The Story of Evolution

by Joseph McCabe

And it is not without interest to notice that a fall in the temperature of the earth is the immediate cause of this social life. The building of homes of any kind seems to be unknown to Magdalenian man. The artist would have left us some sketchy representation of it if there had been anything in the nature of a tent in his surroundings. The rock-shelter and the cave are the homes which men seek from the advancing cold. As these are relatively few in number, fixed in locality, and often of large dimensions, the individualism of the earlier times is replaced by collective life. Sociologists still dispute whether the clan arose by the cohesion of families or the family arose within the clan. Such evidence as is afforded by prehistoric remains is entirely in favour of the opinion of Professor Westermarck, that the family preceded the larger group. Families of common descent would now cling together and occupy a common cavern, and, when the men gathered at night with the women for the roasting and eating of the horse or deer they had hunted, and the work of the artist and the woman was considered, the uncouth muttering and gesticulating was slowly forged into the great instrument of articulate speech. The first condition of more rapid progress was instinctively gained.

Our story of life has so often turned on this periodical lowering of the climate of the earth that it is interesting to find this last and most important advance so closely associated with it that we are forced once more to regard it as the effective cause. The same may be said of another fundamental advance of the men of the later Palaeolithic age, the discovery of the art of making fire. It coincides with the oncoming of the cold, either in the Mousterian or the Magdalenian. It was more probably a chance discovery than an invention. Savages so commonly make fire by friction—rubbing sticks, drills, etc.—that one is naturally tempted to regard this as the primitive method. I doubt if this was the case. When, in Neolithic times, men commonly bury the dead, and put some of their personal property in the grave with them, the fire-kindling apparatus we find is a flint and a piece of iron pyrites. Palaeolithic man made his implements of any kind of hard and heavy stone, and it is probable that he occasionally selected iron ore for the purpose. An attempt to chip it with flint would cause sparks that might fall on inflammable material, and set it alight. Little intelligence would be needed to turn this discovery to account.

Apart from these conjectures as to particular features in the life of prehistoric man, it will be seen that we have now a broad and firm conception of its evolution. From the ape-level man very slowly mounts to the stage of human savagery. During long ages he seems to have made almost no progress. There is nothing intrinsically progressive in his nature. Let a group of men be isolated at any stage of human evolution, and placed in an unchanging environment, and they will remain stationary for an indefinite period. When Europeans began to traverse the globe in the last few centuries, they picked up here and there little groups of men who had, in their isolation, remained just where their fathers had been when they quitted the main road of advance in the earlier stages of the Old Stone Age. The evolution of man is guided by the same laws as the evolution of any other species. Thus we can understand the long period of stagnation, or of incalculably slow advance. Thus, too, we can understand why, at length, the pace of man toward his unconscious goal is quickened. He is an inhabitant of the northern hemisphere, and the northern hemisphere is shaken by the last of the great geological revolutions. From its first stress emerges the primeval savage of the early part of the Old Stone Age, still bearing the deep imprint of his origin, surpassing his fellow-animals only in the use of crude stone implements. Then the stress of conditions relaxes—the great ice-sheet disappears—and again during a vast period he makes very little progress. The stress returns. The genial country is stripped and impoverished, and the reindeer and mammoth spread to the south of Europe. But once more the adversity has its use, and man, stimulated in his hunt for food, invigorated by the cold, driven into social life, advances to the culmination of the Old Stone Age.

We are still very far from civilisation, but the few tens of thousands of years that separate Magdalenian man from it will be traversed with relative speed—though, we should always remember, with a speed far less than the pace at which man is advancing to-day. A new principle now enters into play: a specifically human law of evolution is formulated. It has no element of mysticism, and is merely an expression of the fact that the previous general agencies of development have created in man an intelligence of a higher grade than that of any other animal. In his larger and more plastic brain the impressions received from the outer world are blended in ideas, and in his articulate speech he has a unique means of entering the idea-world of his fellows. The new principle of evolution, which arises from this superiority, is that man's chief stimulus to advance will now come from his cultural rather than his physical environment. Physical surroundings will continue to affect him. One race will outstrip another because of its advantage in soil, climate, or geographical position. But the chief key to the remaining and more important progress of mankind, which we are about to review, is the stimulating contact of the differing cultures of different races.

This will be seen best in the history of civilisation, but the principle may be recognised in the New Stone Age which leads from primeval savagery to civilisation, or, to be more accurate and just, to the beginning of the historical period. It used to be thought that there was a mysterious blank or gulf between the Old and the New Stone Age. The Palaeolithic culture seemed to come to an abrupt close, and the Neolithic culture was sharply distinguished from it. It was suspected that some great catastrophe had destroyed the Palaeolithic race in Europe, and a new race entered as the adverse conditions were removed. This was especially held to be the case in England. The old Palaeolithic race had never reached Ireland, which seems to have been cut oft from the Continent during the Ice-Age, and most of the authorities still believe—in spite of some recent claims—that it never reached Scotland. England itself was well populated, and the remains found in the caves of Derbyshire show that even the artist—or his art—had reached that district. This Palaeolithic race seemed to come to a mysterious end, and Europe was then invaded by the higher Neolithic race. England was probably detached from the Continent about the end of the Magdalenian period. It was thought that some great devastation—the last ice-sheet, a submersion of the land, or a plague—then set in, and men were unable to retreat south.

It is now claimed by many authorities that there are traces of a Middle Stone (Mesolithic) period even in England, and nearly all the authorities admit that such a transitional stage can be identified in the Pyrenean region. This region had been the great centre of the Magdalenian culture. Its large frescoed caverns exhibit the culmination of the Old Stone life, and afford many connecting links with the new. It is, however, a clearly established and outstanding fact that the characteristic art of Magdalenian man comes to an abrupt and complete close, and it does not seem possible to explain this without supposing that the old race was destroyed or displaced. If we could accept the view that it was the Eskimo-like race of the Palaeolithic that cultivated this art, and that they retreated north with the reindeer and the ice, and survive in our Eskimo, we should have a plausible explanation. In point of fact, we find no trace whatever of this slow migration from the south of Europe to the north. The more probable supposition is that a new race, with more finished stone implements, entered Europe, imposed its culture upon the older race, and gradually exterminated or replaced it. We may leave it open whether a part of the old race retreated to the north, and became the Eskimo.

Whence came the new race and its culture? It will be seen on reflection that we have so far been studying the evolution of man in Europe only, because there alone are his remains known with any fullness. But the important region which stretches from Morocco to Persia must have been an equally, if not more, important theatre of development. While Europe was shivering in the last stage of the Ice-Age, and the mammoth and reindeer browsed in the snows down to the south of France, this region would enjoy an excellent climate and a productive soil. We may confidently assume that there was a large and stirring population of human beings on it during the Magdalenian cold. We may, with many of the authorities, look to this temperate and fertile region for the slight advance made by early Neolithic man beyond his predecessor. As the cold relaxed, and the southern fringe of dreary steppe w as converted once more into genial country, the race would push north. There is evidence that there were still land bridges across the Mediterranean. From Spain and the south of France this early Neolithic race rapidly spread over Europe.

It must not be supposed that the New Stone Age at first goes much beyond the Old in culture. Works on prehistoric man are apt to give as features of "Neolithic man" all that we know him to have done or discovered during the whole of the New Stone Age. We read that he not only gave a finer finish to, and sometimes polished, his stone weapons, but built houses, put imposing monuments over his dead, and had agriculture, tame cattle, pottery, and weaving. This is misleading, as the more advanced of these accomplishments appear only late in the New Stone Age. The only difference we find at first is that the stone axes, etc., are more finely chipped or flaked, and are frequently polished by rubbing on stone moulds. There is no sudden leap in culture or intelligence in the story of man.

It would be supremely interesting to trace the evolution of human industries and ideas during the few tens of thousands of years of the New Stone Age. During that time moral and religious ideas are largely developed, political or social forms are elaborated, and the arts of civilised man have their first rude inauguration. The foundations of civilisation are laid. Unfortunately, precisely because the period is relatively so short and the advance so rapid, its remains are crushed and mingled in a thin seam of the geological chronicle, and we cannot restore the gradual course of its development with any confidence. Estimates of its duration vary from 20,000 to 70,000 years; though Sir W. Turner has recently concluded, from an examination of marks on Scottish monuments, that Neolithic man probably came on foot from Scandinavia to Scotland, and most geologists would admit that it must be at least a hundred thousand years since one could cross from Norway to Scotland on foot. As usual, we must leave open the question of chronology, and be content with a modest provisional estimate of 40,000 or 50,000 years.

We dimly perceive the gradual advance of human culture in this important period. During the Old Stone Age man had made more progress than he had made in the preceding million years; during the New Stone Age—at least one-fourth as long as the Old—he made even greater progress; and, we may add, in the historical period, which is one-fourth the length of the Neolithic Age, he will make greater progress still. The pace of advance naturally increases as intelligence grows, but that is not the whole explanation. The spread of the race, the gathering of its members into tribes, and the increasing enterprise of men in hunting and migration, lead to incessant contacts of different cultures and a progressive stimulation.