THE AGE OF MAN
The Pleistocene or “Ice Age,” and the Recent period in which we are living at the present moment are not sharply separated by any event readily recognized or dated, and the two combined are of very short duration as compared with other periods more clearly established by the passing of centuries. Together they comprise the Age of Man as commonly recognized, with about a million years representing the Pleistocene period, some ten to twenty thousand years the Recent. When geologists of the nineteenth century suggested that the coming of man should be regarded as the beginning of a new era, the name Psychozoic was proposed, and to some extent this term has been applied to the present period. More in keeping with other period names is Holocene, meaning entirely recent. Common usage, however, applies the simple term Recent to this unfinished chapter which is also without a clear-cut beginning.
Zoologically, man is merely one of the creatures that arrived in the course of time, along with other mammals. Just when he arrived and how he looked at the time of his coming cannot be determined from a study of fossils. Perhaps it is of no importance. There is nothing to indicate his existence before the Cenozoic, no completely satisfactory proof of existence before the Pleistocene period. As with other inhabitants of the earth, it is probable that he became prominent only after a great deal of competition with other creatures which kept his ancestors submerged for thousands of years. The Ice Age, with its check upon the progress of competing animals, undoubtedly gave him an advantage. His superior mentality enabled him to overcome adversity by methods not available to other mammals; his inventive and mechanical genius must have been greatly strengthened by his experience during this interval.
At about this point, where prehistory begins to merge into history, the geologist and paleontologist must let other interpreters carry on. Archeologists and anthropologists take up the work, and through their efforts many details have been added to our knowledge of the human race. The study of biology, which is the science of life, has provided an instructive viewpoint that enables us to see ourselves against the vast background built up by investigations into the nature of the earth and its ancient inhabitants. This science deals with living creatures as organisms—plants and animals so organized as to be capable of existence only in an environment which provides exact life requirements.
The Age of Man has been variously characterized as an age of soul, of higher intelligence, of culture, and finally, of civilization, freedom and democracy. The “crowning glory” of the organic world is pictured in history as a creature who has busied himself for thousands of years with the building up and tearing down of civilizations. Prehistory reveals this habit as something unique in the human character, for there is no other organism that has specialized so persistently in the creation of its own environment, no other that has had the combined power and talent to produce so much change.
More than anything else, the prehistoric record is a lesson in adaptation, which in its broadest sense means fitness for life under particular conditions, and always subject to organic law. Man’s efforts to bring about an adjustment between himself and his civilization have centered largely on the method of forcing himself into the mold that happens to be present, one pattern today, another tomorrow. No creature of the past has had to adapt itself to anything so radically new or so thoroughly revolutionary. The vital problem now is whether this man-made environment will prove helpful or disastrous.
Though one of its names is “culture,” it has grown sporadically and unevenly, with little evidence of the cultivation that is implied and required. Parts have been expanded to extraordinary proportions while others equally essential have been retarded in their growth. A more intelligent handling of this environment factor seems to be possible, and the present mania for “organization” may become tempered with an awakening consciousness of organic requirements where organism and environment are involved. Once we grasp the idea that “culture” results from man’s effort to improve his living, by putting into his environment something that was not there before—then, surely, this history of a billion years of living, and as many “ways of life,” should teach us something we ought to know as we go into an all-out endeavor to teach a whole world how to obtain a one-and-only way.
We may stand at the beginning of an era for which an appropriate name has not yet been suggested. Civilization, on the other hand, may provide only a minor epoch to be added in some remote time to the story of fossils.