regarding the ancestry of our species. Much is known about the remains of
many kinds of men who lived in prehistoric times, but we need consider
here only one form which lived long before the glacial period in the
so-called Tertiary times. In 1894 a scientist named Dubois discovered in
Java some of the remains of an animal which was partly ape and partly man.
So well did these remains exhibit the characters of Haeckel's hypothetical
ape-man, _Pithecanthropus_, that the name fitted the creature like a
glove. Specifically, the cranium presents an arch which is intermediate
between that of the average ape and of the lowest human beings. It
possessed protruding brows like those of the gorilla. The estimated brain
capacity was about one thousand cubic centimeters, four hundred more than
that of any known ape, and much less than the average of the lower human
races. Even without other characters, these would indicate that the animal
was actually a "missing link" in the scientific sense,--that is, a form
which is near the common progenitors of the modern species of apes and of
man. We would not expect to find a missing link that was actually
intermediate in all respects between modern apes and modern men, any more
than we should look for actual connecting bands of tissue between any two
leaves upon a tree. A missing link, in the true sense, is like a bud of
earlier years which stood near the point from which two twigs of the
present day now diverge. So _Pithecanthropus_ is a part of the chain
leading to man, not far from the place where the human line sprang from a
lower primate ancestor.
Of the fossil remains of true prehistoric men, little need be said. We
cannot know whether the races now living in the regions where these
remains are found are really the descendants of the older types, and so a
direct comparison cannot be made. It is true that the brain capacities of
the man of Spy, of the Neanderthal, and of the English caverns are lower
than those of modern civilized races, but the differences are not so
striking and not so clearly indicative of the apelike ancestor of man as
in the case of the previous comparison of _Pithecanthropus_ with apes and
men.
* * * * *
The foregoing facts illustrate the conclusive evidence brought forward by
science that human evolution in physical respects is true. Even if we
wished to do so, we cannot do away with the facts of structure and
development and fossil history, nor is there any other explanation more
reasonable than evolution for these facts. If now we should inquire into
the causes of this process, we would find again that the present study of
man and men reveals their subjection to the laws of nature which
accomplish evolution elsewhere in the organic world.
The fact of human variation requires no elucidation; it is as real for men
as for insects and trees. Indeed, some of the most significant facts of
variation have been first made out in the case of the human species. The
struggle for existence can be seen in everyday life. We cannot doubt its
reality when scores perish annually because of their failure to withstand
the extreme degrees of temperature during midwinter and midsummer; when
starvation causes so many deaths, and when the incessant combat with
bacterial enemies alone brings the list of casualties on the human side in
our own country to more than two hundred and fifty thousand a year. As in
nature at large, the more unfit are eliminated as a result of this
struggle, while the more adapted succeed. In the long run, that particular
applicant for a clerkship or any other work who may be the more fitted is
the one who gets it. While the severity of competition may be somewhat
mitigated as the result of social organization, and while our altruistic
charitable institutions enable many to prolong a more or less efficient
existence, the struggle for existence cannot be entirely done away with.
Heredity also is a real human process, and it follows the same course as
in animals at large; as in the case of variation, some of the fundamental
laws of its operation have been first worked out in the case of human
phenomena, and have been found subsequently to be of general application.
Reverting to the specific question as to the earliest divergence of man
from the apes, we can readily see how the superior development of the
ape-man's brain gave him a great advantage over his nearest competitors,
and how truly human ingenuity enabled the earliest men to employ weapons
and crude instruments instead of brute force. Thus the gap between men and
apes widened more and more, as reasoning power increased through
successive generations. This is another aspect of the statement that the
supreme position of man has been gained, not by superior organization in
physical respects outside of the nervous system, but by the superior
control of human organization by the higher organs of this system.
The unity of nature and of its processes is established more and more
surely as the naturalist classifies the facts of structure, development,
fossil history, and evolutionary method. Our own species is not unique; it
takes its high place among other organic forms whose lives are controlled
in every way by the uniform consistent laws of the world.
* * * * *
The physical evolution of human races is the next major division of the
large subject before us. Heretofore the obvious differences displayed by
various races have been disregarded and the species has been treated as a
unit, in order that its evolution from pre-human ancestors might be made
clear. Knowing now how the facts of structure show that the supreme
position of our kind has been attained mainly as the result of the
progressive elaboration of the higher portions of the brain, and not
because new and unique structures have been developed, we are prepared to
turn our attention to the diverse characteristics of human races; and
during this inquiry anatomical matters will still be the only ones to be
reviewed. The intellectual and social characters of numerous races belong
to the category of physiological or functional phenomena, which are to
receive due consideration at a later time. It is the meaning of the facts
of racial diversity for which we are now to look.
For many reasons this subject is more difficult to describe in a concise
outline than those taken up before. It is true that every one is familiar
with different types of human beings, such as the Negro and Japanese and
Chinese, while furthermore the obvious differences between such races as
the Norwegian and Italian are sufficiently marked to strike the attention
of any one who looks about at his fellow-passengers in a crowded street
car. But few indeed have a comprehensive knowledge of the wider range of
racial variation in which these familiar examples find their place.
Anthropology, or the science of mankind, is a large and well-organized
department of knowledge, dealing with the entire array of structural and
physiological characters of all men. One of its subdivisions,
anthropometry, is almost an independent discipline with methods of its
own; it describes the characteristics of human races as these are
determined by statistical methods of a somewhat technical nature. There is
still another science, ethnology, which deals more particularly with
institutions, customs, beliefs, and languages rather than with physical
matters, although it is clear that ethnology and anthropology cannot be
sharply separated, and that each must employ the results of the other for
its own particular purposes.
Because men have always been interested in the study of themselves, the
subject of racial evolution is literally enormous, and the attempt to give
anything like a complete description of what is known would obviously be
futile. But it is possible to obtain a clear conception of certain of the
fundamental principles that fall into line with the other parts of the
doctrine of organic evolution with which we have now become acquainted.
The main questions, therefore, may be stated in simple terms. The first
deals with the evidences as to the reality of evolution during the
historical and prehistoric development of the various types of man from
earlier common ancestors; the second asks whether the lines of racial
evolution are further continuations of the line leading from ape-like
ancestors to the human species as a type. In order to give the proper
perspective, it will be well to state at the present juncture, first, that
the various kinds of men do not vary from each other in a chance manner so
as to show all possible types and varieties, but that they fall into
natural groups or families distinguished by certain common
characteristics, just as do all other kinds of species of animals; in the
second place, it appears that some of the differences between the races
denoted higher on structural accounts and the lowest forms of man are of
the same nature as those observed in the review of the various species of
primates from the lemurs to man.
* * * * *
It is best to look at the whole question in a very simple and common-sense
way before undertaking an extended examination of the details of human
diversity. The most casual survey of the peoples that we know best because
of our own individual nearness to them enables us to realize that the
races now upon the earth have not existed forever and ever, or even for
the age of 6000 years as contended by Archbishop Ussher. They have all
come into existence as such, and they differ from their known antecedents;
so that at the very outset common-sense leads us to accept evolution as
true, if we admit that human races have changed during the course of
recent centuries. We know, for example, that the so-called Mexicans of
to-day are a people produced by a fusion of Spanish conquerors and Indian
aborigines the Mexican is neither Spaniard nor Indian, though he may
resemble both in certain respects; he is a product of natural evolution,
accomplished in this case by an amalgamation of two contrasted types. When
we speak of the American people, we must realize that it too has come into
existence as such, and even, indeed, that it is in the actual process of
evolution at the present time. The various foreign elements that have been
added during the last few decades by the hundreds of thousands are
becoming merged with the people who preceded them, just as the Dutch and
the French and the English coalesced during the days of early settlement
to form the young American nation. Perhaps most of us call ourselves
Anglo-Saxon, but we are in reality somewhat different even in physical
respects from the Englishmen of Queen Elizabeth's time, who alone deserved
the name Anglo-Saxon. This very term indicates an evolution of a type that
differs from both the Angles and the early Saxons of King Alfred's age.
These are simple examples which illustrate many features of the universal
history of human races wherever they are to be found. Even in the
comparatively peaceful times of our modern era the history of any race is
a veritable turmoil of constant changes; conquerors impress their
characters upon the vanquished, while the victors often adopt some of the
features of the conquered. Colonies split off from the mother nation to
follow out their destinies under other conditions. Nowhere does the
naturalist find evidence of long-established permanence, or an unentwined
course of an uninterrupted and unmodified line of racial descent.
It is the task of the student of human evolution to unravel the tangled
threads of human histories. The task is relatively simple when it is
concerned with recent times where the aid of written history may be
summoned but when the events of remote and prehistoric ages are to be
placed in order, the difficulties seem well-nigh insuperable. All is not
known, nor can it ever be known; but wherever facts can be established,
science can deal with them. By a study of the present races of mankind,
much of their earlier history can be worked out, for their genetic
relations may be determined by employing the principle that likeness means
consanguinity. Let us suppose an alien visitor to reach our planet from
somewhere else; if he were endowed with only ordinary human common-sense,
he would very soon ascertain the common origin of the English-speaking
people in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, South
Africa, and many other places. Even if he could not understand a word of
the English language, he would be justified in regarding them all as the
descendants of common ancestors because they agree in so many physical
qualities. The anthropologist works according to the same common-sense
principle, obtaining results that find no explanation other than evolution
when the varying characters that are used to determine social relationship
are properly classified and related. It is to these characters that we
must now give some attention.
* * * * *
The average stature of adults varies in different races from four feet one
inch in certain blacks to nearly six feet and seven inches, as among the
Patagonians. These are the extreme values for normal averages, although
dwarfs only fifteen inches high have been known, while "giants" sometimes
occur with a height of nine feet and five inches. Such individuals are of
course rare and abnormal, and are not to be taken into account in
establishing the average stature of a race for use in comparison with that
of another group.
The color of the skin is another criterion of racial relationship, though
it is more variable in races of common descent than we are wont to assume.
We are familiar with the fair and florid skin of the northern European,
the fair and pale skin in middle and southern Europe, the coppery red of
the American Indian, the brown of the Malay, of the Polynesian and of the
Moor, the yellowish cast of the Chinese and Japanese, and the deeper
velvety black of the Zulu; but it has been found that many of the close
relatives of the black are lighter in skin color than some of our
Caucasian relatives, so that this character cannot be taken by itself as a
single criterion of racial affinity.
Perhaps the most conservative and most reliable character that serves for
the broad classification of the human races is the shape of the individual
hairs of the head. We are familiar with the straight lank hair of the
Mongolian peoples and of the various tribes of American Indians, in whom
the hair possesses these peculiarities because each element grows as a
nearly perfect cylinder from the cells of the skin at the bottom of a tiny
pit or hair-follicle. The familiar wavy hair of white men owes its
character to the fact that the individual elements are formed by the skin,
not as pencil-like rods, but as flattened cylinders. They are oval or
elliptical in cross-section, and when they emerge from the skin they grow
into a long spiral. If, now, the hair is formed as a very much flattened
rod about one-half as wide in one diameter as in the other, it curls into
a very tight close spiral and gives the frizzly or woolly head-covering of
the Papuan and of the Negro.
In the next place, the shape of the cranium is a character of much value.
This is determined as the proportion between the transverse diameter of
the skull above the ears to the long diameter, namely, the line that runs
from the middle of the brow to the most posterior point of the skull. In
the so-called "long-headed" or dolichocephalic races, the proportion is
seventy-five to one hundred, while in those forms that have more rounded
or brachycephalic heads, like the Polynesian and the black pygmy, the
relation is eighty-three to one hundred. The cranial capacity again varies
considerably, from nine hundred cubic centimeters to twenty-two hundred
cubic centimeters. Many striking variations are also found in the
projection of the jaws. A line drawn from the lower end of the nose to the
chin makes a certain angle with the line drawn from the chin to the
posterior end of the lower jaw; if the jaw projects very greatly, this
angle will be much less than when they do not. In most of the Caucasian
peoples, the lines meet at an angle of eighty-nine degrees, or very nearly
a right angle, but in some of the lower races the figure may be only
fifty-one degrees. Additional characters of the teeth and of the palate
are also taken into account, and have proved their utility. Finally, the
nose exhibits a wide range of variation from the small delicate feature of
the Chinaman to the large, well-arched nose of the Indian. It may be
hollowed out at the bridge instead of arched; again, it may be nearly an
equilateral triangle in outline, as in the Veddahs, and the nostrils may
open somewhat forward instead of downward. As many as fifteen distinct
varieties of the human nose have been catalogued by Bertillon.
These are the principal bodily characters which the anthropologist uses to
distinguish races and by their means to determine the more immediate or
remote community of origin of comparable types. Many of these
characteristics, as indeed we may already see, are decidedly important in
connection with the second problem specified above, for in the case of the
flat triangular nose and projecting jaws of a low negroid we may discern
clear resemblances to certain features of the apes.
* * * * *
Long before the doctrine of evolution was understood and adopted, students
of the human races had been deeply impressed by their natural
resemblances. As early as 1672 Bernier divided human beings according to
certain of these fundamental similarities into four groups; namely, the
white European, the black African, the yellow Asiatic, and the Laplander.
Linnæus, in the eighteenth century, included _Homo sapiens_ in his list of
species, recognizing four subspecies in the European, Asiatic, African,
and Indian of America. Blumenbach in 1775 added the Malay, thus giving the
five types that most of us learned in our school days. But the different
varieties of men recognized by these observers were believed to be created
in their modern forms and with their present-day characteristics; the
common character of skin color exhibited by any group of peoples of a
single continent was to them only a convenient label for purposes of
description and classification. It was not until years later that
fundamental resemblances were recognized as indicating an actual blood
relationship of the races displaying them, and therefore of evolution.
Since the doctrine of human descent and of the divergence of human races
in later evolution has been accepted, those who have attempted to work out
fully the complete ancestry of different peoples have found that no single
character can be taken by itself, while the various criteria themselves
differ in reliability; the color of the skin is not so sure a guide as the
character of the hair and skull, wherefore the classifications of recent
times, notably those of Huxley and Haeckel, have been based largely upon
the latter. The latest systems have been more rigidly scientific and more
in accord with the most modern conceptions of organic relationships in
general, as evidenced by the thoroughgoing methods of Duckworth in his
recent treatise on human classification.
It now remains to present the salient facts regarding the genetic
relationships of typical human races, although it is obviously impossible
to go into all of the details of the subject. But these are not essential
for the main purpose, which is to show that the evolutionary explanation
is the only one that is reasonable and self-consistent. Opinions are
sometimes widely at variance regarding countless minor points, but no
anthropologist of to-day can be anything but an evolutionist, because the
main principles upon which the specialists agree fall directly into line
with those established elsewhere in zoölogy. It seems best to state these
principles without reverting to controversial matters which find their
place in the monographs of the experts. Any comprehensive account such as
that of Keane, even if it may not give the final word, will be entirely
sufficient to demonstrate how fruitful are the methods of evolution when
they are employed for the study of human races, and indeed how impossible
it is to discuss human histories without finding conclusive evidences of
their evolutionary nature.
The facts that are available indicate that the first members of our
species evolved in an equatorial continent which is now submerged, and
which occupied a position between the present continents of Asia and
Africa. From this center hordes of primitive men migrated to distant
centers where they differentiated into three primary and distinct groups.
The first of these was gradually resolved into the darker-skinned peoples
most of whom now live in the continent of Africa, although many dwell also
in the islands of the western Pacific Ocean. The second branch divided
almost immediately to produce, on the one hand, the Indians of the new
world and, on the other, the yellow-skinned inhabitants of Asia and other
places. The third branch developed as such in the neighborhood of the
Mediterranean Sea, and produced the series of so-called Caucasian peoples,
which are by far the most familiar to us and to which most of us belong.
But so early did the second branch divide that there are virtually four
main divisions of the human species that are to be examined in serial
order.
It is best to begin with our own division, because its greater familiarity
makes it easier to become acquainted with the methods and results of
anthropology, on the basis of facts that we already know. Three
subordinate types exist, located primarily in northern, central, and
southern Europe respectively, but many other races dwell elsewhere that
are assignable to one or another of these subdivisions. In northeastern
Europe we find people such as the Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, and north
Germans, that average five feet eight inches in height. They have the
long, wavy, and soft hair which is a general characteristic of the whole
Caucasian group, although its light flaxen color is distinctive. The blue
eye and florid complexion accompany the light color of the hair. The skull
is of the longer type, the jaws and forehead are straight and square, the
nose is large and long without a distinct arch, and the teeth are
relatively small. It is not so well known that the Scandinavian type is so
closely copied by many people of Asia, such as the western Persians,
Afghans, and certain of the Hindus, living in a continent that we are
inclined to assign to the Mongol only. In the possession of these
characters the Northern Europeans and other races specified display
evidences of their common ancestry and evolution quite as conclusively as
in the case of the cats discussed in an earlier chapter where the meaning
of essential likeness was first demonstrated.