Faces of the Human Past

The impact was seismic, but even before the book appeared, discoveries that ancient humans had lived with extinct mammoths and rhinoceroses in Britain had caused many to question traditional beliefs about human origins. The scion of a banking family that owned much of the Kentish countryside surrounding Darwin's home, Lubbock decorated his indulgent father's mansion with a collection of primitive stone tools, ethnographic artifacts, glass-enclosed colonies of social insects, and eighteen watercolor paintings of early humans going about their daily lives.