When differences other than physical are considered, the superiority of man is so great as to incline many to the opinion that he is a separate creation on the ground of his mentality alone.
However great this superiority is, it does not appear that man possesses any faculty or fairly fundamental mental process which is not possessed in some degree by some lower animal or other. Memory, the powers of abstraction, and of reasoning are possessed by certain animals, if only in a very simple form.
He alone can produce fire; and this acquaintance with fire and the art of cooking has also frequently been regarded as the most distinctive characteristic of the human race. Clothing and decoration are also early peculiarities of man. Alone among animals, he covers himself with the skins of the beasts he has slain, and adorns himself with feathers, shells, teeth, and bones. Yet from these simple beginnings all the arts gradually developed.
MAN AND HIS
DEAD
Man is one of the few animals to pay special attention to his dead. Funeral rites differ much from place to place, and form a special subject of anthropological study. Tumuli, pyramids, standing-stones, and other forms of funeral monument have each their history and implications. Especially does man almost everywhere believe in some sort of survival of the individual after death, and in the existence within himself of a soul or spirit which outlives its fleshly habitation. The origin of religion is largely connected with these ideas of a future life and a future world. Herbert Spencer traces it directly to the theory of hosts and ancestor-worship; Dr. Tylor, to what he calls animism, or the belief in souls universally pervading all natural objects.
Man alone also wilfully indulges in intoxicating, stupefying, or exciting substances, such as alcohol, tobacco, bhang, opium, hashish, etc.
THE GREAT QUESTION OF
MAN’S ORIGIN
As to man’s origin, two main views may be said at present to contest the field. Has man sprung from a single or from several stocks? Do the races of men constitute so many members of one family, or are they four or more unrelated groups? One answer, formerly the accepted one, is based either upon the literal interpretation of Scripture or upon natural theology, and regards him as a distinct creation, separate from and superior to the remaining animals. The other, accepted by many competent authorities, regards him as descended from a hairy ancestor, more or less remotely allied to the anthropoid apes. This theory of his antecedents has been elaborated in profuse detail by Charles Darwin, whose Descent of Man forms the great storehouse of information and speculation on the question. In the beginning, according to the evolutionary view, man was apparently homogeneous—a single species, speaking a single primitive rude tongue (largely eked out by signs and gesture-language), and not divided into distinct varieties. At an early period, however, the species broke up into several races, now inhabiting various parts of the world.
MAN’S PRIMEVAL HOME AND HIS
EARLIEST KNOWN REMAINS
If man is therefore essentially one, he cannot have had more than one primeval home. This human cradle, as it may be called, has been located with some certainty in the Eastern Archipelago, and more particularly in the island of Java, where in 1892 Dr. Eugene Dubois brought to light the earliest known remains that can be described as distinctly human. From the Pliocene (late Tertiary) beds of the Trinil district he recovered some teeth, a skull, and a thigh-bone of a being whom he named the Pithecanthropus erectus, thereby indicating an “Ape-man that could walk.”