H. G. Wells

“ Tracking was then the supreme accomplishment of mankind. By signs and traces that would be invisible to any modern civilized eye they would be reading the story of the previous day's trek of the herd of sturdy little horses ahead of them. They would be so expert that they would go on from one faint sign to another with as little delay as a dog that follows a scent. ”

“ Could anything be more dead, more mute and inexpressive to the inexpert eye than the ocherous fragments of bone and the fractured lumps of flint that constitute the first traces of something human in the world? ”

“ Now that Waugh had gone, Click would become Old Man, and he made the tribe camp that night and build their fire on the high ridges among the heather, far away from the thickets in which the grisly folk might be lurking.
The grisly folk thought we know not how about the menfolk, and the men thought about the grisly folk in such ways as we can understand; they imagined how their enemies might act in this fashion or that, and schemed to circumvent them. It may have been Click who had the first dim idea of getting at the gorge in which the Neanderthalers had their lair, from above. ”

“ A day may come when these recovered memories may grow as vivid as if we in our own persons had been there and shared the thrill and the fear of those primordial days; a day may come when the great beasts of the past will leap to life again in our imaginations, when we shall walk again in vanished scenes, stretch painted limbs we thought were dust, and feel again the sunshine of a million years ago. ”

“ When a human be found signs of the grisly folk near their cave and squatting place they had perforce to track them down and kill them; their own safety and the safety of their little ones were to be secured only by that killing. The Neanderthalers thought the little children of men fair game and pleasant eating.
How long the grisly folk lived on in that ill world of pines and silver birch between the steppes and the glaciers after the true menfolk came we do not know. For ages they may have held out, growing more cunning and dangerous as they became rare. ”

“ Like them he lived in a bleak land on the edge of the snows and glaciers that were even then receding northward. Hairy or grisly, with a big face like a mask, great brow ridges and no forehead, clutching an enormous flint and running like a baboon, with his head forward and not like a man with his head up, he must have been a fearsome creature for our forefathers to come upon. ”

“ And it was not simply men who withstood the grisly beast, but women. They stood over their children; they stood by their men against this eerie thing that was like and yet not like mankind. Unless the savants read all the signs awry it was the men who were the makers of the larger tribes into which human families were already growing in those ancient times. ”

“ Flint and bone implements are found in deposits of very considerable antiquity; some in our museums may be a million years old or more, but the traces of really human creatures, mentally and anatomically like ourselves, do not go back much earlier than twenty or thirty thousand years ago. True men appeared in Europe then, and we do not know whence they came. These other tool-using, fire-making animals, the things that were like men and yet were not men, passed away before the faces of the true men. ”

“ But nothing is ever completely lost. Seventy or eighty years ago a few curious savants began to suspect that there were hidden memories in certain big chipped flints and scraps of bone they found in ancient gravels. Much more recently others have begun to find hints of remote strange experience in the dreams and odd kinks in modern minds. ”

“ In the valley thickets many beasts lurked unseen, and where the winding streams had cut into the soil there were cliffs and caves. Far away along the slopes of the ridge that were now revealed, the wild ponies were grazing. ”

“ And as we realize the want of any close relationship between this ugly, strong, ungainly, manlike animal and mankind, the less likely it becomes that he had a naked skin and hair like ours, and the more probable that he was different, and perhaps bristly or hairy in some queer inhuman fashion like the hairy elephant and the woolly rhinoceros, which were his contemporaries. ”

“ They are huge implements, four or five times as big as those made by any known race of true men, and they are not ill made. Certainly some creature with an intelligent brain made them. Big clumsy hands must have gripped and used these rocky chunks. But so far only one small fragment of a skeleton of this age has been found, a very massive chinless lower jawbone, with teeth rather more specialized than those of men to-day. We can only guess what strange foreshadowing of the human form once ate with that jaw and struck at its enemies with those big but not unhandy flint blades. ”

“ As humanity follows the gropings of scientific men among these ancient vestiges it is like a man who turns over the yellow pages of some long-forgotten diary, some engagement book of his adolescence. His dead youth lives again. ”

“ It was the women's subtle, love-guided wits which protected her sons from the fierce danger of the Old Man, and taught them to avoid his jealousy and wrath, and persuaded him to tolerate them and so have their help against the grisly enemy. ”

“ The true man must have come into the habitat of the Neanderthaler, and the two must have met and fought. Some day we may come upon the evidences of this warfare. Western Europe, which is the only part of the world that has yet been searched with any thoroughness for the remains of early men, was slowly growing warmer age by age; the glaciers that had once covered half the continent were receding and wide stretches of summer pasture and thin woods of pine and birch were spreading slowly over the once icy land. South Europe then was like Northern Labrador to-day. ”

“ Then the menfolk could roll a great rock upon him, or pelt him with burning brands and set the dry bracken alight.
One likes to think of a victory for the human side. This Click we have conjured up had run in panic from the first onset of the grisly male, but as he brooded by the fire that night he heard again in imagination the cry of the lost girl, and he was filled with rage. In his sleep the grisly male came to him and Click fought in his dreams and started awake, stiff with fury.
There was a fascination for him in that gorge in which Waugh had been killed. ”

“ The grisly men rejoiced at the return of life, came out of the caves in which they had lurked during the winter, and took their toll of the beasts.
These grisly men must have been almost solitary creatures. The winter food was too scanty for communities. A male may have gone with a female or so ”

“ It was woman, says Atkinson, in the beginning of things human, who taught the primary taboos, that a son must go aside out of the way of his stepmother, and get himself a wife from another tribe, so as to keep the peace within the family. ”

“ The dog tooth, the third tooth from the middle which is so big in the gorilla, and which in man is pointed and still quite distinct from the other teeth, is not distinct at all in the Neanderthaler. He had a very even row of teeth, and his cheek teeth also were very unlike ours, and less like the apes' than ours. He had more face and less brow than true men, but that is not because he had a lesser brain ”

“ Two or three older men of thirty or so, eight or ten women and girls, with a few young children, a few lads between fourteen and twenty, might make up the whole community. They would be a brownish brown-eyed people with wavy dark hair ”