The Kingdom of Man

by Sir E. Ray Lankester

8. The Emergence of Man.

As to how and when man emerged from the terrestrial animal population so strictly controlled and moulded by natural selection is a matter upon which we gain further information year by year. There must be many here who remember, as I do, the astounding and almost sudden discovery some forty-five years ago of abundant and overwhelming evidence that man had existed in Western Europe as a contemporary of the mammoth and rhinoceros, the hyaena and the lion. The dispute over the facts submitted to the scientific world by Boucher de Perthes was violent and of short duration. The immense antiquity of man was established and accepted on all sides just before Mr. Darwin published his book on The Origin of Species. The palæolithic implements, though not improbably made 150,000 years ago, do not, any more than do the imperfect skulls occasionally found in association with them, indicate a condition of the human race much more monkey-like than is presented by existing savage races (see [Figs. 1 and 2] and Frontispiece, and their explanations). The implements themselves are manufactured with great skill and artistic feeling. Within the last ten years much rougher flint implements, of peculiar types, have been discovered in gravels which are 500 feet above the level of the existing rivers (see [Figs. 3] and [4]). These “Eoliths” of the South of England 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. We have as yet found no remains giving the direct basis for conclusions on the subject; but judging by the analogy (not by any means a conclusive method) furnished by the history of other large animals now living alongside of man—such as the horse, the rhinoceros, the tapir, the wolf, the hyaena, and the bear—it is not improbable that it was in the remote period known as the lower Miocene—remote even as compared with the gravels in which Eoliths occur—that Natural Selection began to favour that increase in the size of the brain of a large and not very powerful semi-erect ape which eventuated, after some hundreds of thousands of years, in the breeding-out of a being with a relatively enormous brain-case, a skilful hand, and an inveterate tendency to throw stones, flourish sticks, protect himself in caves, and in general to defeat aggression and satisfy his natural appetites by the use of his wits rather than by strength alone—in which, however, he was not deficient. Probably this creature had nearly the full size of brain and every other physical character of modern man, although he had not as yet stumbled upon the art of making fire by friction, nor converted his conventional grunts and groans, his screams, laughter, and interjections into a language corresponding to (and thenceforth developing) his power of thought.

Fig. 1.—Pithecanthropus from Java Fig. 2.—Greek Skull

Photographs of a front view of the two skulls shewn in profile in the frontispiece, taken so as to shew the breadth of the ‘forehead’ or prefrontal area, which is seen to be very much greater in the Greek skull ([Fig. 2]) than in the Javanese Pithecanthropus ([Fig. 1]). The prefrontal area is marked out by a black dotted line, the outline of a plane (the prefrontal plane) which is at right angles to the sagittal plane and passes through the meeting point of the frontal with the two parietal bones above; whilst below it passes through the median point called ‘ophryon.’ The plane of the picture is parallel with this prefrontal plane. The white dotted line gives the breadth of the boss-like prefrontal area. It is identical in position with the line d in the side view of the same skulls given in the frontispiece. The black dotted line is identical in position with the line A C in those figures. The two specimens are equally reduced in the photograph. (Original).

Fig. 3.

Photographs of eight Eoliths of one and the same shape, namely, with a chipped or worked tooth-like prominence, rendering the flint fit for use as a ‘borer’—photographed of half the actual size (linear measurement) from specimens found near Ightham, Kent, in the high-level gravel—which form part of the Prestwich collection in the Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London. Many others of the same shape have been found in the same locality. These and the trinacrial implements photographed in Fig. 4 are far older than the oval and leaf-shaped ‘palæoliths’ of the low-lying gravels of the valleys of the Thames, Somme, and other rivers. (Original).

Fig. 4.

Photographs of six Eoliths of the ‘shoulder-of-mutton’ or ‘trinacrial’ type—from the same locality and collection as those shewn in Fig. 3. The photographs are of half the length of the actual specimens. A considerable number of worked flints of this peculiar shape have been found in the same locality. Possibly their shape enabled the primitive men who ‘chipped’ and used them to attach them by thongs to a stick or club. The descriptive term ‘trinacrial’ is suggested by me for these flints in allusion to the form of the island of Sicily which they resemble. (Original).