These alterations in the land areas and climatic conditions exerted the profoundest influence on the destiny of man. When with the increasing cold the other animals native to warm regions had fled or perished, he remained to encounter with undaunted mind the rigors of the boreal climate. Instead of depressing or extinguishing him, these very obstacles seem to have been the spurs to his intellectual progress.
Men were still in the lower stages of culture, with no knowledge of metal, not capable of polishing stones, without a domestic animal or trace of agriculture. Yet everywhere these artisans possessed skill and sentiments far above that of the highest anthropoid ape described by the zoölogist. They knew the use of fire, they constructed shelters, they dwelt together in bands, they possessed some means of navigating streams, they ate both vegetable and animal food, they decorated themselves with colored earth and ornaments, they wielded a club, they twisted fibres into ropes and strings, if occasion required they fastened together skins for clothing. All this is proved by a careful study of what tools and implements they have left us.
Development into Races.—Whatever may have been the physical type of men at their beginning, in culture they were upon the same level for a long while after they had dispersed over the globe.
When, where and how did they develop into the several distinct races that we now know?
We can answer these questions, not fully, but to some extent.
Man developed into certain strongly marked sub-species or races long before the dawn of history. More than six thousand years ago the racial traits of the black, the white, and the yellow races, and even of their subdivisions, were as pronounced and as ineffaceable as they are to-day. This we know from the representations on the Egyptian monuments of the third and sixth dynasties, from the comparative study of ancient skulls, and from the uniform testimony of the earliest writings, wherever we find them.
This permanent fixation of traits, this profound impression of peculiar features, was probably no rapid process, but a very slow one. It took place between the close of the glacial epoch and the proto-historic period. This interim gives time enough; at the lowest calculation, it was twenty thousand years, while others have placed it at a hundred thousand. The division of the species into races unquestionably was completed long before the present geologic period, and under conditions widely diverse from those now existing.[46]
As within these wide limits of time we can reply to the question when the races became such, so within similar broad boundaries of space we can answer where their peculiar types were developed.
At the dawn of history, all the clearly marked sub-species of man bore distinct relations in number and distribution to the great continental areas into which the habitable land of the globe is divided. Nearly the whole of Europe and its geographical appendix, North Africa, were in the possession of the white race; the true negro type was limited to Central and Southern Africa and its appended islands; the yellow or Mongolian type was scarcely found outside of Asia; and the American sub-species was absolutely confined to that continent.
The “Areas of Characterization.”—In claiming that each sub-species had its origin and developed its physical peculiarities in the land areas here assigned to it, the ethnographer is supported by the unanimous verdict of modern zoölogical science. “Whatever be the cause,” writes the Rev. Samuel Haughton, “the distribution of fauna shows clearly that forces have been at work, developing in each great continent animal forms peculiar to itself, and differing from the animal forms developed by other continents.”[47]