polygenism; of evolution; heterogenesis. Identities point to one
origin. Birthplace of the species. The oldest human relics. Remains
of the highest apes. Question of climate. Negative arguments.
Darwin’s belief that the species originated in Africa confirmed;
but with modifications. Quaternary geography of Europe and Africa.
Northern Africa united with Southern Europe. Former shore lines.
The Sahara Sea. The quaternary continents of “Eurafrica,” and
“Austafrica.” Relics of man in them. Man in pre-glacial times. The
Glacial Age. Effect on man. Scheme of geologic time during the
Age of Man. His development into races. Approximate date of this.
Localities where it occurred. The “areas of characterization.”
Relations of continents to races. Theory of Linnaeus; of modern
ethnography. Classification of races. General ethnographic scheme.
Sub-divisions of races; branches; stocks; groups; peoples; tribes;
nations. Other terms; ethnos and ethnic; culture; civilization.
Stadia of culture.
In the rapid survey contained in the previous lectures you have seen
in how many points the races differ. No wonder that the question has
often been seriously mooted by scientific men, Could they all have been
derived from one common ancestral stock? This is the old debate about
“the unity of the human race,” still surviving under the more learned
terms of _monogenism_ or _polygenism_.
As to that other question, whether man came into being as such by a
gradual development, evolution, or transformation, from some lower
mammal, this may be regarded as the only hypothesis now known to
science, and must, therefore, be accepted, at least provisionally,
until some better is proposed. It is the only theory consistent with
man’s place in the zoölogical world, and is borne out by numerous
anatomical analogies, which have been referred to in my first lecture.
In fact, we are driven to it by necessity. No other origin of species
than by transformation of earlier forms has been suggested, even by
those who reject it. I do not speak of specific creation, for that
supposition does not belong to science, but to an obscurant mysticism,
which is the negative of all true knowledge.
But within the limits of the transformation theory there is more than
one method by which varying forms are produced, and one of these may
prove applicable to man, in whose earliest remains we have so far found
no positive indications of a lower physical character than he now
has.[36] So far, the “missing link” is as much out of sight as ever it
was; so far, man appears to have been always what he is to-day.
May he not, as a species, have come into being through a short
series of well-marked varieties, each produced by what is called
“heterogenesis,” that is, the birth of children unlike their parents?
All children are unlike their parents, more or less; and though at
present this unlikeness is strictly within the limits of the several
races, it is the opinion of some who have studied the matter, that in
earlier geologic epochs changes in organic forms were more rapid and
more profound than at present.
I am aware that this suggestion of heterogenesis looks like a return
to the ancient doctrine called _generatio equivoca_, which, in its old
form, is certainly obsolete. But there is no question that in many
existing plants and animals we find singular evidence that from a given
form another may arise, widely different in structure, and perpetuate
itself indefinitely. I am convinced that the importance of these facts
has never been properly appreciated by students of the origin of
species, and of the origin of men in particular.
This, or any hypothesis of evolution, renders the supposition quite
needless that the various races had distinct ancestral origins. Any
evolutionist who accepts the view that man is but a differentiation
from some anthropoid ape, is straining at a gnat after swallowing
the camel, if he hesitates to believe that the comparatively slight
differences between the races may not have originated from like
influences. Furthermore, the resemblances between the various races are
altogether too numerous and exact to render it likely that they could
have been acquired through several ancestries running back to various
lower zoological forms; a consideration greatly strengthened by the
fact that man is the only species of his genus, and there is even no
genus of his class closely related to himself. The chances that such a
perfected animal should have been twice or oftener developed from the
apes, monkeys or lemurs--his nearest cousins--are so small that we must
dismiss the supposition.
It seems to me, indeed, that any one who will patiently study the
parallelisms of growth in the arts and sciences, in poetry and objects
of utility, throughout the various races of men, cannot doubt of their
psychical identity. Still more, if he will acquaint himself with the
modern science of Folk-lore, and will note how the very same tales,
customs, proverbs, superstitions, games, habits, and so on, recur
spontaneously in tribes severed by thousands of leagues, he will not
think it possible that creatures so wholly identical could have been
produced by independent lines of evolution.
_The Birthplace of the Species._--Accepting the theories therefore of
the evolutionists and the monogenists as the most plausible in the
present state of science, it is quite proper to inquire where primeval
man first appeared, and what were his social conditions and personal
appearance.
To some it may seem premature to put such questions. They are
needlessly timid. It is never too soon to propound any question in
science; always too soon to declare that any has been finally and
irrevocably answered.
Beginning our search for the birthplace of the species, we may
consider that it will be indicated by the cumulative evidence of three
conditions. We may look for it, (1) where the oldest relics of man or
his industries have been found; (2) where the remains of the highest of
the lower mammals, especially the man-like apes, have been exhumed, as
it is assumed that man himself descended from some such form; and (3)
where we know from palæontologic evidence a climate prevailed suited to
man’s unprotected early conditions.
The first of these lines of investigation leads us to the science of
“pre-historic archæology.” We shall discover that a study of this
branch of learning is indispensable not only in this connection,
but to solve many other questions in ethnography. Here its answer
is unexpected. We have been taught by long tradition and venerable
documents to look for the first home of primeval man “somewhere in
Asia,” as Professor Max Müller generously puts it. He is inclined to
think that from the highlands of that continent the tribes dispersed in
various directions, some going to the extreme north, and then southward
into Europe. Others would have it that the species itself came into
life in the boreal regions, in that epoch when a mild climate prevailed
there.
Such dreams meet no countenance from pre-historic archæology. The
oldest remains of man’s arts, the first rude flints which he shaped
into utensils and weapons, have not been discovered in Asia, and do
not occur at all in the northern latitudes of either continent. They
have been exhumed from the late tertiary or early quaternary deposits
of southern England, of France, of the Iberian peninsula, and of the
valleys of the Atlas in northern Africa. They have been searched for
most diligently but in vain in Scandinavia, Germany, Russia, Siberia,
and Canada. Not any of the older types of so-called “palæolithic”
implements have been reported in early deposits in those countries.[37]
But in the “river drift” of the Thames, the Somme, the Garonne, and
the Tagus, quantities of rough stone implements have been disinterred,
proving that in a remote epoch, at a time when the hippopotamus
and rhinoceros, the African elephant and the extinct apes, found a
congenial home near the present sites of London, Paris and Lisbon,
man also was there. These relics, especially those found in Portugal,
Central Spain and Southern France, are the very oldest proofs of the
presence of man on the earth yet brought to light.
Where, now, do we find the remains of the highest of the lower animals?
By a remarkable coincidence, in the same region. Of all the anthropoid
apes yet known to the palæontologist, that most closely simulating
man is the so-called _Dryopithecus fontani_, whose bones have been
disinterred in the upper valleys of the Garonne, in Southern France.
Its height was about that of a man, its teeth strongly resembled those
of the Australians, and its food was chiefly vegetables and fruits.
Other remains of a similar character have been found in Italy.[38]
It is well known to geologists that the apes and monkeys or Simiadæ
were abundant and highly developed in Southern Europe in the pliocene
and early pleistocene, just the time, as near as we can fix it,
that man first appeared there. These facts answer the third of our
inquiries--that for a climate suitable to man in an unprotected early
condition, when he had to contend with the elements and the parsimony
of nature, ill-provided as he is with many of the natural advantages
possessed by other animals. At that date Southern Europe and Northern
Africa were under what are called sub-tropical conditions, possessing a
climate not wholly tropical, but yet singularly mild and equable. This
we know from the remains, both animal and vegetable, preserved in the
deposits of that epoch.
A series of negative arguments strengthens this conclusion. Where we
find no remains of apes or monkeys of the higher class, we cannot place
the scene of man’s ancestral evolution. This excludes America, where no
tailless and no narrow-nosed (catarhine) monkeys and no large apes have
been found; it excludes Australia, and all portions of the Old World
north of the Alps and the Himalayas.
In view of such facts, Darwin reached the conclusion that it is most
probable that our earliest progenitors lived on the African continent.
There to this day we find on the one hand the human beings most closely
allied to the lower animals, and the two species of these, the gorilla
and the chimpanzee, now man’s nearest relations among the brutes.[39]
Darwin was disturbed in this conclusion by the presence of the large
apes to whom I have referred in Southern Europe in late tertiary times.
This, however, merely requires a modification in his conclusion, the
general tenor of which, to the effect that man was first developed in
the warm regions of the western or Atlantic portion of the Old World,
somewhere within the present or ancient area of Africa, and not in
Asia, has been steadily strengthened since the great evolutionist wrote
his remarkable work on the _Descent of Man_.
_Quaternary Geography of Europe and Africa._--The modification which I
refer to is the obvious fact that since the late tertiary epoch, and
especially during and after the glacial epoch, some material changes
have taken place in the physical geography of Europe and Africa. To
these I must now ask your particular attention, as they controlled not
only the scene of man’s origin, but the lines of his early migrations.
When primal man, with no weapon or tool but one chipped from a stone
flake, roamed over France, England and the Iberian peninsula, along
with the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and the elephant, the coast
lines of Europe and North Africa were quite unlike those of to-day.
England and Ireland were united to the mainland, and neither the
Straits of Dover nor St. George’s Channel had been furrowed by the
waves. Huge forests, such as can yet be traced near Cromer, covered
the plains which are now the bottom of the German Ocean. In the broad
shallow sea to the north, the mountainous regions of Scandinavia rose
as islands, and between them and the Ural Mountains its waters spread
uninterruptedly.
To the south, Northern Africa was united to Southern Europe by two
wide land-bridges, one at the Straits of Gibraltar, one connecting
Tunis with Sicily and Italy. The eastern portion of the Mediterranean
was a contracted fresh-water lake, pouring its waters into a broad
stream which connected the Atlantic with the Indian Oceans. This stream
covered most of the present desert of the Sahara, the delta of Egypt,
and a large portion of Arabia and Southern Asia. Its northern beach
extended along the southern base of the Atlas Mountains from the River
Dra on the Atlantic to the Gulf of Gabes in the Mediterranean; thence
northward between Malta and Sicily to the Straits of Otranto; by the
Ionian islands easterly till it intersected the present coast-line near
the mouth of the Orontes; northeasterly to about Diarbekir, whence
it trended south and east along the foot of the Zagros mountains to
the Persian Gulf. From that point it followed the present coast-line
to the mouth of the Indus, and thence pursued the base of the great
northern mountain range to the mouth of the Ganges, covering the north
of Hindustan, while the southern elevations of that spacious peninsula,
as well as a large part of southern and western Arabia, rose as
extensive irregular islands above the water. Toward them the mainland
of equatorial Africa extended much nearer than at present. It included
in its area the island of Madagascar, and reached far beyond into the
Indian Ocean. Toward the north, peninsulas and chains of islands,
now the summits of the plateaus and mountains of the central Sahara,
reached nearly or quite to the present shore-line of the Mediterranean,
about Tripolis.[40]
This disposition of the water left two great land areas in the old
world, probably not actually united though separated only by narrow
straits, one between the modern Tripolis and Tunis, and another on the
northern Syrian coast. I represent these areas on the accompanying map,
not indeed minutely, but approximately.
The general accuracy of the contours delineated are now fully
recognized by geologists. They are attested by the remaining
beach-lines of this primitive ocean, by the geographical distribution
of its contemporary fauna and flora, and by the proofs of elevation and
submergence along the shores and in the bottom of the adjacent seas and
oceans. The “great sink” of the western Sahara, the vast “schotts,” or
shallow saltwater ponds south of the Atlas, the salt Dead Sea at
the bottom of a profound depression, prove that the drying up of the
ancient ocean is scarcely yet complete.
[Illustration: OUTLINES OF THE EASTERN HEMISPHERE IN THE EARLY
QUATERNARY.]
So familiar have these ancient continental areas become to geological
students that they have been named like a newly-discovered island or
cape. The northern continent has been called _Eurasia_, compounded
of the words Europe and Asia, and the southern _Indo-Africa_, from a
supposed union of India and Africa.[41]
Neither of these names is quite acceptable. The former leaves out
of account the connection of Europe with Africa, which is of the
first importance in the study of early man; and the latter assumes
a geographic union between India and Africa, which is not likely to
have existed in the period of man’s life on earth. I prefer the two
names which I have inserted on the map; _Eurafrica_, indicating the
connection between Europe and Africa, and _Austafrica_, designating
the whole of the continent south of the ancient dividing sea. The name
_Asia_ should be confined to the Central Asian plateau and the regions
watered by the countless streams which flow from it toward the north,
east and south.
_Relics of Man._--Such was the configuration of land in the Eastern
hemisphere when man first appeared. We know he was there at that time.
I have referred to his rude stone (palæolithic) implements exhumed from
the river-drift of the Thames and the Somme, a deposit which dates
from a time when the hippopotamus bathed in those rivers; still older
seem some rough implements discovered in gravel layers near Madrid,
Spain, deposited by some large river in early quaternary times. The
worked flints near Lisbon were manufactured when a wide fresh-water
lake existed where now not a trace of it is visible on the surface,
and according to some archæologists, are the most ancient manufactured
products yet discovered.[42]
In numerous parts of North Africa, as near Tlemcen in the province of
Oran, and in Tunisia, the oldest forms of stone implements have been
found in place beneath massive layers of quaternary travertin,[43] and
in some of the most barren portions of the Libyan desert, now utterly
sterile, the travertin contains abundant remains of leaves and grasses,
along with chipped flints, proving that at the recession of this
diluvial sea not only was the vegetation luxuriant, but man was then on
the spot, as a hunter and fisher.[44]
Not less certain is it that he was a most ancient occupant of
Austafrica. Chert implements of the true “river-drift” type have been
discovered “in place” in quaternary stratified gravels near Thebes,
and elsewhere in the Nile valley; and in the diamond field of the Cape
of Good Hope, palæolithic forms have been exhumed from diluvial strata
forty or fifty feet below the surface of the soil.[45]
From similar evidence we know that man spread widely over the habitable
earth in that remote time. It is known to archæologists as the
earliest period of the Stone Age, and the implements attributed to it
are singularly alike in size and form. They seem to indicate a race
of beings who were unprogressive, lacking perchance the stimulus of
necessity in their mild climate and with their few needs.
_The Glacial Age._--But a wonderful change took place in their
conditions of life. Slowly, from some yet unexplained cause, mighty
ice-sheets, thousands of feet in thickness, gathered around the poles,
and collected on the flanks of the northern mountains. With silent but
irresistible might they advanced over land and sea, crushing beneath
them all animal and vegetable life, changing the perennial summer of
Eurafrica to an Arctic winter, or at best to an Alpine climate. The
tropical animals fled, the plants perished, and under the enormous
weight of the ice-mass, the ocean bottom in the north was depressed a
thousand feet or more. This in turn brought about material oscillations
in the land levels to the south. The bed of the Mediterranean sank,
that of the Sahara Sea slightly rose, leaving the latter little more
than a swamp, while the former assumed the shape which we now see.
These alterations in the land areas and climatic conditions exerted the
profoundest influence on the destiny of man. When with the increasing
cold the other animals native to warm regions had fled or perished,
he remained to encounter with undaunted mind the rigors of the boreal
climate. Instead of depressing or extinguishing him, these very
obstacles seem to have been the spurs to his intellectual progress.
Men were still in the lower stages of culture, with no knowledge of
metal, not capable of polishing stones, without a domestic animal or
trace of agriculture. Yet everywhere these artisans possessed skill and
sentiments far above that of the highest anthropoid ape described by
the zoölogist. They knew the use of fire, they constructed shelters,
they dwelt together in bands, they possessed some means of navigating
streams, they ate both vegetable and animal food, they decorated
themselves with colored earth and ornaments, they wielded a club,
they twisted fibres into ropes and strings, if occasion required they
fastened together skins for clothing. All this is proved by a careful
study of what tools and implements they have left us.
_Development into Races._--Whatever may have been the physical type of
men at their beginning, in culture they were upon the same level for a
long while after they had dispersed over the globe.
When, where and how did they develop into the several distinct races
that we now know?
We can answer these questions, not fully, but to some extent.
Man developed into certain strongly marked sub-species or races long
before the dawn of history. More than six thousand years ago the racial
traits of the black, the white, and the yellow races, and even of
their subdivisions, were as pronounced and as ineffaceable as they are
to-day. This we know from the representations on the Egyptian monuments
of the third and sixth dynasties, from the comparative study of ancient
skulls, and from the uniform testimony of the earliest writings,
wherever we find them.
This permanent fixation of traits, this profound impression of peculiar
features, was probably no rapid process, but a very slow one. It took
place between the close of the glacial epoch and the proto-historic
period. This interim gives time enough; at the lowest calculation, it
was twenty thousand years, while others have placed it at a hundred
thousand. The division of the species into races unquestionably was
completed long before the present geologic period, and under conditions
widely diverse from those now existing.[46]
As within these wide limits of time we can reply to the question when
the races became such, so within similar broad boundaries of space we
can answer where their peculiar types were developed.
At the dawn of history, all the clearly marked sub-species of man bore
distinct relations in number and distribution to the great continental
areas into which the habitable land of the globe is divided. Nearly
the whole of Europe and its geographical appendix, North Africa, were
in the possession of the white race; the true negro type was limited
to Central and Southern Africa and its appended islands; the yellow or
Mongolian type was scarcely found outside of Asia; and the American
sub-species was absolutely confined to that continent.
_The “Areas of Characterization.”_--In claiming that each sub-species
had its origin and developed its physical peculiarities in the land
areas here assigned to it, the ethnographer is supported by the
unanimous verdict of modern zoölogical science. “Whatever be the
cause,” writes the Rev. Samuel Haughton, “the distribution of fauna
shows clearly that forces have been at work, developing in each great
continent animal forms peculiar to itself, and differing from the
animal forms developed by other continents.”[47]
In ethnography, those geographical areas whose physical conditions
have left a durable impress on their human inhabitants have been
called either “geographical provinces” (Bastian) or “areas of
characterization” (de Quatrefages). I prefer and shall adopt the
latter as more indicative of the meaning of the term. It signifies
that like physio-geographical conditions prevailing over a given area
inhabited for many generations by the same peoples have impressed
upon them certain traits, physical and psychical, which have become
hereditary and continue indeterminately, even under changed conditions
of existence.
This general law is the recognized basis of modern scientific
ethnography.[48] It is open to numerous limitations, and its
application must never be made without the consideration of accessory
and modifying circumstances. For instance, certain areas are much more
potent than others in the influence they exert on man: some act more
powerfully on his mind than on his body, or the reverse; some peoples
are more susceptible to physical influences of a given class than
others; and the length of time required is variable.
_Scheme of Geologic Time during the Age of Man in the Eastern
Hemisphere._
{ Europe connected with Africa. { Man homogeneous.
{ Temperature mild. { Industry palæolithic with
{ 1. Pre-glacial. { African elephant in England. { simple implements.
{ { Tropical animals abundant. { Migrations extensive.
{ { { Language rudimentary.
{
Quaternary, { { Europe severed from { Man dividing into races.
Diluvial { { Africa. { Industry palæolithic with
or { 2. Glacial. { Temperature low. { compound implements.
Pleistocene { { Reindeer in France. { Cave dwellings. Migrations
Epoch. { { Arctic animals abundant. { limited; races in fixed areas.
{
{ { Continents assume present forms. { Races completely established.
{ 3. Post-glacial. { Temperature rising. { Industry neolithic.
{ Temperate zones established. { Beginning of sedentary life.
{ Languages developed in classes.
{ Geographic conditions undisturbed. { Races develop into contact.
{ 1. Pre-historic. { Wild animals not diminished. { Industry of stone and copper.
{
Present { 2. Proto- { Conditions altered by agriculture. { Great migrations begin.
or { historic. { Wild animals slain or tamed. { Industry of bronze and iron.
Alluvial {
Epoch. { { Geographic conditions greatly { Extensive mingling of races.
{ 3. Historic. { modified by man. { Development of nations.
{ { All lower animals subjugated.