The human species

by A. de Quatrefages

In phenomena of this kind, conditions of life act as the supreme ruler. If they vary, they become modifying agents, if they remain constant, agents of stabilisation.

In both cases their result is to harmonise organisms with the conditions of their existence.

Heredity, which is essentially a preserving agent, becomes an agent of variation, when it transmits and accumulates the modifying actions of the conditions of life.

XV. It is now easy to understand, in the general sense, the formation of human races.

Man at first doubtless peopled his centre of appearance and the countries immediately adjoining. He then commenced the immense and varied dispersion which dates from tertiary times and continues to the present day. He has passed through two geological epochs, and is now in his third. He has seen the mammoth and rhinoceros flourishing in Siberia in the midst of a rich fauna; he has at least seen them driven by the cold into the midst of Europe; and he has assisted in their extinction. Later on, he has retaken possession of the barren-lands himself; he has pushed his colonies as far as the neighbourhood of the pole, perhaps to the very pole itself, while at the same time he has invaded the forests and deserts of the tropics, reached the extremity of two great continents, and peopled all the archipelagoes.

For many thousands of years, man has therefore been subject to the action of all the external conditions of life with which we are acquainted, to that of the conditions of life of which we can at the utmost only form an idea. The various kinds of life to which he has been subjected, and the different degrees of civilisation at which he stopped or to which he has reached, have all diversified still more his conditions of existence. Was it possible that he should retain everywhere and for all time his original characters?

Experience and observation lead to an entirely opposite conclusion. When we see the Anglo-Saxon of our days, although protected by all the resources of an advanced civilisation, subjected to the American conditions of life, and changed into a Yankee, we must admit that at each of his great stages, when man is submitted to new conditions of existence, he has had to harmonise himself with them, and in so doing undergo modification. Each of these principal stations has necessarily witnessed the formation of a corresponding race. The original characters, thus successively affected, have become more and more altered, by reason of the length of the journey, and the difference of conditions. When they have reached the end of their journey the grandchildren of the first emigrants would certainly only retain very few of the characters of their ancestors.

The original human type has probably presented, for an indefinite time, its original characters in the tribes which remained fixed to the centre of appearance for our species. When the glacial epoch began, which, according to all appearance, made the earliest country of man uninhabitable, these tribes were forced to emigrate in their turn. Since that time the earth has no longer had autochthones, but has only been peopled by colonists. At the same time the modifying action of the conditions of life was felt by these last comers, who themselves were also transformed.

From this moment, the original type of man has been lost; the human species was only composed of races, all of which differed more or less from the first model.