(a) In the foregoing chapter I have collected a number of facts and arguments pointing to the probability that the chief cause of the evolution of the human Family was the adoption by some anthropoid (or allied form) of the life of the hunter in order to obtain animal food. That the change from a frugivorous to a carnivorous diet may itself have had some effect upon our temperament and activity is possible; but I lay no stress upon that. Most monkeys are almost exclusively frugivorous; the only Primate, except man, that depends a good deal upon animal food is, I believe, the crab-eating macaque (Macacus cynomolgus), of the Burmese and Malay littoral; yet monkeys are the most alert and active of animals; some of them are amongst the most courageous; anthropoids are amongst the most powerful. A carnivorous diet alone would not explain any changes in the shape and proportions of our trunk and limbs, nor the upright gait, nor the gregarious habit, nor the development of the brain, nor the invention of weapons, nor the use of fire, nor any of the mental and emotional characteristics that distinguish man from the other Primates; but all these things readily follow from our remote ancestor’s adoption of the life of the hunter.
Sociologists, surveying extant peoples, have usually distinguished four stages of culture, the hunting, pastoral, agricultural and manufacturing; and some have indicated what they suppose to have been a still earlier stage, the “collecting,” such as may be seen, e. g., amongst the Fuegians. But the collecting state is plainly degenerate, the resource of tribes fallen into distress; it cannot have been the first stage, because it implies no conditions that tend in any way to develop body or mind or society. That hunting came first is a true intuition: and, to understand the development of human nature, we need only refer the hunting-life back to the very origin of the human stock.[31]
(b) The great anthropoids are all confined to the equatorial forests; and it is obvious that, with their diet, it is impossible to pass out of tropical or (at furthest) sub-tropical regions. But the adoption of a flesh diet enabled the human stock to extend the range of its hunting (allowing for gradual adaptation to climate or accommodation by clothing) to any country that supplied the requisite prey; and, accordingly, in course of time, it wandered to every part of the world. The settling of various off-shoots of the original stock in certain regions long enough for them to undergo adaptation to local conditions is (as we have seen) the simplest explanation of existing races.
(c) Whilst none of the great anthropoids has advanced socially beyond family life, man is everywhere (with few and doubtful exceptions) gregarious—living at the lowest grade in tribes or bands of about fifty; and the gregarious life is one of the most important conditions of his peculiar development. Possibly, he may originally have been more gregarious than any extant anthropoid, in spite of his not needing society for defence, and of its seeming to be for so large a frugivorous animal inconvenient in relation to nutrition. Moreover, if the great anthropoids and our own ancestors were descended from some stock of the lower monkeys, such as always go in troops, the gregarious instinct may have remained with them as a latent character. Still, it is my conjecture that man became gregarious, or recovered the social habit, because of the utility of co-operative hunting; so that he became at first a sort of wolf-ape. This will be discussed in the next section. I observe here, however, that the hypothesis helps us to understand why man is still imperfectly sociable; the purpose of the hunting-pack, each wolf-ape seeking prey, was unfavourable to social life in other relations. That in human life group-consciousness preceded self-consciousness is a groundless and fantastic notion: all known savages are fully self-conscious, as their sentiments and behaviour imply; and even the higher brutes are (in my judgment) self-conscious in their relations with others. Current speculations about fashion, imitation, tradition, crowd-psychology, are in danger of exaggeration, and overlook the patent facts of individualism, as shown by the hypocrite, the criminal, the vagrant, the contra-suggestible, the hermit, the sceptic, the saint. Some people—without being in any way morbid—find that a good deal of solitude is necessary to the complete life: by nature the student and the pioneer escape from the crowd.
(d) The later stages of human development have been considerably modified by certain imaginary conditions peculiar to Man; for he—we know not at what date—invented them. These may be summed up under the names of Magic and Animism; and in subsequent chapters they will be discussed, with their astonishing vagaries and still more astonishing reactions upon human life.
The chief conditions, then, to which man has been adapted, and thereby differentiated in body and mind from the anthropoid stock, I take to be four: the hunting life; geographical circumstances; social life; and his own imaginations.
§ 3. Primal Society
In looking for the probable form of the earliest human or (rather) prehuman society, one naturally makes a survey of other mammalian societies; and the task is soon accomplished. It is surprising how few and simple the types of them are, in contrast with the elaborate polities of some hymenoptera and of the termites: these have much greater superficial resemblance to modern human societies; but, in fact, they are families rather than societies; their interesting activities will one day probably be traced to relatively simple mechanisms; and in every way they are too remote from us for any useful comparison. As for mammalian societies, even using the term to include families, they may be classified under four or five types:
(1) Families: (a) Monogamous: of which the best examples seem to be found in some monkeys. Many of the cats are believed to pair monogamously; but it is doubtful whether, or in what measure, the male takes part in the rearing of the whelps.
(b) Polygamous: characteristic of many species of deer;—after the breeding-season, the stags often wander away by themselves.