THE HERITAGE OF MAN [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—On my return home after an absence I find packets of the Spectator awaiting me. Among them is included the issue of May 18th last, in which there appears (p. 788) a review of Mr. Massingham's The Heritage of Man. Your reviewer quotes from his author the statement : " There is no evidence what- ever that the men of the Stone Age manufactured weapons of War." This dictum surely demands further consideration in face of the conclusive ocular evidence we possess to the con- trary, in the discovery of an arrowhead, deeply embedded in the spinal column of a palaeolithic " primitive " ; and more convincingly in a picture by a contemporary artist of " Organized Warfare," vividly depicting, on the walls of a rock-shelter at Minateda, in Spain, a battle in which the combatants are all wielding bows and arrows—" weapons of war," and on which one of the fighters is left on the ground " stuck full of arrows." The battle was waged in the golden age believed in by Mr. Massingham. In the opinion, however, of one of the most learned living anthropologists (Sir Arthur Keith), "there never was such a golden age."7-I am, Sir, &c., HENRY 0. FORBES.
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