ABSTRACT
During the past half-century, knowledge of all kinds has increased with unexampled rapidity, but in few directions has the advance been more striking than in regard to early man. Children beginning the study of history can nowadays be told of the primitive races and of their gradual progress and usually find this much more interesting than the dry records of intertribal warfare in Greece, Italy, or Britain with which the teaching of history formerly began. A little book, The Long Road from Savagery to Civilisation by Fay-Cooper Cole (Baltimore: William & Wilkins, 1933), tells the story in a way likely to hold the attention of any intelligent boy or girl. Anthropologists and archaeologists have discovered more than anyone fifty years ago would have supposed possible about the history of man before the invention of writing. Bit by bit, through stone implements, domestication of animals, agriculture, bronze, and iron, man acquired mastery of his environment and rose from being a rare species at the mercy of wild animals to being the lord of creation and the commonest of the larger mammals.
