Human Origins

by S. Laing

"The bones of four individuals, a woman and two children, were found at Castelnedolo, near Brescia, in a bed identified by its fossils as Lower Pliocene. The excavations were made with the utmost care, in undisturbed strata, by M. Ragazzoni, a well-known scientific man, assisted by M. Germani, and the results confirmed by M. Sergi, a well-known geologist, after a minute personal investigation. The deposit was removed in successive horizontal layers, and not the least trace was found of the beds having been mixed or disturbed. The human bones presented the same fossilized appearance as those of the extinct animals in the same deposit. The female skeleton was almost entire, and the fragments of the skull were sufficiently perfect to admit of their being pieced together so as to show almost its entire form."

The first conjecture naturally was that it must have been a case of subsequent interment, a conjecture which was strengthened by the fact of the female skeleton being so entire; but this is negatived by the undisturbed nature of the beds, and by the fact that the other bones were found scattered at considerable distances throughout the stratum. M. Quatrefages sums up the evidence by saying, "that there exists no serious reason for doubting the discovery, and that if made in a Quaternary deposit, no one would have thought of contesting its accuracy. Nothing can be opposed to it but theoretical à priori objections similar to those which so long repelled the existence of Quaternary man."

But if we accept this discovery, it leads to the remarkable conclusion that Tertiary man not only existed, but has undergone little change in the thousands of centuries which have since elapsed. The skull is of fair capacity, very much like what might be expected from a female of the Canstadt type, and less rude and ape-like than the skulls of Spy and Neanderthal, or those of modern Bushmen and Australians. And the other bones of the skeleton show no marked peculiarities.

This makes it difficult to accept the discovery unreservedly, notwithstanding the great weight of positive evidence in its favour. The great objection to Tertiary man has been, that as all other species had changed, and many had become extinct two or three times over since the Miocene, it was unlikely that an animal so highly specialized as man should alone have had a continuous existence. And this argument of course becomes stronger the more it can be shown that the oldest skeletons differed little if it at all from man of the Quaternary and Recent ages. Moreover, the earlier specimens of Quaternary man which are so numerous and authentic, show, if not anything that can be fairly called the "missing link," still a decided tendency, as they get older, towards the type of the rudest existing races, which again show a distinct though distant approximation towards the type of the higher apes. The oldest Quaternary skulls are dolichocephalic, very thick with enormous frontal sinuses; low and receding foreheads; flattened vertices; prognathous jaws, and slight and receding' chins. The average cranial capacity is about 1150 cubic centimètres, or fully one-fourth less than that of modern European man, and of this smaller brain a larger proportion is in the posterior region. The other peculiarities of the skeletons all tend in the same direction, and, as we have seen in Huxley's description of the men of Spy, sometimes go a long way in the pithecoid direction, even to the extent of not being able to straighten the knee in walking.

It would, therefore, be contrary to all our ideas of evolution to find that some 100,000 or 200,000, or more probably 400,000 or 500,000 years prior to these men of Spy and Neanderthal, the human race had existed in higher physical perfection nearer to the existing type of modern man.

Quatrefages meets this by saying that Tertiary men with a larger brain, and therefore more intelligence than the other Tertiary mammals, might have survived, where these succumbed to changes and became extinct. This is doubtless true to some extent, but it hardly seems sufficient to account for the presence of a higher and more recent type, like that of Castelnedolo in the Lower Pliocene, that is a whole geological period earlier than that of the Lower Quaternary. It is more to the purpose to say with Gaudry that the changes on which the distinction of species are founded are often so slight that they might just as well be attributed to variations of races; and to appeal to instances like that of the Hylobates of the Miocene, one of the nearest congeners of man, in which no genuine difference can be detected from the Hylobates or Gibbon of the present day; and if the discovery referred to at p. [264], of anthropoid primates in the Eocene of Patagonia, should be confirmed, it would greatly strengthen the argument for the persistence of the order to which man belongs through several geological periods.

In any case we require more than the evidence of this one discovery before we can assume the type of Tertiary man as a proved fact with the same confidence as we can the existence of something like man in those remote ages, from the repeated evidence of chipped stones and cut bones, showing unmistakable signs of being the work of human intelligence. And in the meantime, the only safe conclusion seems to be that it is very probable that we may have to go back to the Eocene to find the "missing link," or the ancestral animal which may have been the common progenitor of man and of the other quadrumana.

I turn now to the evidence from the New World. I have kept this distinct, for there is no such proof of synchronism between the later geological phases of this and of the Old World as would warrant us in assuming that what is true in one is necessarily true in the other. Thus in Europe the presence of the mastodon is a conclusive proof that the formation in which its remains are found is Upper Miocene or Pliocene, and it has completely disappeared before the glacial period and the Quaternary era. But in North America it has survived both these periods, and it is even a question whether it is not found in recent peat-mosses with arrow-heads of the historical Indians.

The glacial period also, which in the Old World affords such a clear demarcation between Tertiary and Recent ages, and such manifest proofs of two great glaciations with a long inter-glacial period, presents different conditions in America, where the ice-caps radiated from different centres, and extended further south and over wider areas. There is no proof whether the great cold set in sooner or later, and whether the elevations and depressions of land synchronized with those of Europe. The evidence for a long inter-glacial period is by no means so clear, and the best American geologists differ respecting it. And above all, the glacial period seems to have lasted longer, and the time required for post-glacial or recent denudation, and erosion of river-gorges, to be less than is required to account for post-glacial phenomena on this side of the Atlantic.

The evidence, therefore, from the New World, though conclusive as to the existence of man from an immense antiquity, can hardly be accepted as equally so in an attempt to prove that antiquity to be Tertiary in the sense of identifying it with specific European formations. With this reservation I proceed to give a short account of this evidence as bearing on the question of the oldest proofs of man's existence. The first step or proof of the presence of man in the Quaternary deposits which correspond with the oldest river-drifts of Europe, has only been made quite recently. Mr. Abbott was the first to discover such implements of the usual palæolithic type in Quaternary gravels of the river Delaware, near Trenton in New Jersey, and since then they have been frequently found, as described by Dr. Wright in his recently-published Ice Age in America, in Ohio, Illinois, and other States, in the old gravels of rivers which carried the drainage of the great lake district to the Hudson and the Mississippi, before the present line of drainage was established by the Falls of Niagara and the St. Lawrence. So far the evidence merely confirms that drawn from similar finds in the Old World of the existence of man in the early glacial or Quaternary times, already widely diffused, and everywhere in a similar condition of primitive savagery, and chipping his rude stone implements into the same forms. But if we cross the Rocky Mountains into California, we find evidence which apparently carries us further back and raises new questions.