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over perhaps two hundred thousand years in which we do not know when our first true ‘ancestor’ appeared (though the place was almost certainly Africa). It is not ever easy to pose the right questions; the physiological and technical and mental lines at which we leave Homo erectus behind are matters of definition, and during tens of millennia that species and early specimens of Homo sapiens both lived on the earth.
    The few early human fossils have provoked much argument. Two famous European skulls seem to belong to the period between two Ice Ages about two hundred thousand years ago, an age climatically so different from ours that elephants browsed in a semi-tropical Thames valley and the ancestors of lions prowled about in what would one day be Yorkshire. The ‘Swanscombe’ skull, named after the place where it was found, shows its possessor to have had a big brain (about 1300 cc) but in other ways not much to resemble modern man: if ‘Swanscombe man’ was Homo sapiens , then he represents a very early version. The other skull, that of ‘Steinheim man’, differs in shape from that of Homo sapiens but again held a big brain. Perhaps they are best regarded as the forerunners of early prototypes of Homo sapiens , though creatures still living (as their tools show) much like Homo erectus .
    The next Ice Age then brings down the curtain. When it lifts, a hundred and thirty thousand or so years ago, in the next warm period, human remains again appear. There has been much argument about what they show but it is indisputable that there has been a great step forward. At this point we are entering a period where there is a fairly dense though broken record. Creatures we can now call humans lived in Europe just over a hundred thousand years ago. There are caves in the Dordogne area which were occupied on and off for some fifty thousand years after that. The cultures of these peoples therefore survived a period of huge climatic change; the first traces of them belong to a warm interglacial period and the last run out in the middle of the last Ice Age. This is an impressive continuity to set against what must have been great variation in the animal population and vegetation near these sites; to survive so long, such cultures must have been very resourceful and adaptive.
    For all their essential similarity to ourselves, though, the peoples who created these cultures are still physiologically distinguishable from modern human beings. The first discovery of their remains was at Neanderthal in Germany (because of this, humans of this type are usually called Neanderthals) and it was of a skull so curiously shaped that it was for a long time thought to be that of a modern idiot. Scientific analysis still leaves much about it unexplained. But it is now suggested that Homo sapiens neanderthalis (as the Neanderthal is scientifically classified) has its ultimate origin in an early expansion out of Africa of advanced forms of Homo erectus , possibly a million years ago. Across many intervening genetic stages, there emerged a population of pre-Neanderthals, from which, in turn, the extreme form evolved whose striking remains were found in Europe (and, so far, nowhere else). This special development has been interpreted by some as a Neanderthal sub-species, perhaps cut off by some accident of glaciation. Evidence of other Neanderthalers has turned up elsewhere, in Morocco, in the northern Sahara, at Mount Carmel in Palestine and elsewhere in the Near East and Iran. They have also been traced in Central Asia and China, where the earliest specimens may go back something like two hundred millennia. Evidently, this was for a long time a highly successful species.
    Eighty thousand years ago, the artifacts of Neanderthal man had spread all over Eurasia and they show differences of technique and form. But technology from over a hundred thousand years ago, and associated with other forms of ‘anatomically modern humans’, as scholars term other