The human species

by A. de Quatrefages

Let us observe, in the first place, that here we can have no dates properly so called. They only exist in history. Now primitive mankind can have no history in the scientific sense of the word. Most great religions have endeavoured to fill up this gap. But my readers are already aware that I have refused all considerations drawn from such a source, and that I intend to bring forward here none but the results of experiment and observation. I shall then try how far back we can go with the aid of these guides alone, quoting in the first place a few historic dates as terms of comparison.

II. The Greeks and Romans, with whom classical education too often terminates, do not take us very far. The former had much more ancient records than the latter, and yet the era of the Olympiads only brings us to the year 776 before our era; according to Hecateus of Miletus, it was in the ninth or tenth century before our era that the gods ceased to intermarry with mortals, and the Trojan war is regarded approximately as having taken place in the eleventh or twelfth century. Beyond this period, it is evident that we are led by Greece into mere mythology, or rather into those legendary times where truth and fable are confounded.

The Aryan traditions go further. M. Vivien de Saint Martin, summing up the works of which he is so good a judge, refers the arrival of the Hindoos on the river of Cabul to about the sixteenth or eighteenth century before our era. These tribes were only an offshoot of the great emigration which the Zend-Avesta takes back almost as far as the Bolor. We can, therefore, refer the latter to the twentieth or twenty-eighth century before our era.

Jewish history, starting with Abraham, goes back almost to the same period (2296 years); the deluge of Noah, according to the estimation generally received, to the year 3308. Say about thirty centuries.

In China, the Chou-King places the reign of Hoang-ti in the year 2698, and that of Jao in the year 2357 before our era. This would correspond almost to a century, with the date of the migration of Abraham.

Egypt had no Chou-King, but her monuments are the most magnificent of books. Champollion has taught us how to read them, and we can decipher them page by page. Now Lepsius and Bunsen place the fifth dynasty about the fortieth century, and according to Mariette Bey, the lists of Manetho, upon the subject of which the eminent Egyptologist makes formal reserves, go back to the year 5004 before our era. We should, then, be separated from the earliest historical times of Egypt by an interval of about seventy centuries. If, instead of counting by years, we count by the human life, which we will estimate at about twenty-five years, we find that we are only separated from these times, which constitute the extreme limit of past history, by 280 generations.

These numbers are undoubtedly interesting. They tend to modify some of the impressions which we have received in our childhood; but they tell us nothing of the antiquity of the human race. At most, in showing us that at this period there existed people in the valley of the Nile sufficiently civilised to possess the art of writing, and to raise monuments worthy of our admiration, they refer the first appearance of man far beyond the limits which they reach themselves.

III. The Egyptians themselves have, then, a past anterior to all history. With much greater reason is this the case with the Chinese, Hindoos, Greeks, and still more so with nations less well endowed, or accidentally retarded in their evolution. To plunge into this obscurity with the hope of finding in it any certain land-marks, and to discover facts of which even legends say nothing, would thirty years ago have appeared a senseless enterprise. It is, nevertheless, the work accomplished by one of the most recent of sciences, Prehistoric Archæology. We should therefore regard the year 1847 as a memorable date, when three Danish savants, a geologist, a zoologist, and an archæologist, were charged by the Society of Northern Antiquaries to carry out the studies which have served as its foundation. By a study of the Kitchenmiddens and peat-mosses of their country, Forchammer, Steenstrup and Worsaar have done for the history of man what De Buch, Elie de Beaumont, and Cuvier have done for the history of the globe.

The Kitchenmiddens are essentially formed by the accumulation of shells strewn on the sea-shore, which sometimes attain considerable proportions. With the shells are found the remains of fish, and bones of birds and mammalia. Man alone could have formed this accumulation, and his presence, moreover, is revealed by the implements, tools, and weapons, which he once mislaid, and which are now found among the remains of his meals. They consist of stone, almost always rudely shaped. In some of these artificial hills, among the traces of a very rudimentary industry, we meet with other stone objects which betray workmanship of the most remarkable perfection.

The Kitchenmiddens, then, reveal the existence of a population now forgotten, which at first lived in an entirely savage state, but afterwards acquired a certain amount of civilisation. From a chronological point of view, however, this information is still very imperfect. The mixture of implements, sometimes almost without form, and sometimes again showing wonderful workmanship, permits of various interpretations, which have in fact been given.