EARLY MAN.

The science of the earth has its culmination and terminus in man; and at this, the most advanced of our salient points, as we look back on the long process of the development of the earth, we may well ask, Was the end worthy of the means? We may well have doubts as to an affirmative answer if we do not consider that the means were perfect, each in its own time, and that man, the final link in the chain of life, is that which alone takes hold of the unseen and eternal. He alone can comprehend the great plan, and appreciate its reason and design. Without his agency in this respect nature would have been a riddle without any solution—a column without a capital, a tree without fruit. Besides this, even science may be able to perceive that man may be not merely the legatee of all the ages that lie behind, but the heir of the eternity that lies before, the only earthly being that has implanted in him the germ and instinct of immortality.

Whatever view we may take of these questions, it is of interest to us to know, if possible, how and when this chief corner stone was placed upon the edifice of nature, and what are the precise relations of man to the later geological ages, as well as to the present order of nature, of which he is at once a part, and its ruler and head. Let us put this first in the form of a narrative based on geological facts only, and then consider some of its details and relations to history.

The Glacial age had passed away. The lower land, in great part a bare expanse of mud, sand, and gravel, had risen from the icy ocean in which it had been submerged, and most of the mountain tops had lost their covering of perennial snow and ice. The climate was ameliorated, and the sun again shone warmly on the desolate earth. Gradually the new land became overspread with a rich vegetation, and was occupied by many large animals. There were species of elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, horse, bison, ox and deer, multiplying till the plains and river valleys were filled with their herds, in spite of the fact that they were followed by formidable carnivorous beasts fitted to prey on them. At this time, somewhere in the warm temperate zone, in an oasis or island of fertility, appeared a new thing on the earth, a man and woman walking erect in the forest glades, bathing in the waters, gathering and tasting every edible fruit, watching with curious and inquiring eyes the various animals around them, and giving them names which might eventually serve not merely to designate their kinds, but to express actions and emotions as well. When, where, and how did this new departure, fraught with so many possibilities, occur—introducing as it did the dexterous fingers and inventive mind of Man upon the scene? The last of these questions science is still unable to answer, and though we may frame many hypotheses, they all remain destitute of certain proof in so far as natural science is concerned. We can here only fall back on the old traditional and historical monuments of our race, and believe that man, the child of God, and with God-like intellect, will, and consciousness, was placed by his Maker in an Edenic region, and commissioned to multiply and replenish the earth. The when and where of his introduction, and his early history when introduced, are more open to scientific investigation.

That man was originally frugivorous, his whole structure testifies. That he originated in some favourable climate and fertile land is equally certain, and that his surroundings must have been of such a nature as to give him immunity from the attacks of formidable beasts of prey, also goes without saying. These are all necessary conditions of the successful introduction of such a creature as man, and theories which suppose him to have originated in a cold climate, to struggle at once with the difficulties and dangers of such a position, are, from a scientific point of view, incredible.

But man was introduced into a wide and varied world, more wide and varied than that possessed by his modern descendants. The earliest men that we certainly know inhabited out continents in the second Continental age of the Kainozoic Period, when, as we know from ample geological evidence, the land of the northern hemisphere was much more extensive than at present, with a mild climate, and a rich flora and fauna. If he was ambitious to leave the oasis of his origin the way was open to him, but at the expense of becoming a toiler, an inventor, and a feeder on animal food, more especially when he should penetrate into the colder climates. The details of all this, as they actually occurred, are not within the range of scientific investigation, for these early men must have left few, if any, monuments; but we can imagine some of them. Man's hands were capable of other uses than the mere gathering of fruit. His mind was not an instinctive machine, like that of lower animals, but an imaginative and inventive intellect, capable of adapting objects to new uses peculiar to himself. A fallen branch would enable him to obtain the fruits that hung higher than his hands could reach, a pebble would enable him to break a nut too hard for his teeth. He could easily weave a few twigs into a rough basket to carry the fruit he had gathered to the cave or shelter, or spreading tree, or rough hut that served him for a home; and when he had found courage to snatch a brand from some tree, ignited by lightning, or by the friction of dry branches, and to kindle a fire for himself, he had fairly entered on that path of invention and discovery which has enabled him to achieve so many conquests over nature.

Our imagination may carry us yet a little farther with reference to his fortunes. If he needed any weapon to repel aggressive enemies, a stick or club would serve his purpose, or perhaps a stone thrown from his hand. Soon, however, he might learn from the pain caused by the sharp flints that lay in his path the cutting power of an edge, and, armed with a flint chip held in the hand, or fitted into a piece of wood, he would become an artificer of many things useful and pleasing. As he wandered into more severe climates, where vegetable food could not be obtained throughout the year, and as he observed the habits of beasts and birds of prey, he would learn to be a hunter and a fisherman, and to cook animal food; and with this would come new habits, wants and materials, as well as a more active and energetic mode of life. He would also have to make new weapons and implements, axes, darts, harpoons, and scrapers for skins, and bodkins or needles to make skin garments. He would use chipped flint where this could be procured, and failing this, splintered and rubbed slate, and for some uses, bone and antler. Much ingenuity would be used in shaping these materials, and in the working of bone, antler and wood, ornament would begin to be studied. In the meantime the hunter, though his weapons improved, would become a ruder and more migratory man, and in anger, or in the desire to gain some coveted object, might begin to use his weapons against his brother man. In some more favoured localities, however, he might attain to a more settled life; and he, or more likely the woman his helpmate, might contrive to tame some species of animals, and to begin some culture of the soil.

It was probably in this early time that metals first attracted the attention of men. The ages of stone, bronze, and iron believed in by some archÆologists, are more or less mythical to the geologist, who knows that these things depend more on locality and on natural products than on stages of culture. The analogy of America teaches us that the use of different metals may be contemporaneous, provided that they can be obtained in a native state. At the time of the discovery of America the Esquimaux were using native iron, which, though rare in most parts of the world, is not uncommon in some rocks of Greenland. The people of the region of the great lakes, and of the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio, were using native copper from Lake Superior for similar purposes. Gold was apparently the only metal among the natives of Central America. The people of Peru had invented bronze, or had brought the knowledge of it with them from beyond the sea. Thus the Peruvians were in the bronze age, the Mexicans and Mound builders in the copper age, and the Esquimaux in the iron age, while at the same time the greater part of the aboriginal tribes were at one and the same time in the ages of chipped and polished stone and in these ages what have been called palÆolithic and neolothic weapons were contemporaneous, the former being most usually unfinished examples of the latter, or extemporized tools roughly made in emergencies.[203] How long this had lasted, or how long it would have continued, had not Europeans introduced from abroad an iron age, we do not know. It was probably the same in other parts of the world, in pre-historic times. In any case, the discovery of native metals must have occurred very early. Men searching in the beds of streams for suitable pebbles to form hammers and other implements, would find nuggets of gold and copper, and the properties of these, so different from those of other pebbles, would at once attract attention, and lead to useful applications. Native iron is of rarer occurrence, but in certain localities would also be found.[204] It must have been experiments on these ores, which resemble the native metals in colour, lustre and weight, that led to the first attempts at smelting metals, and these must have occurred at a very early period. Yet for ages the metals must have been extremely scarce, and we know that in comparatively modern times civilized nations like the Egyptians were using flint flakes after they had domesticated many animals, had become skilful agriculturists and artisans, and had executed great architectural works.

Probably all these ends had been to some extent, and in some localities, attained in the earliest human period, when man was contemporary with many large animals now extinct. But a serious change was to occur in human prospects. There is the best geological evidence that in the northern hemisphere the mild climate of the earlier Post-glacial period relapsed into comparative coldness, though not so extreme as that of the preceding Glacial age. Hill tops, long denuded of the snow and ice of the Glacial period, were again covered, and cold winters sealed up the lakes and rivers, and covered the ground with wintry snows of long continuance, and with this came a change in animal life and in human habits. The old southern elephant (E. antiquus), the southern rhinoceros (E. leptorhinus), and the river hippopotamus (H. major), which had been contemporaries, in Europe at least, of primitive man, retired from the advancing cold, and ultimately perished, while their places were taken by the hairy mammoth (E. primigenius), the woolly rhinoceros (R. tichorhinus), the reindeer, and even the musk ox. Now began a fierce struggle for existence in the more northern districts inhabited by man a struggle in which only the hardier and ruder races could survive, except, perhaps, in some of the more genial portions of the warm temperate zone. Men had to become almost wholly carnivorous, and had to contend with powerful and fierce animals. Tribe contended with tribe for the possession of the most productive and sheltered habitats. Thus the struggle with nature became aggravated by that between man and man. Violence disturbed the progress of civilization, and favoured the increase and power of the rudest tribes, while the more delicately organized and finer types of humanity, if they continued to exist in some favoured spots, were in constant danger of being exterminated by their fiercer and stronger contemporaries.

In mercy to humanity, this state of things was terminated by a great physical revolution, the last great subsidence of the continents—that Post-glacial flood, which must have swept away the greater part of men, and many species of great beasts, and left only a few survivors to re-people the world, just as the mammoth and other gigantic animals had to give place to smaller and feebler creatures. In these vicissitudes it seemed determined, with reference to man, that the more gigantic and formidable races should perish, and that one of the finer types should survive to re-people the world.

The age of which we have been writing the history, is that which has been fitly named the Anthropic, in that earlier part of it preceding the great diluvial catastrophe, which has fixed itself in all the earlier traditions of men, and which separates what may be called the Palanthropic or Antediluvian age from the Neanthropic or Postdiluvian. Independently altogether of human history, these are two geological ages distinguished by different physical conditions and different species of animals; and the time has undoubtedly come when all the speculations of archÆologists respecting early man must be regulated by these great geological facts, which are stamped upon those later deposits of the crust of the earth, which have been laid down since man was its inhabitant. If they have only recently assumed their proper place in the geological chronology, this is due to the great difficulty in the case of the more recent deposits in establishing their actual succession and relations to each other. These difficulties have, however, been overcome, and new facts are constantly being obtained to render our knowledge more definite. Lest, however, the preceding sketch of the Palanthropic age—that in which gigantic men were contemporaries of a gigantic fauna now extinct—should be regarded as altogether fanciful, we may proceed to consider the geological facts and classification as actually ascertained.

The Tertiary or Kainozoic period, the last of the four great "times" into which the earth's geological history is usually divided, and that to which man and the mammalia belong, was ingeniously subdivided by Lyell, on the ground of percentages of marine shells and other invertebrates of the sea. According to this method, which with some modification in details is still accepted, the Eocene, or dawn of the recent, includes those formations in which the percentage of modern species of marine animals does not exceed 3-1/2, all the other species found being extinct. The Miocene (less recent) includes formations in which the percentage of living species does not exceed 35, and the Pliocene (more recent) contains formations having more than 35 per cent, of recent species. To these three may be added the Pleistocene, in which the great majority of the species are recent, and the Modern or Anthropic, in which we are still living. Dawkins and Gaudry give us a division substantially the same with Lyell's, except that they prefer to take the evidence of the higher animals instead of the marine shells.. The Eocene thus includes those formations in which there are remains of mammals or ordinary land quadrupeds, but none of these belong to recent species or genera, though they may be included in the same families and orders with the recent mammals. This is a most important fact, as we shall see, and the only exception to it is that Gaudry and others hold that a few living genera, as those of the dog, civet, and marten, are actually found in the later Eocene. The Miocene, on the same mammalian evidence, will include formations in which there are living genera of mammals, but no species which survive to the present time. The Pliocene and Pleistocene show living species, though in the former these are very few and exceptional, while in the latter they become the majority.

With regard to the geological antiquity of man, no geologist expects to find any human remains in beds older than the Tertiary, because in the older periods the conditions of the world do not seem to have been suitable to man, and because in these periods no animals nearly akin to man are known. On entering into the Eocene Tertiary we fail in like manner to find any human remains; and we do not expect to find any, because no living species and scarcely any living genera of mammals are known in the Eocene; nor do we find in it remains of any of the animals, as the anthropoid apes, for instance, most nearly allied to man. In the Miocene the case is somewhat different. Here we have living genera at least, and we have large species of apes; but no remains of man have been discovered, if we except some splinters of flint found in beds of this age at Thenay, in France, and some notched bones. Supposing these objects to have been chipped or notched by animals, which is by no means certain in the case of the flints, the question remains, Was this done by man? Gaudry and Dawkins prefer to suppose that the artificer was one of the anthropoid apes of the period. It is true that no apes are known to do such work now; but then other animals, as beavers and birds, are artificers, and some extinct animals were of higher powers than their modern representatives. But if there were Miocene apes which chipped flints and cut bones, this would, either on the hypothesis of evolution or that of creation by law, render the occurrence of man still less likely than if there were no such apes. The scratched and notched bones, on the other hand, indicate merely the gnawing of sharks or other carnivorous animals. For these reasons neither Dawkins nor Gaudry, nor indeed any geologists of authority in the Tertiary fauna, believe in Miocene man.

In the Pliocene, though the facies of the mammalian fauna of Europe becomes more modern, and a few modern species occur, the climate becomes colder, and in consequence the apes disappear, so that the chances of finding fossil men are lessened rather than increased in so far as the temperate regions are concerned. In Italy, however, Capellini has described a skull, an implement, and a notched bone supposed to have come from Pliocene beds. To this it may be objected that the skull—which I examined in 1883 in the museum at Florence—and the implement are of recent type, and probably mixed with the Pliocene stuff by some slip of the ground. As the writer has elsewhere pointed out,[205] similar and apparently fatal objections apply to the skull and implements alleged to have been found in Pliocene gravels in California. Dawkins further informs us that in the Italian Pliocene beds supposed to hold remains of man, of twenty-one mammalia whose bones occur, all are extinct species, except possibly one, a hippopotamus. This, of course, renders very unlikely in a geological point of view the occurrence of human remains in these beds.

In the Pleistocene deposits of Europe—and this applies also to America—we for the first time find a predominance of recent species of land animals. Here, therefore, we may look with some hope for remains of man and his works, and here, in the later Pleistocene, or the early Modern, they are actually found. When we speak, however, of Pleistocene man, there arise some questions as to the classification of the deposits, which it seems to the writer Dawkins and other British geologists have not answered in accordance with geological facts, and a misunderstanding as to which may lead to serious error. They have extended the term Pleistocene over that Post-glacial period in which we find remains of man, and thus have split the "Anthropic" period into two; and they proceed to divide the latter part of it into the Pre-historic and Historic periods, whereas the name Pleistocene should not be extended to the Post-glacial age. The close of the Glacial period, introducing great physical and climatal changes, some new species of mammalia and man himself, should be regarded as the end of the Pleistocene, and the introduction of what some French geologists have called the Anthropic period, which I have elsewhere divided into Palanthropic, corresponding to the so-called PalÆolithic age, and Neanthropic, corresponding to the later stone and metal ages.[206] These may be termed respectively the earlier and later stages of the Modern period as distinguished from the Pleistocene Tertiary.

In point of logical arrangement, and especially of geological classification, the division into historic and pre-historic periods is decidedly objectionable. Even in Europe the historic age of the south is altogether a different thing from that of the north, and to speak of the pre-historic period in Greece and in Britain or Norway as indicating the same portion of time is altogether illusory. Hence a large portion of the discussion of this subject has to be properly called "the overlap of history." Further, the mere accident of the presence or absence of historical documents cannot constitute a geological period comparable with such periods as the Pleistocene and Pliocene, and the assumption of such a criterion of time merely confuses our ideas. On the one hand, while the whole Tertiary or Kainozoic, up to the present day, is one great geological period, characterized by a continuous though gradually changing fauna and series of physical conditions, and there is consequently no good basis for setting apart, as some geologists do, a Quaternary as distinct from the Tertiary period; on the other hand, there is a distinct physical break between the Pliocene and the Modern in the great Glacial age. This, in its Arctic climate and enormous submergence of the land, though it did not exterminate the fauna of the northern hemisphere, greatly reduced it, and at the close of this age some new forms came in. For this reason the division between the Pleistocene and Anthropic ages should be made at the beginning of the Post-glacial age. The natural division would thus be:—

I. Pleistocene, including—

(a) Early Pleistocene, or first continental period. Land very extensive, moderate climate. This passes into the preceding Pliocene.

(b) Later Pleistocene, or glacial, including Dawkins' "Mid Pleistocene." In this there was a great prevalence of cold and glacial conditions, and a great submergence of the northern land.

II. Anthropic, or period of man and modern mammals, including—

(a) Palanthropic, Post-glacial, or second continental period, in which the land was again very extensive, and PalÆocosmic man was contemporary with some great mammals, as the mammoth, now extinct, and the area of land in the northern hemisphere was greater than at present. This includes a later cold period, not equal in intensity to that of the Glacial period proper, and was terminated by a great and very general subsidence, accompanied by the disappearance of PalÆocosmic man and some large mammalia, and which may be identical with the historical deluge.

(b) Neanthropic or Recent, when the continents attained their present levels, existing races of men colonized Europe, and living species of mammals. This includes both the Pre-historic and Historic periods.

On geological grounds the above should clearly be our arrangement, though of course there need be no objection to such other subdivisions as historians and antiquarians may find desirable for their purposes. On this classification the earliest certain indications of the presence of man in Europe, Asia, or America, so far as yet known, belong to the Modern or Anthropic period alone. That man may have existed previously no one need deny, but no one can at present positively affirm on any ground of actual fact. It may be necessary here to explain the contentions often made that in Britain and Western Europe man belongs to an interglacial period. When with Dr. James Geikie, the great Scottish glacialist, we hold that there were several interglacial periods, the Glacial age may be extended by including the warm period of the Palanthropic, and the cold at its termination, as one of the interglacial and Glacial periods. In this way, as a matter of classification, man appears in the latest Interglacial periods. This, however, as above stated, I regard as an error in arrangement; but it makes no practical difference as to the facts.

Inasmuch, however, as the human remains of the Post-glacial epoch are those of fully developed men of high type, it may be said, and has often been said, that man in some lower stage of development must have existed at a far earlier period. That is, he must, if certain theories as to his evolution from lower animals are to be sustained. This, however, is not a mode of reasoning in accordance with the methods of science. When facts fail to sustain certain theories we are usually in the habit of saying "so much the worse for the theories," not "so much the worse for the facts," or at least we claim the right to hold our judgment in suspense till some confirmatory facts are forth-coming.

We have now to inquire as to the actual nature of the indications of man in Europe and Western Asia at the close of the Glacial or Pleistocene period. These are principally such of his tools or weapons as could escape decay when embedded in river gravels, or in the earth and stalagmite of caverns or rock shelters, or buried with his bones in* caves of sepulture. Very valuable accessory fossils are the broken bones of the animals he has used as food. Most valuable, and rarest of all, are well-preserved human skulls and skeletons. Some doubt may attach to mere flint flakes, in the absence of other remains; but the other indications above referred to are indisputable, and when proper precautions are taken to notice the succession of beds, and to eliminate the effects of any later disturbance of the deposits, human fossils become as instructive and indisputable as any others.

When the whole of the facts thus available are put together, we find that the earliest men of whom we have osseous remains, and who, undoubtedly, inhabited Europe and Western Asia in the second continental period, before the establishment of the present geography, and before the disappearance of the mammoth and its companions, were of two races or subraces, agreeing in certain respects, differing in others. Both have long or dolichocephalic heads, and seem to have been men of great strength and muscular energy, with somewhat coarse countenances of Mongolian type, and they seem to have been of roving habits, living as hunters and fishermen in a semi-barbarous condition, but showing some artistic skill and taste in their carvings on bone and other ornaments.

The earliest of the two races locally, though, on the whole, they were contemporaneous, is that known as the Cannstadt or Neanderthal people, who are characterized by a low forehead, with beetling brows, massive limb bones and moderate stature. So far as known they were the ruder and less artistic of the two races. The other, the Engis or Cromagnon race, was of higher type, with well-formed and capacious skull, and a countenance which, if somewhat broad, with high cheek bones, eyes lengthened laterally, and heavy lower jaw, must have been of somewhat grand and impressive features. These men are of great stature, some examples being seven feet in height, and with massive bones, having strong muscular impressions. The Engis skull found in a cave in Belgium, with bones of the mammoth, the skeletons of the Cromagnon cave in the valley of the Vezere, in France, and those of the caves of Mentone, in Italy, represent this race. Doubts, it is true, have been entertained as to whether the last-mentioned race is really palanthropic; but the latest facts as to their mode of occurrence and associations seem to render this certain. These men were certainly contemporaneous with the mammoth, and they disappeared in the cataclysm which closed the earlier anthropic period. Attempts have, however, been made to separate them into groups according to age, within this period;[207] and there can be no doubt that both in France and England the lower and older strata of gravels and caves yield ruder and less perfect implements than the higher. Independently, however, of the fact that the very earliest men may have been peaceful gatherers of fruit, and not hunters or warriors, having need of lethal weapons, such facts may rather testify to local improvement in the condition of certain tribes than to any change of race. Such local improvement would be very likely to occur wherever a new locality was taken possession of by a small and wandering tribe, which, in process of time, might increase in numbers and in wealth, as well as in means of intercourse with other tribes. A similar succession would occur when caves, used at first as temporary places of rendezvous by savage tribes, became afterwards places of residence, or were acquired by conquest on the part of tribes a little more advanced, in the manner in which such changes are constantly taking place in rude communities.

[207] Mortillet, "Pre-historic Men."