Dr. Tylor shows how Wallace and Darwin established a theory of human descent, and sums up the similarities and dissimilarities in anatomical construction between man and the man-like apes. Even more interesting is what the article says (p. 110) about “assigning to man his place in nature on psychological grounds.”
Huxley acknowledged an immeasurable and practically infinite divergence, ending in the present enormous psychological gulf between ape and man. It is difficult to account for this intellectual chasm as due to some minor structural difference.... Beyond a doubt, man possesses, and in some way possesses by virtue of his superior brain, a power of co-ordinating the impressions of his senses, which enables him to understand the world he lives in, and by understanding to use, resist, and even in a measure rule it. No human art shows the nature of this human attribute more clearly than does language
—although other animals have a sort of language. The article quotes Dr. A. Russel Wallace’s conclusion that man stands “apart, as not only the head and culminating point of the grand series of organic nature, but as in some degree a new and distinct order of being.” And another great anatomist, Prof. St. George Mivart, says “Man’s animal body must have had a different source from that of the spiritual soul which informs it, owing to the distinctness of the two orders to which these existences severally belong.” Dr. Tylor, in citing these authorities, adds that “man embodies an immaterial and immortal, spiritual principle which no lower creature possesses, and which makes the resemblance of the apes to him but a mocking simulance.”
The answer to the question “How did man originate?” depends on the answer to the question “How did species originate?” The main points are summed up in the article Anthropology (on p. 112), which also deals with the fossil remains of man, especially skulls, and their bearing on the question. A more detailed discussion will be found in the articles Evolution (Vol. 10, p. 22) and Species (Vol. 25, p. 616).
Races of Man
The classification of man into different races is the topic next taken up by Dr. Tylor in the article Anthropology, and he deals particularly with classification by the “facial angle” (on which see also the article Craniometry, Vol. 7, p. 372). Different classifications are criticized and the article decides that “Huxley’s division probably approaches more nearly than any other to such a tentative classification as may be accepted.... He distinguishes four principal types of mankind, the Australioid, Negroid, Mongoloid and Xanthochroic (fair whites), adding a fifth variety, the Melanchroic (dark whites).” That races are not species, zoologically, is made plain by the fact that the offspring of parents of different races are fertile—those of different species being infertile.
Antiquity of Man
One of the questions connected with the origin of man is his antiquity. The Biblical chronology, as commonly reckoned and interpreted, allowed a time since the appearance of the original stock which seemed far too short for the apparent variation from the original species (see Chronology, Vol. 6, p. 305). The natural sciences, notably geology, have “made it manifest that our earth must have been the seat of vegetable and animal life for an immense period of time; while the first appearance of man, though comparatively recent, is positively so remote, that an estimate between twenty and a hundred thousand years may fairly be taken as a minimum.” This geological claim is supported by the evidence of prehistoric archaeology (see the article Archaeology, Vol. 2, p. 344). In the caves of France and Belgium human bones have been found with the remains of fossil species of elephant, rhinoceros, hyena, bear, etc., and “the co-existence of man with a fauna now extinct or confined to other districts was brought to yet clearer demonstration by the discovery in these caves of certain drawings and carvings of the animals done by the ancient inhabitants themselves, such as a group of reindeer on a piece of reindeer horn, and a sketch of a mammoth, showing the elephant’s long hair, on a piece of a mammoth’s tusk from La Madeleine.” See Fig. 7, Plate facing p. 118, Vol. 2; the figures of the reindeer and mammoth, hairy and with upturned tusks, in Plate II, article Archaeology (following p. 348, Vol. 2); and of the reindeer in Plate I (Vol. 19, p. 462), and the old cave paintings of wild boars and bison from Altamira, reproduced in colour on Plate II, the next page. These paintings, marking by their technical excellence a high stage of art if not of civilization, are said by geologists to date back 50,000 years. The student will be repaid for turning a moment from the article Anthropology and the question of the antiquity of man to the article |Cave-Dwellers| Cave (Vol. 5, p. 573), by the eminent archaeologist, W. Boyd Dawkins, and the author of Cave-hunting and Early Man in Britain. He reconstructs the civilization of the inhabitants of the pleistocene caves of the European continent (p. 576), describes the carvings and drawings of which we have just spoken, and says of the cave-dwellers:
If these remains be compared with those of existing races, it will be found that the cave-men were in the same hunter stage of civilization as the Eskimos, and that they are unlike any other races of hunters. If they were not allied to the Eskimos by blood, there can be no doubt that they handed down to the latter their art and their manner of life. The bone needles, and many of the harpoons, as well as the flint spearheads, arrowheads and scrapers, are of precisely the same form as those now in use amongst the Eskimos. The artistic designs from the caves of France, Belgium and Switzerland, are identical in plan and workmanship with those of the Eskimos.... The reindeer, which they both knew, is represented in the same way by both. The practice of accumulating large quantities of the bones of animals round their dwelling-places, and the habit of splitting the bones for the sake of the marrow, are the same in both. The hides were prepared with the same sort of instruments, and the needles with which they were sewn together are of the same pattern. The stone lamps were used by both. In both there was the same disregard for sepulture. All these facts can hardly be mere coincidences caused by both peoples leading a savage life under similar conditions. The conclusion, therefore, seems inevitable that, so far as we have any evidence of the race to which the cave-dwellers belong, that evidence points only in the direction of the Eskimos. It is to a considerable extent confirmed by a consideration of the animals found in the caves. The reindeer and musk sheep afford food to the Eskimos now in the Arctic Circle, just as they afforded it to the cave-men in Europe; and both these animals have been traced by their remains from the Pyrenees to the north-east through Europe and Asia as far as the very regions in which they now live. The mammoth and bison also have been tracked by their remains in the frozen river gravels and morasses through Siberia as far as the American side of Bering Strait. Palaeolithic man appeared in Europe with the arctic mammalia, lived in Europe with them, and in all human probability retreated to the north-east along with them.
The antiquity of man may be estimated also by the time it must have taken to deposit the soil that overlies traces of civilization,—for instance in Egypt where pottery is found 60 feet deep, while inundations from the Nile probably have not averaged more than a few inches in a century. “The most recent work of Egyptologists proves a systematic civilization to have existed in the valley of the Nile at least 6000 to 7000 years ago.” Similar testimony is given by examining the lake-dwellings of Switzerland and the kitchen middens of Denmark. On these see the articles Lake Dwellings (Vol. 16, p. 91), by Joseph Anderson, keeper of the National Museum of Antiquities, Edinburgh, and Shell-heaps (Vol. 24, p. 832). The latter article, in a description of the middens of Denmark, says: