasts and the like upon the smooth walls of caves and upon inviting rock surfaces They made a great variety of implements much smaller in scale and finer than those of the Neanderthaler men We have now in our museums great quantities of their implements their statuettes, their rock drawings and the like The earliest of them were hunters Their chief pursuit was the wild horse the little bearded pony of that time They followed it as it moved after pasture and also they followed the basin They knew the mammoths because they have left as strikingly effective pictures of that creature To judge by one rather ambiguous drawing they trapped and killed it They hunted with spears and throwing stones They do not seem to have had the bow and it is doubtful if they had yet learned to tame any animals They had no dogs There's one carving of a horse's head and one or two drawings that suggest a bridled horse with a twisted skin or tendon round it But the little horses of that age and region could not have carried a man And if the horse was domesticated it was used as a lead horse It is doubtful and improbable that they had yet learned the rather unnatural use of animals' milk as food They do not seem to have erected any buildings though they may have had tents of skins and though they made clay figures they never rose to the making of pottery Since they had no cooking implements their cookery must have been rudimentary or non-existent They knew nothing of cultivation and nothing of any sort of basket work or woven clothes Except for their robes of skin or fur they were naked painted savages These earliest known men hunted the open steppes of Europe for a hundred centuries perhaps and then slowly drifted and changed for a change of climate Europe, century by century was growing milder and damper Reindeer receded northward and eastward and bison and horse followed The steppes gave way to forests and red deer took the place of horse and bison There is a change in the character of the implements with this change of their application River and lake fishing becomes of great importance to men and fine implements of bone increased The bone needles of this age, says de Mortilet are much superior to those of later even historical times, down to the Renaissance The Romans for example never had needles comparable to those of this epoch Almost fifteen or twelve thousand years ago a fresh people drifted into the south of Spain and left very remarkable drawings of themselves upon exposed rock faces there These were the Assylians named from the Mas d'Azil Cave They had the bow they seemed to have worn feather headresses they drew vividly but also they had reduced their drawings to a sort of symbolism A man for instance would be represented by a vertical dab with two or three horizontal dabs That suggests the dawn of the writing idea Against hunting sketches there are often marks like tallies One drawing shows two men smoking out a bee's nest These are the latest of the men that we call paleolithic, old stone age because they had only chipped implements By ten or twelve thousand years a new sort of life has dawned in Europe Men have learned not only to chip but to polish and grind stone implements and they have begun cultivation The neolithic age, new stone age, was beginning It is interesting to note that less than a century ago they're still survived in a remote part of the world In Tasmania, a race of human beings at a lower level of physical and intellectual development than any of these earliest races of mankind who have left traces in Europe These people had long ago been cut off by geographical changes from the rest of the species and from stimulation and improvement They seem to have degenerated rather than developed They lived a base life subsisting upon shellfish and small game They had no habitations but only squatting places They were real men of our species but they had neither the manual dexterity nor the artistic powers of the first true men End of Chapter 11 And now let us indulge in a very interesting speculation How did it feel to be a man in those early days of the human adventure? How did men think What did they think in those remote days of hunting and wandering 400 centuries ago before seed time and harvest began? Those were days long before the written record of any human impressions and we are left almost entirely to inference and guesswork in our answers to these questions The sources to which scientific men have gone in their attempts to reconstruct that primitive mentality are very various Recently the science of psychoanalysis which analyzes the way in which the egoistic and passionate impulses of the child are restrained, suppressed, modified or overlaid to adapt them to the needs of social life seems to have thrown a considerable amount of light upon the history of primitive society and another fruitful source of suggestion has been the study of the ideas and customs of such contemporary savages as still survive Again, there is a sort of mental fossilization which we find in folklore and the deep lying irrational superstitions and prejudices that still survive among modern civilized people And finally, we have in the increasingly numerous pictures statues, carvings, symbols and the like as we draw near to our time clearer and clearer indications of what man found interesting and worthy of record and representation Primitive man probably thought very much as a child thinks that is to say in a series of imaginative pictures He conjured up images or images presented themselves to his mind and he acted in accordance with the emotions they aroused So a child or an uneducated person does today Systematic thinking is apparently a comparatively late development in human experience It has not played any great part in human life until within the last 3,000 years And even today those who really control and order their thoughts are but a small minority of mankind Most of the world still lives by imagination and passion Probably the earliest human societies in the opening stages of the true human story were small family groups Just as the flocks and herds of the earlier mammals arose out of families which remained together and multiplied So probably did the earliest tribes But before this could happen a certain restraint upon the primitive egotisms of the individual had to be established The fear of the father and respect for the mother had to be extended into adult life and the natural jealousy of the old man of the group for younger males as they grew up had to be mitigated The mother on the other hand was the natural advisor and protector of the young Human social life grew up out of the reaction between the crude instinct of the young to go off and pair by themselves as they grew up On the one hand and the dangers and disadvantages of separation on the other An anthropological writer of great genius Gigi Atkinson in his primal law has shown how much of the customary law of savages the taboos that are so remarkable a fact in tribal life can be ascribed to such a mental adjustment of the needs of the primitive human animal to a developing social life and the later work of the psychoanalyst has done much to confirm his interpretation of these possibilities Some speculative writers would have us believe that respect and fear for the old man and the emotional reaction of the primitive savage to all their protective women exaggerated in dreams and enriched by fanciful mental play played a large part in the beginnings of primitive religion and in the conception of gods and goddesses Associated with their respect for powerful or helpful personalities was a dread and exaltation of such personages after their death due to their reappearance in dreams It was easy to believe they were not truly dead but only fantastically transferred to a remoteness of greater power The dreams, imaginations and fears of a child are far more vivid and real than those of a modern adult and primitive man was always something of a child He was never to the animals also and he could suppose them to have motives and reactions like his own He could imagine animal helpers animal enemies, animal gods One needs to have been an imaginative child oneself to realize again how important, significant, potentious or friendly, strangely shaped rocks lumps of wood, exceptional trees or the like may have appeared to the men of the old stone age and how dream and fancy would create stories and legends about such things that would become credible as they told them Some of these stories would be good enough to remember and tell again The woman would tell them to the children and so establish a tradition To this day, most imaginative children invent long stories in which some favorite doll or animal or some fantastic semi-human being figures as the hero and primitive man probably did the same with a much stronger disposition to believe his hero real For the very earliest of the true men that we know of were probably quite talkative beings In that way they have differed from the Neanderthalers and had an advantage over them The Neanderthaler may have been a dumb animal Of course, the primitive human speech was probably a very scanty collection of names that may have been eked out with gestures and signs There is no sort of savage so low as not to have a kind of science of cause and effect But primitive man was not very critical in his associations of cause with effect He very easily connected an effect with something quite wrong as its cause You do so and so, he said and so and so happens If a child a poisonous berry and it dies you eat the heart of a valiant enemy and you become strong There we have two bits of cause and effect association one true, one false We call the system of cause and effect in the mind of a savage fetish But fetish is simply savage science It differs from modern science in that it is totally unsystematic and uncritical and so more frequently wrong In many cases it is not difficult to link cause and effect In many others erroneous ideas were soon corrected by experience But there was a large series of issues of very great importance to primitive man where he sought persistently for causes and found explanations that were wrong but not sufficiently wrong nor so obviously wrong as to be detected It was a matter of great importance to him that game should be abundant or fish plentiful and easily caught and no doubt he tried and believed in a thousand charms incantations and omens to determine these desirable results Another great concern of his was illness and death Occasionally infections crept through the land and men died of them Occasionally men were stricken by illness and died or were enfeebled without any manifest cause This too must have given the hasty emotional mind of primitive man much feverish exercise Dreams and fantastic guesses made him blame this or appeal for help to that man or beast or thing He had the child's aptitude for fear and panic Quite early in the little human tribe older, steadier minds sharing the fears sharing the imaginations but a little more forceful than the others must have asserted themselves to advise, to prescribe, to command This they declared unpropitious and that imperative this an omen of good and that an omen of evil The expert in fetish, the medicine man was the first priest He exhorted, he interpreted deems He warned, he performed the complicated hocus pocus that brought luck or averted calamity Primitive religion was not so much what we now call religion as practice and observance and the early priest dictated what was indeed an arbitrary primitive practical science End of Chapter 12 Chapter 13 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Chapter 13 The Beginnings of Cultivation We are still very ignorant about the beginnings of cultivation and settlement in the world although a vast amount of research and speculation has been given to these matters in the last 50 years All that we can say with any confidence at present is that someone about 15,000 and 12,000 BC while the Assyrian people were in the south of Spain and while the remnants of the earlier hunters were drifting northward and eastward somewhere in North Africa or western Asia or in that great Mediterranean valley that is now submerged under the waters of the Mediterranean Sea There were people who, age by age were working out two vitally important things They were beginning cultivation and they were domesticating animals They were also beginning to make in addition to the chipped implements of their hunter forebears implements of polished stone They had discovered the possibility of basket work and roughly woven textiles of plant fiber and they were beginning to make a rudely modeled pottery They were entering upon a new phase in human culture the Neolithic phase, new stone age as distinguished from the Paleolithic, old stone phase of the Cromanyards, the Grimaldi people the Assyrians and their like Slowly those Neolithic people spread over the warmer parts of the world and the arts they had mastered the plants and animals they had learned to use spread by imitation and acquisition even more widely than they did By 10 South and B.C. most of mankind was at the Neolithic level Now the ploughing of land the sowing of seed, the reaping of harvest threshing and grinding seemed the most obviously reasonable steps to a modern mind Just as to a modern mind it is a common place that the world is round What else could you do, people will ask What else can it be? But to the primitive man of 20,000 years ago neither of the systems of action and reasoning that seemed so sure and manifest to us today were at all obvious He felt his way to effectual practice through a multitude of trials and misconceptions with fantastic and unnecessary elaborations and false interpretations at every turn Somewhere in the Mediterranean region wheat grew wild and man may have learned to pound and then grind up its seeds for food long before he learned to sow he reaped before he sowed and it is a very remarkable thing that throughout the world whenever there is sowing and harvesting there is still traceable the vestiges of a strong primitive association of the idea of sowing with the idea of a blood sacrifice and primarily of the sacrifice of a human being The study of the original entanglement of these two things is a profoundly attractive one The interested reader will find it very fully developed in that monumental work It was an entanglement, we must remember in the childish, dreaming, myth-making primitive mind No reason process will explain it But in that world of 12,000 to 20,000 years ago it would seem that whenever seed time came round to the Neolithic peoples there was a human sacrifice and it was not the sacrifice of any mean or outcast person it was the sacrifice usually of a chosen youth or maiden a youth, more often who was treated with profound deference and even worship up to the moment of his emulation He was a sort of sacrificial god king and all the details of his killing had become a ritual directed by the old knowing men and sanctioned by the accumulated usage of ages At first primitive men with only a very rough idea of the seasons must have found great difficulty in determining when was the propitious moment for the seed time sacrifice and the sowing There is some reason for supposing that there was an early stage in human experience when men had no idea of a year The first chronology was in lunar month It is supposed that the years of the biblical patriarchs are really moons and the Babylonian calendar shows distinct traces of an attempt to reconceive time by taking 13 lunar months to see it round This lunar influence upon the calendar reaches down to our own days If usage did not dull our sense of its strangeness we should think it a very remarkable thing indeed that the Christian church does not commemorate the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ on the proper anniversaries but on dates that vary year by year with the phases of the moon It may be doubted whether the first agriculturalists made any observation of the stars It is more likely that stars were first observed by migratory herdsmen who found them a convenient mark of direction But once their use in determining seasons was realized their importance to agriculture became very great The seed time sacrifice was linked up with the southing or northing of some prominent star A myth and worship of that star was for primitive men almost inevitable consequence It is easy to see how important the man of knowledge and experience, the man who knew about the blood sacrifice and the stars, became in this early neolithic world The fear of uncleanness and pollution and the methods of cleansing that were advisable constituted another source of power for the knowledgeable men and women for there have always been witches as well as wizards and priestesses as well as priests The early priest was really not as much a religious man as a man of applied science His science was generally empirical and often bad He kept its secret from the generality of men very jealously but that does not alter the fact that his primary function was knowledge and that his primary use was a practical use 12 or 15 thousand years ago in all the warm and fairly well watered parts of the old world these neolithic human communities with their class and tradition of priests and priestesses and their cultivated fields and their development of villages and little-walled cities were spreading Age by age a drift and exchange of ideas went on between these communities Eliot Smith and Rivers have used the term Heliolithic culture for the culture of these first agricultural peoples Heliolithic, sun and stone is not perhaps the best possible word to use for this but until scientific men give us a better one we shall have to use it Originating somewhere in the Mediterranean and western Asiatic area it spread age by age eastward and from island to island across the Pacific until it may even have reached America and mingled with the more primitive ways of living of the Mongoloid immigrants coming down from the north wherever the brownish people with the Heliolithic culture went they took with them all or most of a certain group of curious ideas and practices some of them are such queer ideas that they call for the explanation of the mental expert they made pyramids and great mounds and set up great circles of big stones perhaps to facilitate the astronomical observation of the priests they made mummies of some or all of their dead they tattooed and circumcised they had the old custom known as the Coed of sending the father to bed and rest when a child was born and they had as a luck symbol the well-known swastika if we were to make a map of the world with dots to show how far these group practices have left their traces we should make a belt along the temperate and subtropical coasts of the world from Stonehenge and Spain across the world to Mexico and Peru but Africa below the equator, north-central Europe and north Asia would show none of these dottings there lived races who were developing along practically independent lines the term paleolithic we may note is also used to cover the Neanderthaler and even the euolithic implements the pre-human age is called the older paleolithic the age of true men using unpolished stones in the newer paleolithic End of chapter 13