The Origin of Man and of His Superstitions

by Carveth Read

(3) There is one characteristic difference of Man from the anthropoids which his hunting habits do not clearly explain—his relatively naked skin. Darwin attributed this condition to sexual selection.[14] He argued that, on the one hand, so far as Man has had the power of choice, women have been chosen for their beauty; and that, on the other hand, women have had more power of selection, even in the savage state, than is usually supposed, and “would generally choose not merely the handsomest men, according to their standard of taste, but those who were at the same time best able to defend and support them.” Hence, if a partial loss of hair was esteemed ornamental by our ape-like progenitors, sexual selection, operating age after age, might result in relative nakedness. “The faces of several species of monkey and large surfaces at the posterior end of the body have been denuded of hair; and this we may safely attribute to sexual selection.” The beard of the male, and the great length of the hair of the head in some races, especially seem due to this cause. The greater hairiness of Europeans, compared with other races, may be a case of reversion to remote ancestral conditions. But as all races are nearly naked, the common character was probably acquired before the several races had diverged from the common stock.

The species of monkey that have lost the hair on various parts of their bodies, and the beard of males (together with the longer head-hair of women) of our own race are cases that strongly support the ascription of such secondary sexual characters to sexual selection. Yet, going back to the time before the division of modern Man into races (say, 600,000 years), it seems incredible that any women then went unmarried, hair or no hair, if they were healthy (and the unhealthy soon ceased to exist); or that any man went unmarried, if he could do his share in the hunting-field (and, if not, he also soon ceased to exist). No facts observed amongst extant savages—the choice exerted by women, or the polygamy of chiefs—throw much light upon that ancient state of affairs. There were then no chiefs: the hunt-leader of pack or clan had no authority but his personal prowess, no tradition of ancestry or religion, nor probably the prestige of magic, to give him command of women. Unless, at that time, relative nakedness was strongly correlated with personal prowess in the male and efficiency in the female, it is difficult to understand how it can have been preserved and increased by sexual selection. Forgive me for adding an unkind remark: if the selection of women for their beauty has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years, and has had a cumulative effect upon the race, is not the result disappointing? Go into the street and look. That “women have become more beautiful, according to the general opinion, than men,” is not an objective, truly æsthetic judgment, but one determined by causes of which “general opinion” is falsely unconscious. Schopenhauer[15] thought that men are better looking than women; and of average specimens this seems to be true; though, to be sure, he was a sort of misogynist.

Another explanation of Man’s nakedness was suggested by Thomas Belt, based on the parallel case of certain races of naked dogs, namely, that he is the better able to free himself from parasites.[16] Darwin mentions this hypothesis and, in a footnote, cites in its favour “a practice with the Australians, when the vermin get troublesome, to singe themselves”; but he says, in the text, “whether this evil is of sufficient magnitude to have led to the denudation of the body through natural selection, may be doubted, since none of the many quadrupeds inhabiting the tropics have, as far as I know, acquired any specialised means of relief.”[17] It appears, too, that against the probability of such a result must be set the actual disadvantage of nakedness, as insisted upon by Wallace, who says that savages feel the want of protection and try to cover their backs and shoulders.[18] Still, the disadvantage implied in occasionally feeling the want of protection would not prevent the loss of hair, if this would deliver the race from serious dangers from vermin; and the force of the argument from the condition of other tropical quadrupeds depends, at least in some measure, upon whether or not there is something peculiar in the case of naked dogs and men.

Belt argues that the naked dogs with dark, shining skins, found in Central America and also in Peru,[19] and which were found there at the Spanish conquest, have probably acquired their peculiar condition by natural selection, because they are despised by the natives, and no care is taken of their breeding, and yet they do not interbreed with the common hairy varieties, as usually happens with artificial stocks. The advantage of a naked skin being the greater freedom it gives from ticks, lice and other vermin, the advantage is especially great for a domestic animal living in the huts of savages, where, because they are inhabited year after year, vermin are extraordinarily abundant. The naked dog, then, differs from tropical quadrupeds which are adapted from a dateless antiquity to such vermin as infest them, by having been thrown by human companionship amongst not only strange vermin, but vermin in extraordinarily dense aggregation. Belt would have guarded a weak point in his case, had he explained why naked races of dogs are so scarce. Hairy races may have been more recently domesticated, or bred for their hairiness, or less addicted to an indoor life.

The case of our own forefather also differs somewhat from that of other tropical mammalia; because, by hypothesis, he underwent pretty rapidly such an extraordinary change of life; which may have brought him into circumstances where vermin, formerly negligible, became highly injurious. “Monkeys,” as Belt observes, “change their sleeping-places almost daily”; the Orang is said to construct a fresh nest every night; this is also reported of the Gorilla. Not improbably, then, daily change of locality was the practice of the original anthropoid stock, whence we also are descended: thereby avoiding the accumulation of vermin. Did the hunting life introduce a new habit? In the old frugivorous forest life, the custom was to get up into some tree for the night, and within a short radius there were hundreds equally suitable; and, therefore, there was nothing to check the natural preference for a fresh one. When, however, the hunting pack began to make its lair on the ground, there was no such wide choice amongst caves, rock-shelters, or thickets: one might be better than any other for miles around. If, then, they settled down there as in a common lair, the circumstances were, for the time, favourable to the multiplication of vermin, and therefore to nakedness of skin, in order the more easily to be rid of them. Perhaps, then, this difference of Man from the anthropoids may be referred to one common cause with all the others—the hunting life. There, too, the defilement of blood made fur inconvenient to animals not apt to cleanse themselves, like those in the true carnivorous heredity and tradition.

When we consider how injurious some insects are to vertebrate life, being suspected of having caused in some cases the extinction of species, can it be said that facility in ridding oneself of such vermin as lice and ticks is an inadequate cause of human nakedness, or not one that might outweigh the drawbacks of cold and wet? It is not, however, incompatible with the action of sexual selection, tending to the same result; nor, again, with the preferential destruction of hairy children if ever infanticide was practised. A further possible ground of deliberate selection may have been the mere ambition of differing from other animals; for a tribe on the Upper Amazons is reported to depilate to distinguish themselves from the monkeys, and the wish to be superior to other animals led a tribe in Queensland to pretend that they, unlike kangaroos, etc., have no fathers according to the flesh.[20] Admitting that this last motive can hardly have been primitive, still, our nakedness may be a resultant of several causes.

(4) Cannibalism, where it has been found amongst extant peoples, or is known to have been formerly practised, was often justified by certain magical or animistic ideas, but sometimes frankly by dietetic taste, or by the satisfaction of revenge or of emphatic triumph over an enemy. Was it an ancient and perhaps general custom? The excavations at Krapina in Croatia disclosed along with remains of the Neanderthal species, which seems to have had a habitation there, those of rhinoceros and cave-bear and of some other kind of Man; and “some of the human bones had been apparently split open: on that slender basis the Krapina men have been suspected of cannibalism.”[21] If the suspicion is valid, the practice existed (say) 50,000 years ago in one species of Man; and perhaps much earlier, if we consider how it was merely an extension of the practice of devouring game to include the slain members of a hostile pack; for as primitive Man, or Lycopithecus, his pre-human forebear, no doubt regarded other animals as upon the same level as himself, so he will have regarded human enemies as upon the same footing with other animals. That true carnivores are not generally cannibals may be put down to their more ancient and perfect adaptation to a predatory life. For them persistent cannibalism would have been too destructive, and for us it belongs to the experimental stage of history; though, of course, even in recent times, under stress of famine, reversion to the practice is not unknown to civilised men.

(5) The extraordinary variability of modern Man (considered as one species) in stature, shape of skull, size and power of brain, colour, hairiness, quality of hair, and other characters, physical and mental, may be referred chiefly to his having become adapted to various local conditions upon settling here or there for long periods of time after wandering over the world in quest of game. The settling of offshoots of the original stock in certain regions long enough for them to undergo adaptation to local circumstances is the simplest explanation of existing races: the Negro adapted to equatorial Africa; the Asiatic stock (“Mongolian”) to Central Asia; the Mediterranean race to the neighbourhood of the sea after which it is named. As to the Nordic sub-race (of the Mediterranean, we may suppose), with its fair hair and skin, it has the appearance of an Arctic beast of prey, like the Polar bear. The snow-leopard of the Himalaya is found at a midway stage of such adaptation. Some geologists and zoologists now believe that, during the Glacial Period, the climate of Northern Europe was not everywhere such as necessarily to destroy the local fauna and flora, and in that case our ancestors may for ages have maintained themselves there; or, if that was impossible (as the absence of palæolithic remains in Scandinavia seems to indicate), they may have roamed for many ages along the borders of glaciation, perhaps as far as the Pacific Coast. Chinese annals refer to fair tribes in Eastern Siberia 200 years before the Christian era;[22] and it seems requisite to imagine some extensive reservoir of mankind in order to explain the origin of the vast hordes which in prehistoric as in historical times again and again invaded Europe—hordes

“which the populous North
Poured ever from her frozen loins, to pass
Rhene or the Danau; when her barbarous sons
Came like a deluge on the South, and spread
Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.”