On the other hand, as an unmethodical body of knowledge, as an interest, anthropology is plainly one of the oldest of the sisterhood of sciences. How could it well be otherwise than that men were at least as much interested in each other as in the stars and mountains and plants and animals? Every savage is a bit of an ethnologist about neighboring tribes and knows a legend of the origin of mankind. Herodotus, the “father of history,” devoted half of his nine books to pure ethnology, and Lucretius, a few centuries later, tried to solve by philosophical deduction and poetical imagination many of the same problems that modern anthropology is more cautiously attacking with the methods of science. In neither chemistry nor geology nor biology was so serious an interest developed as in anthropology, until nearly two thousand years after these ancients.
In the pages that follow, the central anthropological problems that concern the relations of the organic and cultural factors in man will be defined and solutions offered to the degree that they seem to have been validly determined. On each side of this goal, however, stretches an array of more or less authenticated formulations, of which some of the more important will be reviewed. On the side of the organic, consideration will tend largely to matters of fact; in the sphere of culture, processes can here and there be illustrated; in accord with the fact that anthropology rests upon biological and underlies purely historical science.
CHAPTER II
FOSSIL MAN
[7.] The “Missing Link.”—[8.] Family tree of the Primates.—[9.] Geological and glacial time.—[10.] Place of man’s origin and development.—[11.] Pithecanthropus.—[12.] Heidelberg man.—[13.] The Piltdown form.—[14.] Neandertal man.—[15.] Rhodesian man.—[16.] The Cro-Magnon race.—[17.] The Brünn race.—[18.] The Grimaldi race: Neolithic races.—[19.] The metric expression of human evolution.
7. The “Missing Link”
No modern zoölogist has the least doubt as to the general fact of organic evolution. Consequently anthropologists take as their starting point the belief in the derivation of man from some other animal form. There is also no question as to where in a general way man’s ancestry is to be sought. He is a mammal closely allied to the other mammals, and therefore has sprung from some mammalian type. His origin can be specified even more accurately. The mammals fall into a number of fairly distinct groups, such as the Carnivores or flesh-eating animals, the Ungulates or hoofed animals, the Rodents or gnawing animals, the Cetaceans or whales, and several others. The highest of these mammalian groups, as usually reckoned, is the Primate or “first” order of the animal kingdom. This Primate group includes the various monkeys and apes and man. The ancestors of the human race are therefore to be sought somewhere in the order of Primates, past or present.
The popular but inaccurate expression of this scientific conviction is that “man is descended from the monkeys,” but that a link has been lost in the chain of descent: the famous “missing link.” In a loose way this statement reflects modern scientific opinion; but it certainly is partly erroneous. Probably not a single authority maintains to-day that man is descended from any species of monkey now living. What students during the past sixty years have more and more come to be convinced of, was already foreshadowed by Darwin: namely that man and the apes are both descended from a common ancestor. This common ancestor may be described as a primitive Primate, who differed in a good many details both from the monkeys and from man, and who has probably long since become extinct.
Fig. 1. Erroneous (left) and more valid (right) representation of the descent of man.