3. If we could go back: It should be noted that Wells's descriptions in this chapter are extremely speculative.

  3

  The Beginnings of Life

  1. 1,600 million years: The current estimate is that the Record of the Rocks covers a length of time closer to 4,000 million years. The periods into which the record is divided continue to be revised in the light of new evidence. A modern consensus is given in the chart below.

  Era

  Period

  Millions of years ago

  Cenozoic

  Quaternary

  –

  Tertiary

  2

  Mesozoic

  Cretaceous

  65

  Jurassic

  144

  Triassic

  213

  Palaeozoic

  Permian

  248

  Carboniferous

  286

  Devonian

  360

  Silurian

  408

  Ordovician

  438

  Cambrian

  505

  Precambrian

  Proterozoic

  590

  Azoic or Archaean

  2,500

  2. any living thing: The earliest period is now classified as the Precambrian, divided into the Azoic (or Archaean) and the Proterozoic. Seaweed, algae and invertebrates were already in existence in the Proterozoic period.

  3. spicule: A small, pointed structure which makes up the skeleton of a sponge.

  4

  The Age of Fishes

  1. We now know that the genetic ‘plan’ of every creature is carried by the chemical DNA, contained in each of its body cells. The cells contain two slightly different sets of instructions, one set from the mother, one from the father, recorded on spiral-shaped molecules called chromosomes.

  2. the first known Vertebrata: The first vertebrates are now thought to have appeared in the Ordovician period, with larger vertebrates developing during the Silurian period.

  5

  The Age of the Coal Swamps

  1. Life was still only in the sea: More recent science has been able to detect leafless plants on land as early as the Silurian period. During the Devonian period, these were joined by leafy plants, insects and invertebrates.

  2. over this planet: Periods of extreme cold and warmth are thought to arise from small changes in the Earth's orbit and axis, compounded by variations in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and by the gradual movement of the continents, which changes the direction of warm water currents and can also provide a surface for snow and ice to accumulate.

  3. reproduce its kind: During the Carboniferous period, some reptiles did breed on land.

  6

  The Age of Reptiles

  1. learns its most valuable lessons: Through the metaphor of learning lessons, which personifies life as a pupil studying for an examination, Wells implies that biological evolution entails progress towards a goal, not just adaptation to changing conditions. At the end of the next paragraph, he takes the side of land life because he knows that it will one day produce the human race. Such literary devices, perhaps unscientific but necessary to engage the reader's sympathy and supply an effective storyline, may be discovered throughout the book.

  2. still incalculable movements of the Earth's crust: It is now known that continents are embedded in rigid, moving plates, driven by convection currents beneath the Earth's crust. During the Carboniferous and Permian periods, the continents moved together to form one great landmass, since dubbed Pangaea, which broke up during the Age of the Reptiles, then began to move towards the current, equally temporary distribution of continents.

  3. It came to an end some 80 million years ago: The end of the Mesozoic period is today dated at 65 million years ago and divided into three periods, the Triassic, the Jurassic (when dinosaurs were dominant) and the Cretaceous.

  4. same limitation: Scientists now believe that many dinosaurs were warm-blooded.

  7

  The First Birds and the First Mammals

  1. selvas: Rainforests.

  2. race: Species.

  3. 80 million years: The Mesozoic Age is now thought to have lasted some 180 million years.

  4. The cold has killed them: The causes of the dinosaurs' extinction remain controversial. Climate change is usually accepted as the major factor, many people believing it to have been accelerated by the consequences of an asteroid, meteor or comet striking the Earth. The death of the dinosaurs may, however, have been exaggerated, since some scientists now classify birds as their living descendants.

  8

  The Age of Mammals

  1. to the present time: The Cenozoic period is generally estimated to have begun 65 million years ago.

  2. it is now slowly emerging: The last ice age ended about 20,000 years ago.

  3. we lack sufficient science: The period during which human beings have dominated the Earth is now considered to be ‘interglacial’, a short era of comparative warmth within an overall ice age. This would suggest that we are headed for another ‘glacial age’. However, many people believe that in recent decades human activity has caused significant global warming which might reverse this process. Climate change remains therefore a highly controversial topic.

  4. they keep together: Scientists now believe that some dinosaurs lived in herds and showed parental care in raising their young.

  9

  Monkeys, Apes and Sub-men

  1. the first man-like beings lived upon our planet: The ‘First Glacial Age’ is now dated from around 5 million years ago. Within this period, at least 4,500,000 years ago, upright-walking apes appeared in Africa, having evolved into a distinct species between 6 and 8 million years ago. At what period the species made the transition from ape men to ‘true men’ is a matter of judgement.

  2. not bones but implements: Many ‘almost human’ fossils have now been discovered in East Africa, some of them 4 million years old.

  3. ‘eoliths’ (dawn stones): These objects are now thought to have been chipped by natural forces, not by early humans.

  4. makers of the eoliths: Pithecanthropus erectus has been tentatively dated to over 1 million years ago.

  5. bored holes in bones: In the Outline of History, where he had greater space for discussion, Wells was more cautious about the nature of the Piltdown evidence. In fact there was no such creature as Eoanthropus. Scientific tests in 1953 showed the remains to comprise the jaw of an orang-utan and a human cranium, treated to simulate age.

  10

  The Neanderthaler and the Rhodesian Man

  1. About fifty or sixty thousand years ago: By more recent reckoning, Neanderthals arrived in Europe around 130,000 years ago and survived until around 30,000 years ago.

  2. it made and used: By his choice of the pronoun ‘it’, his exclusion of Neanderthals from the category of ‘true men’ and his disparaging descriptions of them, Wells seeks to place our own ancestors in a comparatively flattering light and encourage solidarity between modern humans. By suggesting we wiped out rival species, however, he also warns us against our inherited disposition to bloodshed which, equipped with modern technology, can lead to world wars. Wells fictionalized the supposed competition between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals in a short story called ‘The Grisly Folk’ (1921). William Golding's novel The Inheritors (1955) is a pro-Neanderthal riposte, artistically powerful but scientifically even more questionable than Wells's version.

  3. head down and forward: Freshly discovered evidence has amended our view of the Neanderthals. They walked upright like modern people and were not especially hairy. They seem to have been quite skilful tool-makers and hunters, were the earliest known humans to bury their dead and could even speak.

  4. even thousands of years: Neanderthals seem to have existed for over 250,000 years.

  5. their region of origin: The generally accepted view today is that humans originated in Africa and migrated to other parts of the world, evolving into several different types along the way, including Neanderthals and ourselves. DNA research suggests that the modern type of human, Homo sapiens, originated about 200,000 years ago. The earliest known skulls of anatomically modern people come from Ethiopia and date from about 195,000 years ago. Having spread out from Africa about 150,000 years ago, our ancestors gradually replaced all other types of human. Some experts think Homo sapiens wiped out its rivals, but in some places our ancestors and Neanderthals lived side by side for 10,000 years, suggesting we may simply have been more efficient over the very long term, perhaps because we were better able to cope with the warming climate. There is even a minority theory (noted by Wells in the Outline) that the two types interbred.

  6. Broken Hill in South Africa: The site is now known as Kabwe in Zambia. Several skulls have been found there and dated as about 150,000 years old.

  11

  The First True Men

  1. very high type indeed: Few today would accept the value judgement of ‘high’ or any simple correlation between brain size and intelligence. There is no dispute, however, that Cro-Magnons were anatomically identical to modern humans.

  2. de Mortillet: Louis de Mortillet (1821–98) was a French anthropologist and politician. Wells took this quotation from An Introduction to the Study of Prehistoric Art (1915) by Ernest Albert Parkyn (1857–1930).

  3. the first True Men: This account of the Tasmanians – inevitably based on the observations of the people who exterminated them – should probably be viewed with scepticism.

  12

  Primitive Thought

  1. such contemporary savages as still survive: This chapter is, as Wells indicates, thought-provoking speculation rather than history. The sources he cites carry less weight today than they would have done in the 1920s, since few now would accept Freudian psychoanalysis as a science or endorse the implicit assumption that ‘contemporary savages’ preserve unchanged a culture 40,000 years old. Wells's novella ‘A Story of the Stone Age’ (1897) is a related, fictional attempt to re-create the experiences and mentality of early humans.

  2. J. J. Atkinson: Primal Law by James Jasper Atkinson (d. 1899) was published in 1903 in a joint volume with Andrew Lang's Social Origins.

  3. Old Man… gods and goddesses: The highly speculative theory is that Palaeolithic humans lived in small groups, each one led by a dominant male, rather as gorillas live today. The so-called ‘Old Man’ would drive away or even kill boy children as they grew to be his rivals until, once he had reached forty or so years of age and begun to physically deteriorate, some younger male would kill him in turn.

  4. always something of a child: The once common analogy between ‘primitive man’ and modern child is regarded today with great scepticism.

  13

  The Beginnings of Cultivation

  1. (Old Stone) phase: Scientists have more recently added a bridging period of small stone tools and greater settlement called the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age).

  2. Neolithic level: By modern reckoning, agricultural settlement began around 9000 BC in the ‘Fertile Crescent’ between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, then spread slowly to other areas.

  3. Sir J. G. Frazer's Golden Bough: The Golden Bough is the best-known work by the classical scholar James George Frazer (1854–1941). It appeared in 1890, was later expanded to twelve volumes and in 1922 appeared in an abridged edition for the general reader. The book is probably best remembered today for its influence on T. S. Eliot's landmark modern poem, The Waste Land (1922).

  4. Elliot Smith and Rivers: George Elliot Smith (1871–1937), Australian anatomist and ethnologist; W. H. R. Rivers (1864–1922), British medical psychologist and anthropologist.

  14

  Primitive Neolithic Civilizations

  1. main mass of humanity: Few people today would accept that there are safe criteria for judging different races as ‘of various value’. Modern scientists, having found race to be a comparatively superficial aspect of human biology, would endorse Wells's well-informed warnings in the third paragraph of this chapter.

  15

  Sumeria, Early Egypt and Writing

  1. the great history of Egypt was beginning: These first cities are now dated to around 3500 BC.

  16

  Primitive Nomadic Peoples

  1. favourable regions of India and China: From around 3500 BC towns were indeed appearing in east and north-east China and the Indus Valley.

  2. to the Mediterranean Sea: Sargon's conquests took place between 2400 and 2350 BC. One of the most engaging characters in Wells's later fiction, Albert Preemby in Christina Alberta's Father (1925), becomes convinced during a seance that he is a reincarnation of Sargon, with highly unfortunate consequences.

  3. yet known to history: Hammurabi's laws are now dated nearer to 1750 BC.

  17

  The First Sea-going Peoples

  1. still remains to be deciphered: The Linear B system of writing at Knossos was eventually deciphered in 1952. It proved to be an early dialect of Greek, showing, in contradiction to the notion current in Wells's day, that the Mycenaean culture was after all produced by forebears of the Greeks. As of 2005, the Linear A script has yet to be deciphered.

  18

  Egypt, Babylon and Assyria

  1. New Assyrian Empire: By modern reckoning, Tiglath Pileser III came to power in 744 BC and claimed the kingship of Babylon in 729 BC.

  2. blood and iron: The Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck (1815–98) used the phrase ‘blood and iron’ in speeches of 1862 and 1886, referring to the military force a nation-state requires to achieve its goals.

  3. Mesopotamia or Egypt: We are now aware of India's ‘Harappan’ culture, which by 2250 BC seems to have been the equal of Mesopotamia and Egypt.

  19

  The Primitive Aryans

  1. Nordic race: Partly due to its perversion by Nazi Germany, this use of the term ‘Aryan’ has been abandoned by modern anthropologists. The ‘race’ which Wells describes is now treated as several different ethnic groups, though with a shared language history, and the term Aryan is applied solely to that group which conquered India.

  20

  The Last Babylonian Empire and the Empire of Darius I

  1. God has numbered… to the Medes and Persians: The quotations are adapted from Daniel 5:25–28.

  22

  Priests and Prophets in Judea

  1. hardship, adventure and oppression: Wells believed that modern civilization needed an equivalent to the Bible, a constantly updated set of texts which would set out a consensus view of our core knowledge and ideas, supplying a ‘framework for the thoughts and imaginations of every citizen in the world’ (The Salvaging of Civilization (1921)). He regarded his own historical writing as a pilot project towards this end.

  2. harnessed our race: As early as 1896, in an article entitled ‘Human Evolution, an Artificial Process’, Wells had hailed the Hebrew prophets as the forerunners of modern ‘eccentric and innovating people, playwrights, novelists, preachers, poets, journalists, and political reasoners and speakers’, a group which implicitly included Wells himself.

  23

  The Greeks

  1. about 960 BC: Solomon is now thought to have reigned from about 965 to 925 BC.

  2. as Milton composed Paradise Lost: John Milton (1608–74) began to compose the Christian epic poem Paradise Lost some time after 1652 when he became completely blind. Wells respected Milton as a militant republican and defender of free speech, quoting him at considerable length in The Salvaging of Civilization (1921).

  25

  The Splendour of Greece

  1. better than any existing community: Wells himself was a leading advocate and practitioner of Utopian thinking, most notably in A Modern Utopia (1905).

  27

  The Museum and Library at Alexandria

  1. Professor Mahaffy: Sir John Mahaffy (1839–1919), Professor of Ancient History at Trinity College, Dublin, wrote several studies of Ancient Greece.

  28

  The Life of Gautama Buddha

  1. in the sixth century BC: Gautama lived from around 563 to 483 BC.

  2. Nautch dance: A traditional performance by professional female dancers.

  3. canopy of the skies: Wells took this quotation, attributed to the ‘Burmese Chronicle’, from the writings of T. W. Rhys Davids (1843–1922), Professor of Pali and Buddhist Literature at University College London, 1882–1912.

  29

  King Asoka

  1. Madras… Kalinga (255 BC): Asoka ruled from about 273 to 232 BC, and invaded Kalinga in about 261 BC.

  2. resumed their sway: A number of Indians marched through London in 1923, carrying a banner which read ‘Down with H. G. Wells’ Short History of the World’. This may well be one of the passages which offended them.

  30

  Confucius and Lao Tse

  1. sixth century BC: Confucius lived 551–479 BC; Lao Tse's dates are unknown.

  2. Shang… Chow: By modern reckoning, the Shang dynasty ended in 1028 BC, the Zhou dynasty (the currently accepted spelling) succeeding it from 1027 to 256 BC.

  31

  Rome Comes into History

  1. over against: near.

  33

  The Growth of the Roman Empire

  1. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, SPQR, the elder Cato, the Scipios: The Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), a highly popular collection of poems about Roman history by the journalist, politician, administrator and historian Thomas Macaulay (1800–59); SPQR, an abbreviation of ‘Senatus Populusque Romanus’ (the Senate and People of Rome); Cato the Elder (234–149 BC), a conservative Roman statesman who campaigned for the destruction of Carthage; Scipio Africanus (236–c. 183 BC), Roman general who defeated Carthage, and Scipio Aemilianus (185–129 BC), his adopted grandson, famed both as a general and a patron of the arts.

  35

  The Common Man's Life under the Early Roman Empire

  1. British Peace in India: Having been taken over by stages during the nineteenth century, India remained under British control until 1947.

  37