DO WE KNOW WHERE MAN ORIGINATED?

For a long time some scientists thought the “cradle of mankind” was in central Asia. Other scientists insisted it was in Africa, and still others said it might have been in Europe. Actually, we don’t know where it was. We don’t even know that there was only one “cradle.” If we had to choose a “cradle” at this moment, we would probably say Africa. But the southern portions of Asia and Europe may also have been included in the general area. The scene of the early development of mankind was certainly the Old World. It is pretty certain men didn’t reach North or South America until almost the end of the Ice Age—had they done so earlier we would certainly have found some trace of them by now.

The earliest tools we have yet found come from central and south Africa. By the dating system I’m using, these tools must be over 500,000 years old. There are now reports that a few such early tools have been found—at the Sterkfontein cave in South Africa—along with the bones of small fossil men called “australopithecines.” Not all scientists would agree that the australopithecines were “men,” or would agree that the tools were made by the australopithecines themselves. For these sticklers, the earliest bones of men come from the island of Java. The date would be about 450,000 years ago. So far, we have not yet found the tools which we suppose these earliest men in the Far East must have made.

Let me say it another way. How old are the earliest traces of men we now have? Over half a million years. This was a time when the first alpine glaciation was happening in the north. What has been found so far? The tools which the men of those times made, in different parts of Africa. It is now fairly generally agreed that the “men” who made the tools were the australopithecines. There is also a more “man-like” jawbone at Kanam in Kenya, but its find-spot has been questioned. The next earliest bones we have were found in Java, and they may be almost a hundred thousand years younger than the earliest African finds. We haven’t yet found the tools of these early Javanese. Our knowledge of tool-using in Africa spreads quickly as time goes on: soon after the appearance of tools in the south we shall have them from as far north as Algeria.

Very soon after the earliest Javanese come the bones of slightly more developed people in Java, and the jawbone of a man who once lived in what is now Germany. The same general glacial beds which yielded the later Javanese bones and the German jawbone also include tools. These finds come from the time of the second alpine glaciation.

So this is the situation. By the time of the end of the second alpine or first continental glaciation (say 400,000 years ago) we have traces of men from the extremes of the more southerly portions of the Old World—South Africa, eastern Asia, and western Europe. There are also some traces of men in the middle ground. In fact, Professor Franz Weidenreich believed that creatures who were the immediate ancestors of men had already spread over Europe, Africa, and Asia by the time the Ice Age began. We certainly have no reason to disbelieve this, but fortunate accidents of discovery have not yet given us the evidence to prove it.

MEN AND APES

Many people used to get extremely upset at the ill-formed notion that “man descended from the apes.” Such words were much more likely to start fights or “monkey trials” than the correct notion that all living animals, including man, ascended or evolved from a single-celled organism which lived in the primeval seas hundreds of millions of years ago. Men are mammals, of the order called Primates, and man’s living relatives are the great apes. Men didn’t “descend” from the apes or apes from men, and mankind must have had much closer relatives who have since become extinct.

Men stand erect. They also walk and run on their two feet. Apes are happiest in trees, swinging with their arms from branch to branch. Few branches of trees will hold the mighty gorilla, although he still manages to sleep in trees. Apes can’t stand really erect in our sense, and when they have to run on the ground, they use the knuckles of their hands as well as their feet.

A key group of fossil bones here are the south African australopithecines. These are called the Australopithecinae or “man-apes” or sometimes even “ape-men.” We do not know that they were directly ancestral to men but they can hardly have been so to apes. Presently I’ll describe them a bit more. The reason I mention them here is that while they had brains no larger than those of apes, their hipbones were enough like ours so that they must have stood erect. There is no good reason to think they couldn’t have walked as we do.

BRAINS, HANDS, AND TOOLS

Whether the australopithecines were our ancestors or not, the proper ancestors of men must have been able to stand erect and to walk on their two feet. Three further important things probably were involved, next, before they could become men proper. These are:

1. The increasing size and development of the brain.

2. The increasing usefulness (specialization) of the thumb and hand.

3. The use of tools. Nobody knows which of these three is most important, or which came first. Most probably the growth of all three things was very much blended together. If you think about each of the things, you will see what I mean. Unless your hand is more flexible than a paw, and your thumb will work against (or oppose) your fingers, you can’t hold a tool very well. But you wouldn’t get the idea of using a tool unless you had enough brain to help you see cause and effect. And it is rather hard to see how your hand and brain would develop unless they had something to practice on—like using tools. In Professor Krogman’s words, “the hand must become the obedient servant of the eye and the brain.” It is the co-ordination of these things that counts.

Many other things must have been happening to the bodies of the creatures who were the ancestors of men. Our ancestors had to develop organs of speech. More than that, they had to get the idea of letting certain sounds made with these speech organs have certain meanings.

All this must have gone very slowly. Probably everything was developing little by little, all together. Men became men very slowly.

WHEN SHALL WE CALL MEN MEN?

What do I mean when I say “men”? People who looked pretty much as we do, and who used different tools to do different things, are men to me. We’ll probably never know whether the earliest ones talked or not. They probably had vocal cords, so they could make sounds, but did they know how to make sounds work as symbols to carry meanings? But if the fossil bones look like our skeletons, and if we find tools which we’ll agree couldn’t have been made by nature or by animals, then I’d say we had traces of men.

The australopithecine finds of the Transvaal and Bechuanaland, in south Africa, are bound to come into the discussion here. I’ve already told you that the australopithecines could have stood upright and walked on their two hind legs. They come from the very base of the Pleistocene or Ice Age, and a few coarse stone tools have been found with the australopithecine fossils. But there are three varieties of the australopithecines and they last on until a time equal to that of the second alpine glaciation. They are the best suggestion we have yet as to what the ancestors of men may have looked like. They were certainly closer to men than to apes. Although their brain size was no larger than the brains of modern apes their body size and stature were quite small; hence, relative to their small size, their brains were large. We have not been able to prove without doubt that the australopithecines were tool-making creatures, even though the recent news has it that tools have been found with australopithecine bones. The doubt as to whether the australopithecines used the tools themselves goes like this—just suppose some man-like creature (whose bones we have not yet found) made the tools and used them to kill and butcher australopithecines. Hence a few experts tend to let australopithecines still hang in limbo as “man-apes.”

THE EARLIEST MEN WE KNOW

I’ll postpone talking about the tools of early men until the next chapter. The men whose bones were the earliest of the Java lot have been given the name Meganthropus. The bones are very fragmentary. We would not understand them very well unless we had the somewhat later Javanese lot—the more commonly known Pithecanthropus or “Java man”—against which to refer them for study. One of the less well-known and earliest fragments, a piece of lower jaw and some teeth, rather strongly resembles the lower jaws and teeth of the australopithecine type. Was Meganthropus a sort of half-way point between the australopithecines and Pithecanthropus? It is still too early to say. We shall need more finds before we can be definite one way or the other.

Java man, Pithecanthropus, comes from geological beds equal in age to the latter part of the second alpine glaciation; the Meganthropus finds refer to beds of the beginning of this glaciation. The first finds of Java man were made in 1891–92 by Dr. Eugene Dubois, a Dutch doctor in the colonial service. Finds have continued to be made. There are now bones enough to account for four skulls. There are also four jaws and some odd teeth and thigh bones. Java man, generally speaking, was about five feet six inches tall, and didn’t hold his head very erect. His skull was very thick and heavy and had room for little more than two-thirds as large a brain as we have. He had big teeth and a big jaw and enormous eyebrow ridges.

No tools were found in the geological deposits where bones of Java man appeared. There are some tools in the same general area, but they come a bit later in time. One reason we accept the Java man as man—aside from his general anatomical appearance—is that these tools probably belonged to his near descendants.

Remember that there are several varieties of men in the whole early Java lot, at least two of which are earlier than the Pithecanthropus, “Java man.” Some of the earlier ones seem to have gone in for bigness, in tooth-size at least. Meganthropus is one of these earlier varieties. As we said, he may turn out to be a link to the australopithecines, who may or may not be ancestral to men. Meganthropus is best understandable in terms of Pithecanthropus, who appeared later in the same general area. Pithecanthropus is pretty well understandable from the bones he left us, and also because of his strong resemblance to the fully tool-using cave-dwelling “Peking man,” Sinanthropus, about whom we shall talk next. But you can see that the physical anthropologists and prehistoric archeologists still have a lot of work to do on the problem of earliest men.

PEKING MEN AND SOME EARLY WESTERNERS

The earliest known Chinese are called Sinanthropus, or “Peking man,” because the finds were made near that city. In World War II, the United States Marine guard at our Embassy in Peking tried to help get the bones out of the city before the Japanese attack. Nobody knows where these bones are now. The Red Chinese accuse us of having stolen them. They were last seen on a dock-side at a Chinese port. But should you catch a Marine with a sack of old bones, perhaps we could achieve peace in Asia by returning them! Fortunately, there is a complete set of casts of the bones. Peking man lived in a cave in a limestone hill, made tools, cracked animal bones to get the marrow out, and used fire. Incidentally, the bones of Peking man were found because Chinese dig for what they call “dragon bones” and “dragon teeth.” Uneducated Chinese buy these things in their drug stores and grind them into powder for medicine. The “dragon teeth” and “bones” are really fossils of ancient animals, and sometimes of men. The people who supply the drug stores have learned where to dig for strange bones and teeth. Paleontologists who get to China go to the drug stores to buy fossils. In a roundabout way, this is how the fallen-in cave of Peking man at Choukoutien was discovered.

Peking man was not quite as tall as Java man but he probably stood straighter. His skull looked very much like that of the Java skull except that it had room for a slightly larger brain. His face was less brutish than was Java man’s face, but this isn’t saying much.

Peking man dates from early in the interglacial period following the second alpine glaciation. He probably lived close to 350,000 years ago. There are several finds to account for in Europe by about this time, and one from northwest Africa. The very large jawbone found near Heidelberg in Germany is doubtless even earlier than Peking man. The beds where it was found are of second alpine glacial times, and recently some tools have been said to have come from the same beds. There is not much I need tell you about the Heidelberg jaw save that it seems certainly to have belonged to an early man, and that it is very big.

Another find in Germany was made at Steinheim. It consists of the fragmentary skull of a man. It is very important because of its relative completeness, but it has not yet been fully studied. The bone is thick, but the back of the head is neither very low nor primitive, and the face is also not primitive. The forehead does, however, have big ridges over the eyes. The more fragmentary skull from Swanscombe in England (p. 11) has been much more carefully studied. Only the top and back of that skull have been found. Since the skull rounds up nicely, it has been assumed that the face and forehead must have been quite “modern.” Careful comparison with Steinheim shows that this was not necessarily so. This is important because it bears on the question of how early truly “modern” man appeared.

Recently two fragmentary jaws were found at Ternafine in Algeria, northwest Africa. They look like the jaws of Peking man. Tools were found with them. Since no jaws have yet been found at Steinheim or Swanscombe, but the time is the same, one wonders if these people had jaws like those of Ternafine.

WHAT HAPPENED TO JAVA AND PEKING MEN

Professor Weidenreich thought that there were at least a dozen ways in which the Peking man resembled the modern Mongoloids. This would seem to indicate that Peking man was really just a very early Chinese.

Several later fossil men have been found in the Java-Australian area. The best known of these is the so-called Solo man. There are some finds from Australia itself which we now know to be quite late. But it looks as if we may assume a line of evolution from Java man down to the modern Australian natives. During parts of the Ice Age there was a land bridge all the way from Java to Australia.

TWO ENGLISHMEN WHO WEREN’T OLD

The older textbooks contain descriptions of two English finds which were thought to be very old. These were called Piltdown (Eoanthropus dawsoni) and Galley Hill. The skulls were very modern in appearance. In 1948–49, British scientists began making chemical tests which proved that neither of these finds is very old. It is now known that both “Piltdown man” and the tools which were said to have been found with him were part of an elaborate fake!

TYPICAL “CAVE MEN”

The next men we have to talk about are all members of a related group. These are the Neanderthal group. “Neanderthal man” himself was found in the Neander Valley, near DÜsseldorf, Germany, in 1856. He was the first human fossil to be recognized as such.

Some of us think that the neanderthaloids proper are only those people of western Europe who didn’t get out before the beginning of the last great glaciation, and who found themselves hemmed in by the glaciers in the Alps and northern Europe. Being hemmed in, they intermarried a bit too much and developed into a special type. Professor F. Clark Howell sees it this way. In Europe, the earliest trace of men we now know is the Heidelberg jaw. Evolution continued in Europe, from Heidelberg through the Swanscombe and Steinheim types to a group of pre-neanderthaloids. There are traces of these pre-neanderthaloids pretty much throughout Europe during the third interglacial period—say 100,000 years ago. The pre-neanderthaloids are represented by such finds as the ones at Ehringsdorf in Germany and Saccopastore in Italy. I won’t describe them for you, since they are simply less extreme than the neanderthaloids proper—about half way between Steinheim and the classic Neanderthal people.

Professor Howell believes that the pre-neanderthaloids who happened to get caught in the pocket of the southwest corner of Europe at the onset of the last great glaciation became the classic Neanderthalers. Out in the Near East, Howell thinks, it is possible to see traces of people evolving from the pre-neanderthaloid type toward that of fully modern man. Certainly, we don’t see such extreme cases of “neanderthaloidism” outside of western Europe.

There are at least a dozen good examples in the main or classic Neanderthal group in Europe. They date to just before and in the earlier part of the last great glaciation (85,000 to 40,000 years ago). Many of the finds have been made in caves. The “cave men” the movies and the cartoonists show you are probably meant to be Neanderthalers. I’m not at all sure they dragged their women by the hair; the women were probably pretty tough, too!

Neanderthal men had large bony heads, but plenty of room for brains. Some had brain cases even larger than the average for modern man. Their faces were heavy, and they had eyebrow ridges of bone, but the ridges were not as big as those of Java man. Their foreheads were very low, and they didn’t have much chin. They were about five feet three inches tall, but were heavy and barrel-chested. But the Neanderthalers didn’t slouch as much as they’ve been blamed for, either.

One important thing about the Neanderthal group is that there is a fair number of them to study. Just as important is the fact that we know something about how they lived, and about some of the tools they made.

OTHER MEN CONTEMPORARY WITH THE NEANDERTHALOIDS

We have seen that the neanderthaloids seem to be a specialization in a corner of Europe. What was going on elsewhere? We think that the pre-neanderthaloid type was a generally widespread form of men. From this type evolved other more or less extreme although generally related men. The Solo finds in Java form one such case. Another was the Rhodesian man of Africa, and the more recent Hopefield finds show more of the general Rhodesian type. It is more confusing than it needs to be if these cases outside western Europe are called neanderthaloids. They lived during the same approximate time range but they were all somewhat different-looking people.

EARLY MODERN MEN

How early is modern man (Homo sapiens), the “wise man”? Some people have thought that he was very early, a few still think so. Piltdown and Galley Hill, which were quite modern in anatomical appearance and supposedly very early in date, were the best “evidence” for very early modern men. Now that Piltdown has been liquidated and Galley Hill is known to be very late, what is left of the idea?

The backs of the skulls of the Swanscombe and Steinheim finds look rather modern. Unless you pay attention to the face and forehead of the Steinheim find—which not many people have—and perhaps also consider the Ternafine jaws, you might come to the conclusion that the crown of the Swanscombe head was that of a modern-like man.

Two more skulls, again without faces, are available from a French cave site, FontÉchevade. They come from the time of the last great interglacial, as did the pre-neanderthaloids. The crowns of the FontÉchevade skulls also look quite modern. There is a bit of the forehead preserved on one of these skulls and the brow-ridge is not heavy. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion that the bones belonged to an immature individual. In this case, his (or even more so, if her) brow-ridges would have been weak anyway. The case for the FontÉchevade fossils, as modern type men, is little stronger than that for Swanscombe, although Professor Vallois believes it a good case.

It seems to add up to the fact that there were people living in Europe—before the classic neanderthaloids—who looked more modern, in some features, than the classic western neanderthaloids did. Our best suggestion of what men looked like—just before they became fully modern—comes from a cave on Mount Carmel in Palestine.

THE FIRST MODERNS

Professor T.D. McCown and the late Sir Arthur Keith, who studied the Mount Carmel bones, figured out that one of the two groups involved was as much as 70 per cent modern. There were, in fact, two groups or varieties of men in the Mount Carmel caves and in at least two other Palestinian caves of about the same time. The time would be about that of the onset of colder weather, when the last glaciation was beginning in the north—say 75,000 years ago.

The 70 per cent modern group came from only one cave, Mugharet es-Skhul (“cave of the kids”). The other group, from several caves, had bones of men of the type we’ve been calling pre-neanderthaloid which we noted were widespread in Europe and beyond. The tools which came with each of these finds were generally similar, and McCown and Keith, and other scholars since their study, have tended to assume that both the Skhul group and the pre-neanderthaloid group came from exactly the same time. The conclusion was quite natural: here was a population of men in the act of evolving in two different directions. But the time may not be exactly the same. It is very difficult to be precise, within say 10,000 years, for a time some 75,000 years ago. If the Skhul men are in fact later than the pre-neanderthaloid group of Palestine, as some of us think, then they show how relatively modern some men were—men who lived at the same time as the classic Neanderthalers of the European pocket.

Soon after the first extremely cold phase of the last glaciation, we begin to get a number of bones of completely modern men in Europe. We also get great numbers of the tools they made, and their living places in caves. Completely modern skeletons begin turning up in caves dating back to toward 40,000 years ago. The time is about that of the beginning of the second phase of the last glaciation. These skeletons belonged to people no different from many people we see today. Like people today, not everybody looked alike. (The positions of the more important fossil men of later Europe are shown in the chart on page 72.)

DIFFERENCES IN THE EARLY MODERNS

The main early European moderns have been divided into two groups, the Cro-Magnon group and the Combe Capelle-BrÜnn group. Cro-Magnon people were tall and big-boned, with large, long, and rugged heads. They must have been built like many present-day Scandinavians. The Combe Capelle-BrÜnn people were shorter; they had narrow heads and faces, and big eyebrow-ridges. Of course we don’t find the skin or hair of these people. But there is little doubt they were Caucasoids (“Whites”).

Another important find came in the Italian Riviera, near Monte Carlo. Here, in a cave near Grimaldi, there was a grave containing a woman and a young boy, buried together. The two skeletons were first called “Negroid” because some features of their bones were thought to resemble certain features of modern African Negro bones. But more recently, Professor E.A. Hooton and other experts questioned the use of the word “Negroid” in describing the Grimaldi skeletons. It is true that nothing is known of the skin color, hair form, or any other fleshy feature of the Grimaldi people, so that the word “Negroid” in its usual meaning is not proper here. It is also not clear whether the features of the bones claimed to be “Negroid” are really so at all.

From a place called Wadjak, in Java, we have “proto-Australoid” skulls which closely resemble those of modern Australian natives. Some of the skulls found in South Africa, especially the Boskop skull, look like those of modern Bushmen, but are much bigger. The ancestors of the Bushmen seem to have once been very widespread south of the Sahara Desert. True African Negroes were forest people who apparently expanded out of the west central African area only in the last several thousand years. Although dark in skin color, neither the Australians nor the Bushmen are Negroes; neither the Wadjak nor the Boskop skulls are “Negroid.”

As we’ve already mentioned, Professor Weidenreich believed that Peking man was already on the way to becoming a Mongoloid. Anyway, the Mongoloids would seem to have been present by the time of the “Upper Cave” at Choukoutien, the Sinanthropus find-spot.

WHAT THE DIFFERENCES MEAN

What does all this difference mean? It means that, at one moment in time, within each different area, men tended to look somewhat alike. From area to area, men tended to look somewhat different, just as they do today. This is all quite natural. People tended to mate near home; in the anthropological jargon, they made up geographically localized breeding populations. The simple continental division of “stocks”—black = Africa, yellow = Asia, white = Europe—is too simple a picture to fit the facts. People became accustomed to life in some particular area within a continent (we might call it a “natural area”). As they went on living there, they evolved towards some particular physical variety. It would, of course, have been difficult to draw a clear boundary between two adjacent areas. There must always have been some mating across the boundaries in every case. One thing human beings don’t do, and never have done, is to mate for “purity.” It is self-righteous nonsense when we try to kid ourselves into thinking that they do.

I am not going to struggle with the whole business of modern stocks and races. This is a book about prehistoric men, not recent historic or modern men. My physical anthropologist friends have been very patient in helping me to write and rewrite this chapter—I am not going to break their patience completely. Races are their business, not mine, and they must do the writing about races. I shall, however, give two modern definitions of race, and then make one comment.

Dr. William G. Boyd, professor of Immunochemistry, School of Medicine, Boston University: “We may define a human race as a population which differs significantly from other human populations in regard to the frequency of one or more of the genes it possesses.”

Professor Sherwood L. Washburn, professor of Physical Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, the University of California: “A ‘race’ is a group of genetically similar populations, and races intergrade because there are always intermediate populations.”

My comment is that the ideas involved here are all biological: they concern groups, not individuals. Boyd and Washburn may differ a bit on what they want to consider a “population,” but a population is a group nevertheless, and genetics is biology to the hilt. Now a lot of people still think of race in terms of how people dress or fix their food or of other habits or customs they have. The next step is to talk about racial “purity.” None of this has anything whatever to do with race proper, which is a matter of the biology of groups.

Incidentally, I’m told that if man very carefully controls the breeding of certain animals over generations—dogs, cattle, chickens—he might achieve a “pure” race of animals. But he doesn’t do it. Some unfortunate genetic trait soon turns up, so this has just as carefully to be bred out again, and so on.

SUMMARY OF PRESENT KNOWLEDGE OF FOSSIL MEN

The earliest bones of men we now have—upon which all the experts would probably agree—are those of Meganthropus, from Java, of about 450,000 years ago. The earlier australopithecines of Africa were possibly not tool-users and may not have been ancestral to men at all. But there is an alternate and evidently increasingly stronger chance that some of them may have been. The Kanam jaw from Kenya, another early possibility, is not only very incomplete but its find-spot is very questionable.

Java man proper, Pithecanthropus, comes next, at about 400,000 years ago, and the big Heidelberg jaw in Germany must be of about the same date. Next comes Swanscombe in England, Steinheim in Germany, the Ternafine jaws in Algeria, and Peking man, Sinanthropus. They all date to the second great interglacial period, about 350,000 years ago.

Piltdown and Galley Hill are out, and with them, much of the starch in the old idea that there were two distinct lines of development in human evolution: (1) a line of “paleoanthropic” development from Heidelberg to the Neanderthalers where it became extinct, and (2) a very early “modern” line, through Piltdown, Galley Hill, Swanscombe, to us. Swanscombe, Steinheim, and Ternafine are just as easily cases of very early pre-neanderthaloids.

The pre-neanderthaloids were very widespread during the third interglacial: Ehringsdorf, Saccopastore, some of the Mount Carmel people, and probably FontÉchevade are cases in point. A variety of their descendants can be seen, from Java (Solo), Africa (Rhodesian man), and about the Mediterranean and in western Europe. As the acute cold of the last glaciation set in, the western Europeans found themselves surrounded by water, ice, or bitter cold tundra. To vastly over-simplify it, they “bred in” and became classic neanderthaloids. But on Mount Carmel, the Skhul cave-find with its 70 per cent modern features shows what could happen elsewhere at the same time.

Lastly, from about 40,000 or 35,000 years ago—the time of the onset of the second phase of the last glaciation—we begin to find the fully modern skeletons of men. The modern skeletons differ from place to place, just as different groups of men living in different places still look different.

What became of the Neanderthalers? Nobody can tell me for sure. I’ve a hunch they were simply “bred out” again when the cold weather was over. Many Americans, as the years go by, are no longer ashamed to claim they have “Indian blood in their veins.” Give us a few more generations and there will not be very many other Americans left to whom we can brag about it. It certainly isn’t inconceivable to me to imagine a little Cro-Magnon boy bragging to his friends about his tough, strong, Neanderthaler great-great-great-great-grandfather!