Anthropology

by Edward B. Tylor

Fig. 5.—Skeletons of apes and man. a, gibbon; b, orang; c, chimpanzee; d, gorilla; e, man (after Huxley).

Professor Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature, in which this anatomical comparison is made, contains a celebrated drawing which is copied in [Fig. 5] as the readiest means of showing how the anthropoid apes correspond bone for bone with ourselves. At the same time it illustrates some main points in which their bodily actions are unlike ours. It has been said that the child first takes on him the dignity of man when he leaves off going on all-fours. But in fact, standing and walking upright is not a mere matter of training; it belongs to the arrangement of the human body being different from that of quadrupeds. The limbs of the dog or cow are so proportioned as to bring them down on all-fours, and this is to a less degree the case with the apes, while the head and trunk of the growing child are lifted toward the erect attitude by the disproportionate growth of the lower limbs. Though man’s standing upright requires continued muscular effort, he is so built as to keep his balance more readily than other animals in this position. It may be noticed from the figure how in man the opening at the base of the skull (occipital foramen) through which the spinal cord passes up into the brain, is farther to the front than in the apes, so that his skull, instead of pitching forward, is balanced on the top of the atlas vertebra (so called from Atlas supporting the globe). The figure shows also the S-like curvature of man’s spine, and how the bony pelvis or basin forms a broad support for his intestines as he stands upright, in which attitude the feet serve as bases enabling the legs to carry the trunk. Thus the erect posture, only imitated with difficult effort by the showman’s performing animals, is to man easy and unconstrained. Not through great differences of structure, but by adjustments of bones and muscles, the fore- and hind-limbs of quadrupeds work in accord, while in man, whose muscular adaptation is for going on his legs, there is no such reciprocal action between the legs and arms. Of the monkey tribes, many walk fairly on all-fours as quadrupeds, with legs bent, arms straightened forward, soles and palms touching the ground. But the higher manlike apes are adapted by their structure for a climbing life among the trees, whose branches they grasp with feet and hands. When the orang-utan takes to the ground he shambles clumsily along, generally putting down the outer edge of the feet and the bent knuckles of the hands. The orang and gorilla have the curious habit of resting on their bent fists, so as to draw their bodies forward between their long arms, like a cripple between his crutches. The nearest approach that apes naturally make to the erect attitude, is where the gibbon will go along on its feet, touching the ground with its knuckles first on one side and then on the other, or will run some distance with its arms thrown back above its head to keep the balance, or when the gorilla will rise on its legs and rush forward to attack. All these modes of locomotion may be understood from the skeletons in the figure. The apes thus present interesting intermediate stages between quadruped and biped. But only man is so formed that, using his feet to carry him, he has his hands free for their special work.

Fig. 6.—a, hand, b, foot, of chimpanzee (after Vogt); c, hand, d, foot, of man.

In comparing man with the lower animals, it is wrong to set down his pre-eminence entirely to his mind, without noticing the superiority of his limbs as instruments for practical arts. If one looks at the illustrations to “Reynard the Fox,” where the artist does his best to represent the lion holding a sceptre, the she-wolf flirting a fan, or the fox writing a letter; what he really shows is, how ill adapted the limbs of quadrupeds are to such actions. Man’s being the “tool-using animal” is due to his having hands to use the tool as well as mind to invent it; and only the apes, as most nearly approaching man in their limbs, can fairly imitate the use of such instruments as a spoon or a knife. In [Fig. 6] the hand and foot of the chimpanzee may be compared with those of man. Here the ape’s foot b, looks so like a hand, that many naturalists have classed the higher apes under the name of four-handed animals, or quadrumana. In anatomical structure it is a foot, but it is a prehensile or grasping foot, able to clip or pinch an object by setting the great toe thumb-wise against the others, which the human foot d, cannot do. It is true that among people who go barefoot the great toe is not quite so helpless as that of a boot-wearing European. With the naked foot the savage Australian picks up his spear, and the Hindu tailor holds his cloth as he squats sewing. The above drawing is purposely taken, not from the free foot of the savage, but from the European foot cramped by the stiff leather boot, because this shows in the utmost way the contrast between ape and man. In the ape, it is seen that both the hands and feet gain their suitability for a tree-climbing life at the loss of their suitability for walking on the ground. But man’s upper and lower extremities have become differentiated or specialised in two opposite ways, the human foot becoming a stepping-machine with less grasping-power than the ape-foot, while the human hand comes to excel the ape-hand as a special organ for feeling, holding, and handling. The figure c shows the longer and freely-acting thumb and the wider flexible palm in man, the sensitive cushions at our finger-ends also giving us greater delicacy of touch. It is most instructive to visit the monkey-house at the Zoological Gardens for the purpose of comparing hands of high and low kinds. The hand of the marmoset with its five claw-nailed digits, is a mere grasping instrument hardly capable of handling. Other low monkeys have the thumbs small and not opposable, that is, their ends do not meet those of the other fingers, whereas the thumbs of the higher apes are (as the figure shows) opposable like ours. How far the value of the hand as a mechanical instrument depends on this opposability, any one may satisfy himself by using his hand with the thumb stiff. It is plain that man’s hand, enabling him to shape and wield weapons and tools to subdue nature to his own ends, is one cause of his standing first among animals. It is not so obvious, but it is true, that his intellectual development must have been in no small degree gained by the use of his hands. From handling objects, putting them in different positions, and setting them side by side, he was led to those simplest kinds of comparing and measuring which are the first elements of exact knowledge, or science.

Outwardly, the shaggy hair of the apes contrasts with the comparative nakedness of the human skin. In man as in lower animals, the thatch of hair indeed forms an effective shelter to the head. The hairy fringe round the human mouth in the adult male has in some races a strong growth, as in the European or the native of Australia. But in others, as the African negro and the so-called American Indian, the scanty face-hair looks as though it had dwindled to the mere remnant of a fuller growth. Looked at in this way, the hairy patches on the Englishman’s breast and limbs, though practically of no importance, are an object of curious interest to the naturalists who consider them relics from the remote period when man’s ancestral stock had a fuller hairy covering, whose want is now supplied by artificial shelter suited to season and climate. It is interesting to notice that there are some few human beings to be met with, whose faces and bodies are largely covered with long shaggy hair. Such a face-covering hides the play of feature—that expressive means of intercourse between mind and mind. Had the skeletons of apes and man in our figure been clothed with flesh, we should have seen plainly the signs of man’s higher organisation in the flexible versatile features, in whose movements and folds are symbolised the pleasures and pains, the loves and hates, of every phase of human life. How coarse and clumsy are the corresponding changes of face in the monkey-tribes, such as the drawing back of the corners of the mouth and wrinkling of the lower eyelid which constitute an ape’s smile, or the rise and fall of the baboon’s eyebrow’s and forehead in anger. The visitor from some other planet, so often imagined as coming to our earth and forming his judgments by what he sees, might well discern in the difference between man’s face and the gorilla’s muzzle some measure of the discrepancy within.

The brain being the instrument or organ of mind, anatomists comparing the brains of animals have looked for well-marked distinctions between the less and the more intelligent. In the natural order of Primates, to which man belongs with the monkeys and lemurs, the series of brains shows a remarkable rise or development from lower to higher forms. The lemur has a small and comparatively smooth brain, whereas the high anthropoid apes have brains which strikingly approach man’s. In fact the lemur has very little mind in comparison with the sagacious and teachable chimpanzee or orang-utan. But man’s reason so vastly surpasses that of the highest apes, that naturalists have wondered at the likeness of their brain to ours, which is illustrated in the accompanying [Fig. 7], representing the brain of the chimpanzee a, and of man b, whole on the left to show the convolutions, and cut across on the right to expose the interior. To compare their structure the two brains are drawn of the same size, but in fact the chimpanzee brain is much smaller than the human. It is one great difference between man and the anthropoid apes, that his brain exceeds theirs in quantity; in a rough way he has three pounds of brain to their one. It is seen also that in the ape-brain the lobes or hemispheres have fewer and simpler windings than the more complex convolutions of the human brain, which in general outline they resemble. Now both size and complexity mean mind-power. The lobes of the brain consist within of the “white matter” with its innumerable fibres carrying nerve-currents, while the outer coating is formed of the “grey matter,” containing the brain-corpuscles or cells from which the fibres issue, and which are centres through which the combinations are made which we are conscious of as thoughts. As the coating of grey matter follows the foldings of the brain down into the fissures, it is evident that the increased complexity of the convolutions, combined with greater actual size of brain, furnishes man with a vastly more extensive and intricate thinking-apparatus than the animals nearest below him in the order of nature.