20. Race Origins
Almost every one sooner or later becomes interested in the problem of the origin of the human races and the history of their development. We see mankind divided into a number of varieties that differ strikingly in appearance. If these varieties are modifications of a single ancestral form, what caused them to alter, and what has been the history of the change?
In the present state of science, we cannot wholly answer these important questions. We know very little about the causes that change human types; and we possess only incomplete information as to the history of races. Stray bits of evidence here and there are too scattered to afford many helpful clues. The very earliest men, as we know them from fossils, are too far removed from any of the living varieties, are too primitive, to link very definitely with the existing races, which can all be regarded as intergrading varieties of a single species, Homo sapiens. In the latter half of the Old Stone Age, in the Aurignacian period, at a time estimated to have been from twenty to twenty-five thousand years ago, we commence to encounter fossils which seem to foreshadow the modern races. The so-called Grimaldi type of man from this period possesses Negroid affinities, the contemporary Cro-Magnon and perhaps Brünn types evince Caucasian ones. But we know neither the origin nor the precise descendants of these fossil races.[3] They appear and then vanish from the scene. About all that we can conclude from this fragment of evidence is that the races of man as they are spread over the earth to-day must have been at least some tens of thousands of years in forming. What caused them to differentiate, on which part of the earth’s surface each took on its peculiarities, how they further subdivided, what were the connecting links between them, and what happened to these lost links—on all these points the answer of anthropology is as yet incomplete.
It is no different in other fields of biology. As long as the zoölogist or botanist reviews his grand classifications or the wide sweep of organic evolution for fifty million years back, he seems to obtain striking and simple results. When he turns his attention to a small group, attempting to trace in detail its subvarieties, and the relations and history of these, the task is seen to be intricate and the accumulated knowledge is usually insufficient to solve more than a fraction of the problems that arise.
There is, then, nothing unusual in the situation of partial bafflement in which anthropology still finds itself as regards the human races.