The Romance of Modern Geology / Describing in simple but exact language the making of the earth with some account of prehistoric animal life

by Edwin Sharpe Grew

CHAPTER XXIV

THE KINGDOM OF MAN

The greatest zoologist of his time, Sir E. Ray Lankester, has said that man has differed from all other inhabitants of the animal kingdom in being able to resist the pressure of circumstances which have altered and destroyed them. In all the cases of the animals which we have been considering, these creatures have been limited by the conditions of geography; they have been killed by extremes of heat and cold; they have been subject to starvation if one kind of diet were unobtainable; and they have constantly altered in shape, structure, and appearance, according to the requirements of the new conditions in which they found themselves. But man's mind and will have enabled him to cross rivers and oceans by rafts and boats, to clothe himself against cold, to shelter himself from heat and rain, to prepare an endless variety of food by fire, and to increase and multiply as no other animal without change of form, and without submitting to the terrible axe of selection wielded by ruthless circumstance over all other living things on this globe. "And as he has more and more obtained this control over his surroundings, he has expanded that unconscious protective attitude towards his mature offspring which natural selection had already favoured and established among the mammals into a conscious and larger love for his tribe, his race, his nationality, and his kind. He has developed speech, the power of communicating, and, above all, of recording from generation to generation his thought and knowledge. He has formed communities, built cities, and set up empires; and at every step of his progress man has receded farther and farther from the ancient rule exercised by nature over the lower animals."

Whence comes this power? When and how did it arrive? That we do not know. For the early beginnings of man we can only grope among the relics of his progress which he has left for the speculation of his more intelligent descendants, in the shape of the rude implements and dwellings which he used in the childhood of the race.

From time to time actual remains of early man are found buried among the uppermost strata, and from them we can make some guesses at his age. Virtually three links have been found in the chain of human ancestry. The earliest is represented by the "Trinil Man" of Java, found by Dubois in 1890, and named the Pithecanthropos erectus, in reference to its likeness both to man as we know him and to the great anthropoid apes, although it had a much more erect carriage than any of them. This relic, man or some other creature as it may have been, stands midway between the chimpanzee and the more typical "Neandarthal Man," the skull of which was found in a cave of the Neander Valley, near Dusseldorf, in 1856. Thirty years later the skulls of the "Spy men" of the same type as this were found in Belgium. This type lived in what we call the early Stone Age, and was a low type of meat-eating hunter. The next higher type, the third type of man, is that identified with what geologists and anthropologists call the "Gibraltar skull," from the place where the skull was found. But all we know of these types of man we must judge from their skulls and from the stone implements and the animals found near them. The skulls of primitive men and of modern men show a certain difference in shape. If we take two skulls, that of a man and a monkey, and draw a line from the region just over the nose to the place at the back of the skull just above where it joins the backbone, there is left above the line a great dome in the human skull, whereas in the monkey the place left above is much flatter and much shallower. Now the skull of the Pithecanthropos erectus found in Java resembles the monkey's skull in this shallowness; and the skulls of the Neandarthal and the Spy men also had shallower brain-pans than the men of to-day. They may, therefore, be either different creatures or they may merely have had smaller brains. We can only say that the creature called Man suddenly appears among the lower animals with a brain some five or six times the bulk (in proportion to his size and weight) of that of any surviving ape. Great as is the difference, it is one of the most curious facts in the history of man's development that the bulk of his brain does not seem to have continued to increase in any very marked degree since the early Ages of Stone.

What were the Stone Ages? In the long years before primitive man learned to weld iron or bronze he formed his weapons and his tools from stone and flint; and geologists and antiquarians have discovered several of these "Ages of Stone" of different periods. For example, the Stone Age which our grandfathers spoke of is now called the Neolithic Age; and in the second quarter of the last century it became gradually admitted that man had existed earlier than that and had swung hammers and chipped edges in what we now call Palæolithic times. That would put man back to the age of the Mammoth. But in the last quarter of last century a new claim arose. The Palæolithic stone weapons and tools were made 150,000 years ago, and were manufactured with great skill and even artistic feeling. Within the last ten years much rougher flint implements of peculiar types have been found in gravels which are 500 to 700 feet above the level of the existing rivers—in the drift of which Palæolithic implements were found. To these older, clumsier weapons and tools—if, indeed, implements they be—the name Eoliths was given by Mr. J. Allen Brown. These Eoliths of the south of England and of Belgium indicate a race of men of less developed skill than the makers of the Palæoliths, and carry the antiquity of man at least as far back beyond the Palæoliths as these are from the present day. So much for speculation. But are the Eoliths truly implements, or are they, as a determined school of anthropologists assert, merely flints which fortuitously resemble the rougher variety of true Palæolith? The strongest attack made on their authenticity comes from Professor Boule and M. Laville, of the French School of Mines, who say that in the flint waste of a cement factory at Mantes they have discovered "pseudo-Eoliths" which are made by the action of the water of the mill, and which resemble every known variety of the so-called "Eolith." Their suggestion is that Eoliths were not made by man at all but were produced by the action of running water. To which the Eolithic anthropologists retort that Eoliths ought surely to be produced by running water now, and that some Seine-made Eoliths would be more convincing. The differences between the Mantes specimens and the "true" Eolith cannot be detected by the untrained eye; but, spite of the French sceptics, the school of believers in the genuineness of the Eolith is growing.

We need not enter further into these controversies, and we need only say that flint implements of various kinds are found all over the world, in Egypt before the Pharaohs, in Australia, in South Africa, and indeed in every continent. They are being made even to-day by aborigines in Australasia, and there is even a "flint knapping" industry which survives to-day at Brandon, in Suffolk, though these flints are not intended for use as spear-heads or arrow-heads or anything so primitive. There is little geological evidence to show the place where man first appeared; but what we know of his frame and constitution induces us to believe that somewhere in the warm climate of Southern Asia was his first habitation. From this, or from some similar tract in that quarter of the globe, there seems to have been four great migratory movements. These were complicated by reverse movements, by cross migrations, and by wanderings, which we shall probably never altogether understand; and so we can only sum up briefly the chief features of them.

The greatest movement appears to have been north-eastward between the great desert and mountain tract of Central Asia on the one hand, and the Pacific on the other, attended by divergences eastward to many islands (as they are now) of the Pacific. When the emigrants got too far north to wish to explore further, they spread out to east and west, forming a belt below the Arctic regions and sending a branch down the whole length of the American Continent. This movement embraced the Mongoloid races, and included the old American Indians and the Malayan races. Before the disturbing influences of man's later development, this branch had three notable centres of civilisation: the Chinese in Asia, the Mexican in North America, and the Peruvian in South America.

A second and much less numerous band of emigrants struck out to the south-east, and reaching the southern hemisphere gave rise to the Australian and New Zealand aboriginal races—all peoples who never rose very much or developed notable power.

To a third movement to the south-west is assigned the peopling of Africa south of the Sahara with the negro and similar races, which have become very numerous but never very powerful or intelligent.

The fourth movement was north-westward across or around the barriers of desert and mountain to Western Asia, Europe, and North Africa. These emigrants were the true adventurers, hardy, progressive, and energetic; and their descendants have developed into the strongest and most vigorous of the human family. The less progressive of them remain still on the further side of the mountains of Western Asia. The three passage-ways used by the original emigrants seem to have been (1) the Red Sea Nile-Valley path, in which the dusky white and the Ethiopian races mingled; (2) the Euphrates Valley, down which the Semitic races moved; and (3) the tracts of the more northerly plateau, across which moved the ancestral Aryan races. It is also quite certain that some races moved backwards by this route and returned to India to give rise to the Brahmins, the most learned race of that country.

We have thus traced, so far as our limited knowledge will allow us, the geographical spread of man's dominance. But we cannot associate him with the history that in previous chapters we have roughly traced, of the development of the lower members of the animal kingdom. The qualities which have developed in Man are of such an unprecedented power and so far dominate everything else in his characteristics and surroundings that they justify the view that he forms a new departure in the gradual unfolding of this world's predestined scheme. Knowledge, Reason, Self-consciousness, Will, are the attributes of Man. He goes on from strength to strength, and in the Divine purpose which created him may lie the possibility that in the future he may attain a fuller knowledge than any he yet possesses. The great poet of the Victorian Age wrote of Knowledge:—

Flower in the crannied wall

I pluck you out of the crannies;

I hold you there, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower—but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

The nearer approach to that understanding is the greatest and truest aim of scientific investigation.

The End