6. Age of Anthropological Science
The foregoing exposition will make clear why anthropology is generally regarded as one of the newer sciences—why its chairs are few, its places in curricula of education scattered. As an organized science, with a program and a method of its own, it is necessarily recent because it could not arise until the biological and social sciences had both attained enough organized development to come into serious contact.
On the other hand, as an unmethodical body of knowledge, as an interest, anthropology is plainly one of the oldest of the sisterhood of sciences. How could it well be otherwise than that men were at least as much interested in each other as in the stars and mountains and plants and animals? Every savage is a bit of an ethnologist about neighboring tribes and knows a legend of the origin of mankind. Herodotus, the “father of history,” devoted half of his nine books to pure ethnology, and Lucretius, a few centuries later, tried to solve by philosophical deduction and poetical imagination many of the same problems that modern anthropology is more cautiously attacking with the methods of science. In neither chemistry nor geology nor biology was so serious an interest developed as in anthropology, until nearly two thousand years after these ancients.
In the pages that follow, the central anthropological problems that concern the relations of the organic and cultural factors in man will be defined and solutions offered to the degree that they seem to have been validly determined. On each side of this goal, however, stretches an array of more or less authenticated formulations, of which some of the more important will be reviewed. On the side of the organic, consideration will tend largely to matters of fact; in the sphere of culture, processes can here and there be illustrated; in accord with the fact that anthropology rests upon biological and underlies purely historical science.
CHAPTER II
FOSSIL MAN
[7.] The “Missing Link.”—[8.] Family tree of the Primates.—[9.] Geological and glacial time.—[10.] Place of man’s origin and development.—[11.] Pithecanthropus.—[12.] Heidelberg man.—[13.] The Piltdown form.—[14.] Neandertal man.—[15.] Rhodesian man.—[16.] The Cro-Magnon race.—[17.] The Brünn race.—[18.] The Grimaldi race: Neolithic races.—[19.] The metric expression of human evolution.