Human Origins

by S. Laing

The human race repeats this lesson of the animal world, and shows a graduated scale of fertility and permanence in crosses, between different types according as they are closely or distantly related. Thus if we take the two extremes, the blond white of North temperate Europe and the Negro of Equatorial Africa, the disposition to union is almost replaced by repugnance which is only overcome under special circumstances, such as slavery, and an absence of women of their own race; while the offspring, the mulatto, is everywhere a feeble folk, with deficient vitality, diminished fertility, and prone to die out, or revert to one or other of the original types. But where the types are not so extremely divergent the fertility of the cross increases, as between the brunet white of Southern Europe and the Arab or Moor with the Negro, and of the European with the native Indian of America.

Perhaps the strongest argument for polgyeny is that derived from the different constitutions of different races as regards susceptibility to climatic and other influences.

At present, and as far back as history or tradition enables us to trace, mankind has, as in the case of other animals, been very much restricted to definite geological provinces. Thus in the extreme case of the fair white and the Negro, the former cannot live and propagate its type south of the parallel of 40°, or the latter north of it. This argument was no doubt pushed too far by Agassiz, who supposed the whole world to be divided into a number of limited districts, in each of which a separate creation both of men, animals, and plants had taken place suited to the environment. This is clearly inconsistent with facts, but there is still some force in it when stripped of exaggeration, and confined to the three or four leading types which are markedly different. Especially it bears on the argument, on which monogenists mainly rely, of the peopling of the earth by migration from one common centre. No doubt migration has played a very great part in the diffusion of all animal and vegetable species, and their zoological provinces are determined very much by the existence of insurmountable barriers in early geological times. No doubt also man is better organized for migration than most other terrestrial animals, and history and tradition show that in comparatively recent times he has reached the remotest islands of the Pacific by perfectly natural means. But this does not meet the difficulty of accounting, if we place the origin of man from a single pair anywhere in the northern hemisphere, for his presence in palæolithic times in South Africa and South America. How did he get across the equatorial zone, in which only a tropical fauna, including the tropical Negro, can now live and flourish? Or vice versâ, if the original Adam and Eve were black, and the Garden of Eden situated in the tropics, how did their descendants migrate northwards, and live on the skirts of the ice-caps of the glacial period? Or how did the yellow race, so tolerant of heat and cold, and of insanitary conditions, and so different in physical and moral characters from either the whites or the blacks, either originate from them, or give rise to them? The nearest congeners of man, the quadrumana, monkeys and apes, are all catarrhine in the Old World, and all platyrhine in America. Why, if all are descended from the same pair of ancestors, and have spread from the same spot by migration? We can only reconcile the fact that it is so with the facts of evolution, by throwing the common starting-point or points of the lines of development much further back into the Eocene, or even further; and if this be true for monkeys, why not for man?

One point seems quite clear, that monogeny is only possible by extending the date of human origins far back into the Tertiaries. On any short-dated theories of man's appearance upon earth—as for instance that of Prestwich, that palæolithic man probably only existed for some 20,000 or 25,000 years before the neolithic period—some theory like that of Agassiz, of separate creations in separate zoological provinces, follows inevitably. If the immense time from the Miocene to the Recent period has been insufficient to differentiate the Hylobates and Dryopithecus very materially from the existing anthropoid apes, a period such as 40,000 or 50,000 years would have gone a very little way in deriving the Negro from the white, or the white from the Negro. To deny the extension of human origins into the Tertiaries is practically to deny Darwin's theory of evolution altogether, or to contend that man is an exception to the laws by which the rest of the animal creation have come into existence in the course of evolution.

The question of the locality in which the human species first originated depends also very materially on the date assigned for human origins. The various speculations which have been hazarded on this subject are almost all based on the supposition that this origin took place in comparatively recent times when geographical and other causes were not materially different from those of the present day. It was for ages the accepted belief that all mankind were descended primarily from a single pair of ancestors, who were miraculously created in Mesopotamia, and secondarily from three pairs who were miraculously preserved in the ark in Armenia. This of course never had any other foundation than the belief in the inspired authority of the Bible, and when it came to be established that this, as regards its scientific and prehistoric speculations, was irreconcilable with the most certain facts of science, the orthodox account of the Creation fell with it. The theory of Asiatic origin was, however, taken up on other grounds, and still lingers in some quarters, mainly among philologists, who, headed by Max Müller, thought they had discovered in Sanscrit and Zend the nearest approach to a common Aryan language. Tracing backwards the lines of migration of these people, the Sanscrit-speaking Hindoos and the Zend-speaking Iranians, they found them intersecting somewhere about the Upper Oxus, and jumped at the conclusion that the great elevated plateau of Pamir, the "roof of the world," had been the birthplace of man, as it was of so many of the great rivers which flowed from it to the north, south, east, and west. This theory, however, has pretty well broken down, since it has been shown that other branches of the Aryan languages, specially the Lithuanian, contain more archaic elements than either Sanscrit or Zend; that language is often no conclusive test of race; that Aryan migrations have quite as often or oftener been from west to east than from east to west; and that all history, prehistoric traditions, and linguistic palæontology point to the principal Aryan races having been located in Northern and Central Europe and in Central and Southern Russia very much as we find them at the present day.

The question of the locality of human origins is now being debated on very different grounds, and although it is not denied that Max Müller's "somewhere in Asia" may turn out to be a correct guess, it is denied that there is at present a particle of evidence to support it. For really the whole question is very much one of guesswork. The immense antiquity which on the lowest possible estimate can be assigned for the proved existence of man, carries us back to a period when geological, geographical, and climatic conditions were so entirely different, that all inferences from those of the present period are useless. For instance, certainly half the Himalayas, and probably the whole, were under the sea; the Pamir and Central Asia, instead of being the roof of the world, may have been fathoms deep under a great ocean; Greenland and Spitzbergen were types of the north temperate climate best suited for the highest races of man.

In like manner language ceases to be an available factor in any attempt to trace human origins to their source. It is doubtless true that at the present day different fundamental types of language distinguish the different typical races of the human family. Thus the monosyllabic type, consisting of roots only without grammar, characterizes the Chinese and its allied races of the extreme east of Asia; the agglutinative, in which different shades of meaning were attached to roots, by definite particles glued on to them as it were by prefixes or suffixes, is the type adopted by most of the oldest and most numerous races of mankind in the Old World as their means of conveying ideas by sound; while in the New World the common type of an immense variety of languages is polysynthetic, or an attempt to splutter out as it were a whole sentence in a single immensely long word made up of fragments of separate roots and particles, a type which in the Old World is confined to the Euskarian of the Spanish Basque. And at the head of all as refined instruments for the conveyance of thought, the two inflectional languages, the Aryan and Semitic, by which, though in each case by a totally different system, roots acquire their different shades of meaning by particles, no longer mechanically glued on to them, but melted down as it were with the roots, and incorporated into new words according to definite grammatical rules.

But this carries us back a very little way. Judging by philology alone, the Chinese, whose annals go back only to about 2500 b.c., would be an older race than the Egyptians or Accadians, whose languages can be traced at least 2000 years further back. And if we go back into prehistoric and geological times we are absolutely ignorant whether the neolithic and palæolithic races spoke these languages, or indeed spoke at all. Some palæontologists have fancied that there was evidence for some of the older palæolithic races being speechless, and christened them "Homo alalus," but this is based on the solitary fact that a single human jaw, that of Naulette, is wanting in the genial tubercle, absent also in anthropoid apes, to which one of the muscles of the tongue is attached. But apart from this being a single instance, some of the best anatomists deny that this genial tubercle is really essential to speech, which the latest physiological researches show to be dependent on the development of a small tract in the third frontal convolution of the right side of the brain, any injury to which causes aphasia, or loss of the power of speech, though its physical organs of the larynx remain unimpaired.

It is probable, however, that from the very first man had a certain faculty, like other animals, of expressing meaning by sounds and gestures, and the researches of Romanes, and quite recently those of Professor Garner on the language of monkeys and apes, make this almost certain. But at what particular moment in the course of the evolution of man this faculty ripened into what may be properly called language is a matter of the purest conjecture. It may have been in the Tertiary, the Quaternary, or not until the Recent period.

All we can say is, that when we first catch sight of languages, they are already developed into the present distinct types, arguing, as in the case of physical types, either for distinct miraculous creations, or for such an immensely remote ancestry as to give time for the fixation of separate secondary types before the formation of language. Thus, if we confine ourselves to the most perfect and advanced, and apparently therefore most modern form of language of the foremost races of the world, the inflectional, we find two types, the Semitic and Aryan, constructed on such totally different principles that it is impossible for one to be derived from the other, or both to be descended from a common parent. The Semitic device of expressing shades of meaning by internal flexion, that is, by ringing the changes of vowels between three consonants, making every word triliteral, is fundamentally different from the Aryan device for attaining the same object by fusing roots and added particles into one new word in which equal value is attached to vowels and consonants. We can partly see how the latter may have been developed from the agglutinative, but not how the stiff and cramped Semitic can have been derived either from that or from the far more perfect and flexible type of the Aryan languages. It has far more the appearance of being an artificial invention implying a considerable advance of intellectual attainment, and therefore of comparatively recent date. In any case we may safely accept the conclusion that there is nothing in language which assists us in tracing back human origins into geological times, or indeed much further than the commencement of history.