Far from being a primitive form of organization, the family is a very late product of human evolution.  As far as we can go back in the palaeo-ethnology of mankind, we find men living in societies—­in tribes similar to those of the highest mammals; and an extremely slow and long evolution was required to bring these societies to the gentile, or clan organization, which, in its turn, had to undergo another, also very long evolution, before the first germs of family, polygamous or monogamous, could appear.  Societies, bands, or tribes—­not families—­were thus the primitive form of organization of mankind and its earliest ancestors.  That is what ethnology has come to after its painstaking researches.  And in so doing it simply came to what might have been foreseen by the zoologist.  None of the higher mammals, save a few carnivores and a few undoubtedly-decaying species of apes (orang-outans and gorillas), live in small families, isolatedly straggling in the woods.  All others live in societies.  And Darwin so well understood that isolately-living apes never could have developed into man-like beings, that he was inclined to consider man as descended from some comparatively weak but social species, like the chimpanzee, rather than from some stronger but unsociable species, like the gorilla.(2) Zoology and palaeo-ethnology are thus agreed in considering that the band, not the family, was the earliest form of social life.  The first human societies simply were a further development of those societies which constitute the very essence of life of the higher animals.(3)

If we now go over to positive evidence, we see that the earliest traces of man, dating from the glacial or the early post-glacial period, afford unmistakable proofs of man having lived even then in societies.  Isolated finds of stone implements, even from the old stone age, are very rare; on the contrary, wherever one flint implement is discovered others are sure to be found, in most cases in very large quantities.  At a time when men were dwelling in caves, or under occasionally protruding rocks, in company with mammals now extinct, and hardly succeeded in making the roughest sorts of flint hatchets, they already knew the advantages of life in societies.  In the valleys of the tributaries of the Dordogne, the surface of the rocks is in some places entirely covered with caves which were inhabited by palaeolithic men.(4) Sometimes the cave-dwellings are superposed in storeys, and they certainly recall much more the nesting colonies of swallows than the dens of carnivores.  As to the flint implements discovered in those caves, to use Lubbock’s words, “one may say without exaggeration that they are numberless.”  The same is true of other palaeolithic stations.  It also appears from Lartet’s investigations that the inhabitants of the Aurignac region in the south of France partook of tribal meals at the burial of their dead.  So that men lived in societies, and had germs of a tribal worship, even at that extremely remote epoch.