(a) Younger men are celibate within the natural groups of human society, or are driven out therefrom.
(b) Men thus driven out will seek mates on their own account, and will secure them partly from the original group as far as they are permitted or are successful in their attempts, and partly by capture from other local groups.
The first of these elements strongly emphasises the migratory character of the earliest human groups. The second shows how each group is relieved of the incubus of too great a number for the economic conditions by the double process of sending forth its young males, and of its younger females being captured by successful marauders.
Let us take a fuller note of what the conditions of such a life might be. There is no tie of kinship operating as a social force within the groups; there is the unquestioned condition of hostility surrounding each group, and there is the enforced practice of providing mates by capture. Of these three conditions the most significant is undoubtedly the absence of the kinship tie. If then we use this as the basis for grouping the earliest examples of social organisation, we proceed to inquire whether there are any examples of kinless society in anthropological evidence.
Following up the clue supplied by folklore, we may see whether the pygmy people of anthropological observation answer in any way to those conjectural conditions.[332] I think they do. Thus, we find that the pygmy people are in all cases on the extreme confines of the world's occupation ground; that they occupy the territory to which they have been pushed, not that which they have chosen. As the most primitive representatives, they are the last outposts of the migratory movements. Dr. Beke has preserved an account of the pygmies which even in its terminology assists in their identification as a type of the remotest stages of social existence. Dr. Beke obtained certain information about the countries south-west of Abyssinia, from which Latham quotes the following:—
"The people of Doko, both men and women, are said to be no taller than boys nine or ten years old. They never exceed that height even in the most advanced age. They go quite naked; their principal foods are ants, snakes, mice, and other things which commonly are not used as food.... They also climb trees with great skill to fetch down the fruits, and in doing this they stretch their hands downwards and their legs upwards.... They live mixed together; men and women unite and separate as they please.... The mother suckles the child only as long as she is unable to find ants and snakes for its food; she abandons it as soon as it can get its food by itself. No rank or order exists among the Dokos. Nobody orders, nobody obeys, nobody defends the country, nobody cares for the welfare of the nation."[333]
This evidence is confirmed in many directions. It coincides with the account by Herodotos of the expedition from Libya which met with a pygmy race,[334] and with a seventeenth-century account of a Dutch expedition to the north from the south, who "found a tribe of people very low in stature and very lean, entirely savage, without huts, cattle, or anything in the world except their lands and wild game."[335] Captain Burrows' account of the Congoland pygmies agrees in all essentials, and he particularly notes that they "have no ties of family affection such as those of mother to son or sister to brother, and seem to be wanting in all social qualities;" they have no religion and no fetich rites; no burial ceremony and no mourning for the dead; in short, he adds, "they are to my thinking the closest link with the original Darwinian anthropoid ape extant."[336] The evidence of the African pygmy people everywhere confirms these views, and differences of detail do not alter the general results.[337]
