Chapter 8

In the tropics, the home of the anthropoid apes of to-day and, probably, of the animal we have named the man-ape, war between man and nature scarcely exists. Nature is not hostile to man. There is no occasion for clothing and little for habitation. Food is abundant for the sparse populations. Little exertion is called for to sustain life. Mental stagnation is very likely to supervene. Yet there, as elsewhere, conflict has had much to do with such mental progress as exists. Mastery in warfare is due to superior mental resources, which gradually arise from the exigencies of conflict, and manifest themselves in greater shrewdness or cunning, superior ability in leadership, better organization, fuller mutual aid, and the invention of more destructive weapons and more efficient tools. War acts vigorously on men's minds, peace acts sluggishly. In the former case man's most valued possession, his life, is in jeopardy, and his utmost powers are exerted for its preservation. Every resource within his power is brought to bear to save himself from wounds or death and to destroy his enemies. If the foes are equal physically, victory is apt to come to those which are superior mentally, which are quicker at devising new expedients, more alert in providing against danger, more skilful in the use of weapons, abler in combining their forces to act in unison. In short, the whole story of mankind tells us that mental evolution has been greatly aided by the influences of warfare, the reaction upon the mind of the effort at self-preservation, the destruction of those at a lower level of intellectual alertness, the preservation of the abler and more energetic, the effect of conflict in bringing into activity all the resources of the intellect, and the hereditary transmission of the powers of mind thus developed. It is, undoubtedly, to war between man and man, and the conflict with the adverse conditions of nature in the colder regions of the earth, that man's development from his lowest to his highest intellectual state has been largely due. This is by no means to say that war is still necessary for this result. Other influences are now at work, of equal or superior potency, and while the conflict with nature and the conditions of society is still of importance, war between man and man is no longer necessary as a mental stimulant. The time was, and that not very far in the past, when it was an essential element in human development.

If we descend to the lowest existing savages, however, it is to find this agency almost non-existent. We can perceive in them no organized warfare and no alert conflict with nature. They are as yet at the very beginning of this stage of evolution, and it certainly exerts little influence upon them. Nature is not adverse, life needs little thought or exertion, they accept the world as they find it, without question or revolt, and their thoughts and habits are as unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians. But the fact that active warfare does not now exist among the lowest tribes of mankind, does not argue that such a state has never existed. In truth, we maintain that primitive man is the outcome of an active and long-continued warfare, and that his settled and sluggish condition to-day is the ease that follows victory. He has conquered and is at rest after his labors.

For if we compare primitive man with the anthropoid apes, it is to find one striking and important difference between them. The anthropoids are at a level in position with their animal neighbors. Man is lord and master of the animal kingdom, the dominant being in the world of life. He has no rival in this lordship, but stands alone in his relation to the animal kingdom. He is feared and avoided by the largest and strongest beasts of field and forest. He does not fight defensively, but offensively, and whatever his relation to his fellow-man, he admits no equal in the world of life below him. He is the only animal that has made a struggle for lordship. The gorilla is said to attack the lion and drive it from its haunts. If it does so, it is not with any desire for mastery, but simply to rid itself of a dangerous neighbor. The battle for dominion has been confined to man, and in the winning of it no small degree of mental development must have taken place.

The supremacy of man was not gained without a struggle, and that a severe and protracted one. The animal kingdom did not yield readily to man's lordship, and the war must have been long and bitter, settled as the relations now seem. Rest has succeeded victory. The lower animals are now submissive to man, or retire before him in dread of his strength and resources, and the strain upon his powers has ceased. So far as this phase of evolution is concerned the influences aiding the mental development of man have lost their strength. The warfare is over, and man reigns supreme over the kingdom of life.

Of all animals the man-ape was the best adapted for such a struggle. The other anthropoid apes, while favored by the formation of their hands, lacked that freedom of the arms to which man mainly owes his success. No other animal has ever appeared with arms freed from duty in locomotion and at the same time endued with the power of grasping, and these are the features of organization to which the evolution of the human intellect was wholly due in its first stages. The man-ape was not able to contend successfully with the larger animals by aid of its natural weapons. Its diminutive size, its lack of tearing claws, and its lesser powers of speed, left it at a disadvantage, and had it attempted to conquer by the aid of its strength and the seizing and rending powers of teeth and nails, its victory over the larger animals would never have been won. Even with the aid of the cunning and alertness of the apes, their power of observation, their combination for defence and attack, and their general mental superiority to the tenants of the animal world, their supremacy in the event of their becoming carnivorous must have been confined to the smaller creatures, and could not have been established over the larger animals of their native habitat except through the aid of other than their natural powers.

It was by the use of artificial weapons that the conquest was gained. The tendency to use missiles as weapons of offence and defence, which is shown by various species of monkeys, was in all probability greatly developed by the man-ape, the only carnivorous member, if our premises are correct, of the whole extensive family of the apes, and the only one with the free use of its hands and arms. By the use of weapons of this kind the powers of offence of this animal were enormously increased. As skill was acquired in their use, and more efficient weapons were selected or formed, the man-ape steadily advanced in controlling influence, and the lower animal world became more and more subordinated. No doubt the struggle was a protracted one. The previously dominant animals did not submit without a severe and long-continued contest. Thousands of years may have passed before the larger animals were subdued, for it is probable that the invention of superior weapons by an animal of low mental powers was a very slow process. Each stage of invention gave higher success, but these stages were very deliberate ones.

However this be, we can be assured that the superiority of the ancestral man lay in his mental resources, and that his victory was due to the employment of his mind rather than of his body. As a result, the developing influence of the conflict was exerted upon his brain, the organ of the mind, far more than upon his physical frame, and this organ gradually increased in size, while the body as a whole remained practically unchanged. The conflict began with the man-ape on a level in power and dominance with animals of its own size and inferior to those of greater size and strength. It ended with man dominant over all the lower animals. Such a progress, if made by any animal through variation in physical structure, must have caused radical and extraordinary changes in size, strength, and utility of the natural organs of offence. If made, as in the instance in question, through development of the organ of the mind alone, it could not but have produced a great increase in the size and power of this organ; and the dimensions of the brain in primitive man, as compared with those of the brain in the anthropoid apes, do not seem too great for the magnitude of the result.

The conflict ended, a new animal, man, finally and fully emerged from the family of the apes and settled down in the restful consciousness of victory, with a much larger brain and greatly superior mental powers than were possessed at the beginning of the struggle, yet in physical aspect not greatly changed from his ancestral form after it had first fully gained the erect attitude. The powers gained enabled early man easily to hold the position he had won, and there was no further special strain upon his faculties until a new contest began, that between man and nature, supplemented by a still more vital struggle, that between man and man.

To return to the point from which we set out, it may be said that, as the man-ape gained facility in walking in the erect attitude, and its hands and arms became fully adapted to the use of weapons, its standing in the animal kingdom changed essentially from that before held. Fear and flight ended, retreat ceased, attack began, pursuit succeeded flight, and the great battle for mastery entered upon its long course. An element which aided materially in the victory was the social habit of the animal in question, and the mutual aid which the members of any group gave one another. Educative influences also naturally follow association, every invention or improvement devised by one becomes the property of the whole, and nothing of importance once gained is lost.

The stages of this progress were, undoubtedly, in their outer aspect, stages of improvement in weapons. We seem to see ancestral man, in his early career as a carnivorous animal, seizing the stones and sticks that came readily to hand, and flinging them with some little skill at his prey, in the same manner as we can perceive the baboon doing the same thing. In like manner we observe him breaking off branches from the trees and using them as clubs. One of the first steps of development from this crude stage in the use of weapons would be the selection of stones suited by size and shape for throwing, and the choice of clubs of suitable length and thickness, the latter being stripped of their twigs.

For a long time fresh weapons, those immediately at hand, would be seized and used for every new conflict; but as the idea of the superiority of some weapons to others arose, a second stage of evolution must have begun. The selected club, broken from the tree and prepared for use with some care, and thus embodying a degree of choice and labor, would be too valuable to fling idly away, and might be retained for future use, the first personal possession of inchoate man. Similarly, stones carefully chosen for their suitability for throwing would be probably kept, and a small store of them collected. In short, we may conceive of the man-ape thus gathering a magazine of weapons,--clubs and stones,--sought or shaped during hours of leisure for use in hours of conflict. In this way our animal ancestor doubtless slowly became a skilful hunter, carrying his weapons with him in the chase, and using them efficiently in the conquest of prey.

A third stage in this progress was reached when to some wise-headed old man-ape came the idea of combining the two forms of weapon in use, of fastening in some way the stone to the club in order that a more effective blow might be struck. The vegetable kingdom furnishes natural cords, flat stones with more or less cutting edges could be chosen and bound to the end of the club, and the earliest form of the battle-axe would be produced. With its formation the man-ape made another important step of progress and added greatly to his powers of offence. Stage by stage he was bringing his animal competitors under his control.

The formation of an axe or hatchet, however crude it may have been, would naturally lead to another step in advance. With it the ancestral man had passed beyond the possession of a weapon into the possession of a tool. The shaping of his clubs previously had been done by a rude tearing or hammering off of their twigs. These could now be cut off, and in addition the club might be wrought into a better shape. Manufacture had begun. Our ancestor stood at one end of a long line, at the other end of which we behold the steam-engine, the electric motor, and an interminable variety of other instruments.

Primitive manufacture was not confined to the shaping of wood. The shaping of stone followed in due time. If a tree branch could be made more suitable for its purpose by cutting it into shape with a rude stone axe or hatchet, a stone of better shape might be obtained by hammering. Doubtless the chipping effect of striking stone upon stone had been often observed before the idea arose that this could be made useful, and that where stones of the desired shape were not to be found, the shape of those at hand might in this way be improved.

If we seek for some turning-point, some stage of progress, in which the man-ape fairly emerged into man, perhaps it would be well to select that which we have now reached, that in which the animal in question, which had hitherto used the objects of nature in their natural form, first gained the idea of manufacture and began to shape these objects by the use of tools. In truth, the dividing line between man-ape and man was imperceptibly fine. Various points of demarcation might be chosen, each founded on some important step in evolution. But among them all that in which the effort to convert the objects of nature into better weapons by the use of tools is perhaps the best, as it was probably the first step in that long process of manufacture to which man owes his wonderful advance.

With this early effort at manufacture, man had reached a stage in which he was first able to make a permanent record of his existence upon the earth--aside from that of the very infrequent preservation of his bones as fossil remains. A chipped stone is a permanent object. Even a very rudely shaped one bears some indications of its origin upon its surface, some marks pointing back to man in his early days. Unfortunately for anthropologists, natural agencies sometimes produce effects resembling those achieved by man's hands, and some degree of skill in manufacture and well-marked design is necessary before one can be sure that a seeming stone weapon has not been shaped by nature instead of man. Within a recent period research for the evidence of early man in the shape of chipped stones has been diligently made, with an abundance of undoubted and a number of doubtful results. Some of these reach very far back in time, and if actually the work of man he must have lived upon the earth as a manufacturing animal for years that may be numbered by the million. Seemingly chipped stones have been found that belong to the remote Miocene geological age. With the latter are some scratches upon bones that also seem the work of tools. But these Miocene relics are questionable. They do not seem to surpass the shaping power of nature herself. Unless some more indubitable relics are found, we must place the advent of man as a tool-using animal at a much later date. How far back he may have existed as a man-like biped is another question, which we are not likely soon to solve.

It is scarcely necessary to pursue this branch of our subject farther. We have reached one end of a line of development, the succeeding course of which is well known. From the earliest rudely chipped stones and flints that are certainly the work of man, we can easily trace his progress upward through better examples of the chipped and later through those of the polished stone implement, until the age of metal began. And with these stones have been found many other indications of the progressing powers of man, in the shaping of bone, the invention and use of a considerable variety of implements and ornaments, and the earliest efforts of art, as stated in a preceding section. There is no occasion to go into the detail of these steps of progress. When they are reached, this section of our work ends. We are concerned here simply with man's ancestor and man in his earliest stage of existence, not with man in his later course of development.

IX

THE FIRST STAGE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION

The question has often been asked, if man has descended from an ape ancestor why is it that no traces of this ancestral form have been found in a fossil state? If man has gone through such an extended course of development, why has he left no remains? This question, looked upon as unanswerable by many of those who ask it, is really of minor importance. A half-dozen answers, each of considerable weight, could easily be made to it. In the first place, it may be said that the absence of remains referred to is far from a single instance, but one out of thousands. It is generally admitted that the species of animals found fossil are very far from representing all the species that have existed upon the earth, and probably form but a minute percentage of them. In the second place, the remains of man's ancestor have not been sought for in its native locality, the tropical regions. In the third place, man belongs to the class of animals least likely to be preserved in the fossil state, since they dwell in the depths of forests and at a distance from the lakes and streams in whose muddy bottoms the remains of so many animals have been fossilized. Another answer is, that of the various species of anthropoid apes that probably existed in the past, a few relics only of a single species have been found. If there were this one species alone, its number of individuals must have reached into the millions, yet of those hosts only a few fugitive bones are known to exist. There could not well be a more striking instance of the imperfection of the geological record. The sparse remains of Dryopithecus, the species in question, with some few other fossils of doubtfully anthropoid species, save us from a total blank, and open the vista to a myriad of active arboreal creatures which had their dwelling-place in the old-time European forests, but have almost utterly vanished from human knowledge.

These are not the only answers that can be made to the question propounded. Though the bones of the man-ape have not been found, relics of several stages of developing man exist. Most significant among these, until recently, was the celebrated Neanderthal skull, which in facial aspect departs widely from the ordinary human and approaches the simian type. More significant still is the Pithecanthropus cranium, indicative of an animal that stood midway between man and ape, a creature fully erect in posture, as its thigh bone proves, but with a brain that had attained but the halfway stage of development. In this notable find we seem to see man in the making, the body already fully man-like, the brain advanced much beyond the stage of the ape intellect, but still far below that of man. It is the remnant of a creature significantly on the dividing line between man-ape and man.

So much for the response to the question as hitherto made. As the case stands, we are not obliged to stop at this point. Within the latter section of the nineteenth century discoveries have been made which fit in admirably with our argument. Rediscoveries, perhaps, we should call them, for they were imperfectly known in ancient times, but only recently have they fairly come within human ken. We refer to the Pygmy tribes of the African forests, not definitely offered hitherto as aids to the elucidation of this problem, yet which seem to adapt themselves closely to it, and certainly help essentially in filling the gap between civilized man and his ape-like ancestor.

We have already said that there appear to have been two separate and distinct stages in the evolution of man: one, that of his conflict with the animal world, ending in his mastery of the brute creation; the second that of his conflict with nature, ending in his mastery of the resources of the earth. Overlapping and succeeding the second there has been a third, that of the conflict of man with man, ending in the survival of the fittest of the human race. In the discussion of this problem, as hitherto made, these distinct stages of evolution, with their intermediate resting stages, have not been recognized; argument being based on man as a whole, and no thought directed to the possibility that existing man may represent several separate processes of development, with broad lapses between. The argument we propose to offer is that man as he was at the completion of his first stage, that of the subjugation of the animal world, and before the beginning of the conflict with nature, still exists, the first derivation from the man-ape, living in the location and possessing much of the appearance and many of the habits of this ancestral form.

Late travellers in Africa have found more than trees and streams in the forest depths. They have found there a distinct and peculiar race of men, negro-like in many particulars, yet differing from the negroes in others, and specially marked by their dwarfish stature, which is indicated in the name of Pygmies, usually given them. These diminutive beings were known as long ago as the days of Homer, and their legendary combats with the cranes are spoken of by him in his poems. He was not aware of what is known now, that these forest dwarfs would disdain the cranes as antagonists, and are quite capable of overcoming the lordly elephant. In truth, they know no equals in the forest, and, while destitute of any knowledge of agriculture, are the most skilful, considering the primitive character of their weapons, of the hunters of the earth.

The forest is the home of the Pygmy, as in all probability it was of the man-ape. He dwells in its deepest recesses, its moist and sultry depths, and pines when removed from his native realm in the heart of the tropic woods. In truth, he is almost as fully arboreal as was his tree-dwelling ancestor and as are his forest relatives, the anthropoid apes of to-day; not inhabiting the limbs of trees, indeed, but living under their shade, and forming the true man of the woodland, the nomad hunters of the vast equatorial forests. It must be said, however, that this is not wholly the case. There are tribes seemingly belonging to this race in South Africa who dwell in the open desert, but retain there, in great measure, the habits of their forest kin.

The first of modern travellers to see the Pygmies was Du Chaillu, in his journey through the African woodlands in 1867. He describes them as averaging four feet seven inches in height, their complexion of a pale yellow brown, the hair of their head short, but their bodies covered with a thick growth of hair, as if the loss of their ancestral covering had not been completed. The tribe seen by him was known as the Obongo, and dwelt in Ashango Land, occupying the forest region between the Gaboon and the Congo.