The Story of Evolution

by Joseph McCabe

It remains to be seen if evolutionary principles will throw at least an equal light on the progress of humanity in the historical period. Here again the questions, Whence and Why, have been asked in vain for countless ages. If man is a progressive animal, why has the progress been confined to some of the race? If humanity shared at first a common patrimony, why have the savages remained savages, and the barbarians barbaric? Why has progress been incarnated so exceptionally in the white section of the race, the Europeans? We approach these questions more confidently after surveying the story of terrestrial life in the light of evolutionary principles. Since the days of the primeval microbe it has happened that a few were chosen and many were left behind. There was no progressive element in the advancing few that was not shared by the stagnant many. The difference lay in the environment. Let us see if this principle applies to the history of civilisation.

In the last chapter I observed that, with the rise of human intelligence, the cultural environment becomes more important than the physical. Since human progress is a progress in ideas and the emotions which accompany them, this may seem to be a truism. In point of fact it is assailed by more than one recent historical writer. The scepticism is partly due to a misunderstanding. No one but a fanatical adherent of extreme theories of heredity will deny that the physical surroundings of a race continue to be of great importance. The progress of a particular people may often be traced in part to its physical environment; especially to changes of environment, by migration, for instance. Further, it is not for a moment suggested that a race never evolves its own culture, but has always to receive it from another. If we said that, we should be ultimately driven to recognise culture, like the early Chinese, as a gift of the gods. What is meant is that the chief key to the progress of certain peoples, the arrest of progress in others, and the entire absence of progress in others, is the study of their relations with, or isolation from, other peoples. They make progress chiefly according to the amount of stimulation they get by contact with a diverse culture.

Let us see if this furnishes a broad explanation of the position of the various peoples of the world. The Ethnologist tells us that the lowest peoples of the earth are the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, the Hottentots, a number of little-understood peoples in Central Africa, the wild Veddahs of Ceylon, the (extinct) Tasmanians, the Aetas in the interior of the Philippines, and certain fragments of peoples on islands of the Indian Ocean. There is not the least trace of a common element in the environment of these peoples to explain why they have remained at the level of primitive humanity. Many of them lived in the most promising and resourceful surroundings. What is common to them all is their isolation from the paths of later humanity. They represent the first wave of human distribution, pressed to the tips of continents or on islands by later waves, and isolated. The position of the Veddahs is, to some extent, an exception; and it is interesting to find that the latest German students of that curious people think that they have been classed too low by earlier investigators.

We cannot run over all the peoples of the earth in this way, but will briefly glance at the lower races of the various continents. A branch of the second phase of developing humanity, the negroid stock, spread eastward over the Asiatic islands and Australia, and westward into Africa. The extreme wing of this army, the Australian blacks, too clearly illustrates the principle to need further reference. It has retained for ages the culture of the middle Palaeolithic. The negritos who penetrated to the Philippines are another extreme instance of isolation. The Melanesians of the islands of the Indian and Pacific Ocean are less low, because those islands have been slowly crossed by a much higher race, the Polynesians. The Maoris of New Zealand, the Tongans, Hawaians, etc., are people of our own (Caucasic) stock, probably diverging to the south-east while our branch of the stock pressed westward. This not only explains the higher condition of the Maoris, etc., but also shows why they have not advanced like their European cousins. Their environment is one of the finest in the world, but—it lies far away from the highways of culture.

In much the same way can we interpret the swarming peoples of Africa. The more primitive peoples which arrived first, and were driven south or into the central forests by the later and better equipped invaders from the central zone, have remained the more primitive. The more northern peoples, on the fringe of, or liable to invasion from, the central zone, have made more advance, and have occasionally set up rudimentary civilisations. But the movements from the north to the south in early historical times are too obscure to enable us to trace the action of the principle more clearly. The peoples of the Mediterranean fringe of Africa, living in the central zone of stimulation, have proved very progressive. Under the Romans North Africa was at least as civilised as Britain, and an equally wise and humane European policy might lead to their revival to-day.

When we turn to Asia we encounter a mass of little-understood peoples and a few civilisations with obscure histories, but we have a fairly clear application of the principle. The northern, more isolated peoples, are the more primitive; the north-eastern, whose isolation is accentuated by a severe environment, are most primitive of all. The Eskimo, whether they are the survivors of the Magdalenian race or a regiment thrown off the Asiatic army as it entered America, remain at the primitive level. The American peoples in turn accord with this view. Those which penetrate furthest south remain stagnant or deteriorate; those which remain in the far north remain below the level of civilisation, because the land-bridge to Asia breaks down; but those which settle in Central America evolve a civilisation. A large zone, from Mexico to Peru, was overspread by this civilisation, and it was advancing steadily when European invaders destroyed it, and reduced the civilised Peruvians to the Quichas of to-day.

There remain the civilisations of Asia, and here we have a new and interesting aspect of the question. How did these civilisations develop in Asia, and how is it that they have remained stagnant for ages, while Europe advanced? The origin of the Asiatic civilisations is obscure. The common idea of their vast antiquity has no serious ground. The civilisation of Japan cannot be traced back beyond about the eighth century B.C. Even then the population was probably a mixed flotsam from neighbouring lands—Ainus, Koreans, Chinese, and Malays. What was the character of the primitive civilisation resulting from the mixture of these different cultures we do not know. But the chief elements of Japanese civilisation came later from China. Japan had no written language of any kind until it received one from China about the sixth century of the Christian Era.

The civilisation of China itself goes back at least to about 2300 B.C., but we cannot carry it further back with any confidence. The authorities, endeavouring to pick their steps carefully among old Chinese legends, are now generally agreed that the primitive Chinese were a nomadic tribe which slowly wandered across Asia from about the shores of the Caspian Sea. In other words, they started from a region close to the cradle of western civilisation. Some students, in fact, make them akin to the Akkadians, who founded civilisation in Mesopotamia. At all events, they seem to have conveyed a higher culture to the isolated inhabitants of Western Asia, and a long era of progress followed their settlement in a new environment. For more than two thousand years, however, they have been enclosed in their walls and mountains and seas, while the nations of the remote west clashed unceasingly against each other. We need no other explanation of their stagnation. To speak of the "unprogressiveness" of the Chinese is pure mysticism. The next generation will see.

The civilisation of India is also far later than the civilisation of the west, and seems to be more clearly due to borrowing from the west. The primitive peoples who live on the hills about India, or in the jungles, are fragments, apparently, of the Stone Age inhabitants of India, or their descendants. Their culture may have degenerated under the adverse conditions of dislodgement from their home, but we may fairly conclude that it was never high. On these primitive inhabitants of the plains of India there fell, somewhere about or before 1000 B.C., the Asiatic branch of the Aryan race.

A very recent discovery (1908) has strongly confirmed and illumined this view of the origin of Indian civilisation. Explorers in the ruins of the ancient capital of the Hittite Empire (in North Syria and Cappadocia) found certain treaties which had been concluded, about 1300 B.C., between the Hittites and the king of the Aryans. The names of the deities which are mentioned in the treaties seem to show that the Persian and Indian branches of the Aryan race were not yet separated, but formed a united kingdom on the banks of the Euphrates. They seem to have come from Bactria (and possibly beyond), and introduced the horse (hitherto unknown to the Babylonians) about 1800 B.C. It is surmised by the experts that the Indian and Persian branches separated soon after 1300 B.C., possibly on account of religious quarrels, and the Sanscrit-speaking branch, with its Vedic hymns and its Hinduism, wandered eastward and northward until it discovered and took possession of the Indian peninsula. The long isolation of India, since the cessation of its commerce with Rome until modern times, explains the later stagnation of its civilisation.