Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

The consequences following from changes of area and climate play a remarkable part in the history of man, and have no analogies in the migrations of the lower animals. The Frank, the Anglo-Saxon, and the Norman; the Hungarian, the Saracen, and the Turk: are all to a great extent products of the transplanting of seemingly indigenous races to more favouring localities; but the change to all of them was less than that to which the colonists of the New World have been subjected. There the old process was reversed; and the offspring of Europe’s highest civilisation, abruptly transferred to the virgin forest and steppes of the American wilderness, was left amid the widening inheritance of new clearings to develop whatever tendencies lay dormant in the artificial European man.

Here then are materials full of promise for the ethnical student:—the Red-Man, indigenous, seemingly aboriginal, and still in what it is customary to call a state of nature; the Negro, with many African attributes uneffaced, systematically precluded until very recent years from the free reception of the civilisation with which he has been brought in contact, but subjected nevertheless to novel influences of climate, food, and all external appliances; the White-Man also undergoing the transforming effects of climate, amid novel social and political institutions; and all three extreme types of variety or race testing, on a sufficiently comprehensive scale, their capacity for a fertile intermingling of blood. The period, moreover, is in some respects favourable for summing up results, as changes are at work which mark the close of a cycle in the novel conditions to which one at least of the intruded races has been subjected for upwards of three centuries.

In Europe we study man only as he has been moulded by a thousand external circumstances. The arts, born at the very dawn of history, give form to its modern social life. The faith and morals nurtured among the hills of Judah, the intellect of Greece, the jurisprudence and military prowess of Rome, and the civil and ecclesiastical institutions of medieval Christendom, have all helped to make of us what we are: till in the European of the nineteenth century it becomes a curious question how much pertains to the man, and how much to that civilisation, of which he is in part the author and in part the offspring? In vain we strive to detach European man from elements foreign to him, that we may look on him as he is or was by nature; for he only exists for us as the product of all those multifarious elements which have accumulated along the track of countless generations. The very serf of the Russian steppes cannot grow freely, as his nomad brother of Asia does; but must don the unfamiliar fashions of the Frank, as strange to him as the armour of Saul upon the youthful Ephrathite.

Is, then, civilisation natural to man; or is it only a habit or condition artificially superinduced, and as foreign to his nature as the bit and bridle to the horse, or the truck-cart to the wild ass of the desert? Such questions involve the whole ethnological problem reopened by Lamarck, Agassiz, Darwin, Huxley, and others. Whence is man? What are his antecedents? What—within the compass with which alone science deals,—are his future destinies? Does civilisation move only through limited cycles, repeating in new centuries the work of the old; attaining, under some varying phase, to the same maximum of our imperfect humanity, and then, like the wandering comet, returning from the splendour of its perihelion back to night?

Perhaps a question preliminary even to this is: What is civilisation? He who has seen the Euromerican and the Indian side by side can be at no loss as to the difference between civilised and uncivilised man. But is he therefore at liberty to conclude that the element which so markedly distinguishes the White- from the Red- man of the New World is an attribute peculiar to the former, rather than the development of innate powers common to both, and in the possession of which man differs from all other animals? Domestication is, for the lower animals, the subjection of them to artificial conditions foreign to their nature, which they could not originate for themselves, and which they neither mature nor perpetuate: but, on the contrary, hasten to throw off so soon as left to their own uncontrolled action. Civilisation is for man development. It is self-originated; it matures all the faculties natural to him, and is progressive and seemingly ineradicable. Of both postulates the social life alike of the forest and of the clearings of the New World seems to offer proofs; and to other questions involved in an inquiry into the origin of civilisation and man’s relations to it, answers may also be recovered from the same source. There the latest developments of human progress are abruptly brought face to face with the most unprogressive phases of savage nature; and many old problems are being solved anew under novel conditions. The race to which this is chiefly due had been isolated during centuries of preparatory training, and illustrates in some of the sources of its progress the impediments to the civilisation of savage races brought in contact with others at so dissimilar a stage. The very elements for Britain’s greatness seem to lie in her slow maturity; in her collision with successive races only a little in advance of herself; in her transition through all the stages from infancy to vigorous manhood. But that done, the Old Englander becomes the New Englander; starts from his matured vantage-ground on a fresh career, and displaces the American Red-man by the American White-Man, the free product of the great past and the great present.

It was with a strange and fascinating pleasure, that, after having striven to resuscitate the races of Britain’s prehistoric ages, by means of their buried arts,[^[1]] I found myself face to face with the aborigines of the New World. Much that had become familiar to me in fancy, as pertaining to a long obliterated past, was here the living present; while around me, in every stage of transition, lay the phases of savage and civilised life: the nature of the forest, the art of the city; the God-made country, the man-made town: each in the very process of change, extinction, and re-creation. Here, then, was a new field for the study of civilisation and all that it involves. The wild beast is in its native state, and hastens, when relieved from artificial constraints, to return to the forest wilds as to its natural condition. The forest-man—is he too in his natural condition? for Europe’s sons have, for upwards of three centuries, been levelling his forests, and planting their civilisation on the clearings, yet he accepts not their civilisation as a higher goal for him. He, at least, thinks that the white man and the red are of diverse natures; that the city and the cultivated field are for the one, but the wild forest and the free chase for the other. He does not envy the white man, he only wonders at him as a being of a different nature.

Broken-Arm, the Chief of the Crees, receiving the traveller Paul Kane and his party into his lodge, at their encampment in the valley of the Saskatchewan, told him the following tradition of the tribe. One of the Crees became a Christian. He was a very good man, and did what was right; and when he died he was taken up to the white man’s heaven, where everything was very beautiful. All were happy amongst their friends and relatives who had gone before them; but the Indian could not share their joy, for everything was strange to him. He met none of the spirits of his ancestors to welcome him: no hunting nor fishing, nor any of those occupations in which he was wont to delight. Then the Great Manitou called him, and asked him why he was joyless in His beautiful heaven; and the Indian replied that he sighed for the company of the spirits of his own people. So the Great Manitou told him that he could not send him to the Indian heaven, as he had, whilst on earth, chosen this one; but as he had been a very good man, he would send him back to earth again.

The Indian does not believe in the superiority of the white man. The difference between them is only such as he discerns between the social, constructive beaver, and the solitary, cunning fox. The Great Spirit implanted in each his peculiar faculties; why should the one covet the nature of the other? Hence one element of the unhopeful Indian future. The progress of the white man offers even less incentive to his ambition than the cunning of the fox, or the architectural instincts of the beaver. He, at least, does not overlook, in his sylvan philosophy, that feature in the physical history of mankind, which Agassiz complained of having been neglected: viz., the natural relations between different types of man and the animals and plants inhabiting the same regions. Yet the Indian of the American wilds is no more primeval than his forests. Beneath the roots of their oldest giants lie memorials of an older native civilisation; and the American ethnologist and naturalist, while satisfying themselves of the persistency of a common type, and of specific ethnical characteristics prevailing throughout all the widely-scattered tribes of the American continent,[^[2]] have been studying only the temporary supplanters of nations strange to us as the extinct life of older geological periods.

In that old East, to which science still turns when searching for the cradle-land of the human family, vast areas exist, the characteristics of which seem to stamp with unprogressive endurance the inheritors of the soil. Along the shores of the Indian Ocean and the Levant, and stretching from the Persian Gulf into the fertile valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris, are still found seats of civilisation coexistent with the earliest dawn of man’s history. But beyond these lies the elevated table-land of Central Asia, stretching away northward, and pouring its waters into inland seas, or directing their uncivilising courses into the frozen waters of the Arctic circle. Abrupt mountain-chains subdivide this elevated plateau into regions which have been for unrecorded ages the hives of pastoral tribes, unaffected by any intrusion of civilising arts or settled social habits; until, impelled by unknown causes, they have poured southward over the seats of primitive Asiatic civilisation, or westward into the younger continent of Europe.

From the wandering hordes of the great Asiatic steppes have come the Huns, the Magyars, and the Turks, as well as a considerable portion of the Bulgarians of modern Europe; while the sterile peninsula of Arabia has given birth to moral revolutions of the most enduring influence. Yet the capacity for civilisation of the Magyar or the Turk, transferred to new physical conditions, and subjected to higher moral and intellectual influences; or the wondrous intellectual vigour of the Arab of Bagdad or Cordova: affords no scale by which to gauge the immobility of the Tartar on his native steppe, or the Arab in his desert wilderness. Without agriculture or any idea of property in land, destitute of the very rudiments of architecture, knowing no written law, or any form of government save the patriarchal expansion to the tribe of the primitive family ties: we can discern no change in the wild nomad, though we trace him back for three thousand years. Migratory offshoots of the hordes of Central Asia, and of the wanderers of the Arabian desert, have gone forth to prove the capacity for progress of the least progressive races; but the great body tarries still in the wilderness and on the steppe, to prove what an enduring capacity man also has to live as one of the wild fauna of the waste.