Part 2

Mankind, we’ll say, is at least a half million years old. It is very hard to understand how long a time half a million years really is. If we were to compare this whole length of time to one day, we’d get something like this: The present time is midnight, and Jesus was born just five minutes and thirty-six seconds ago. Earliest history began less than fifteen minutes ago. Everything before 11:45 was in prehistoric time.

Or maybe we can grasp the length of time better in terms of generations. As you know, primitive peoples tend to marry and have children rather early in life. So suppose we say that twenty years will make an average generation. At this rate there would be 25,000 generations in a half-million years. But our United States is much less than ten generations old, twenty-five generations take us back before the time of Columbus, Julius Caesar was alive just 100 generations ago, David was king of Israel less than 150 generations ago, 250 generations take us back to the beginning of written history. And there were 24,750 generations of men before written history began!

I should probably tell you that there is a new method of prehistoric dating which would cut the earliest dates in my reckoning almost in half. Dr. Cesare Emiliani, combining radioactive (C14) and chemical (oxygen isotope) methods in the study of deep-sea borings, has developed a system which would lower the total range of human prehistory to about 300,000 years. The system is still too new to have had general examination and testing. Hence, I have not used it in this book; it would mainly affect the dates earlier than 25,000 years ago.

CHANGES IN ENVIRONMENT

The earth probably hasn’t changed much in the last 5,000 years (250 generations). Men have built things on its surface and dug into it and drawn boundaries on maps of it, but the places where rivers, lakes, seas, and mountains now stand have changed very little.

In earlier times the earth looked very different. Geologists call the last great geological period the _Pleistocene_. It began somewhere between a half million and a million years ago, and was a time of great changes. Sometimes we call it the Ice Age, for in the Pleistocene there were at least three or four times when large areas of earth were covered with glaciers. The reason for my uncertainty is that while there seem to have been four major mountain or alpine phases of glaciation, there may only have been three general continental phases in the Old World.[2]

[2] This is a complicated affair and I do not want to bother you with its details. Both the alpine and the continental ice sheets seem to have had minor fluctuations during their _main_ phases, and the advances of the later phases destroyed many of the traces of the earlier phases. The general textbooks have tended to follow the names and numbers established for the Alps early in this century by two German geologists. I will not bother you with the names, but there were _four_ major phases. It is the second of these alpine phases which seems to fit the traces of the earliest of the great continental glaciations. In this book, I will use the four-part system, since it is the most familiar, but will add the word _alpine_ so you may remember to make the transition to the continental system if you wish to do so.

Glaciers are great sheets of ice, sometimes over a thousand feet thick, which are now known only in Greenland and Antarctica and in high mountains. During several of the glacial periods in the Ice Age, the glaciers covered most of Canada and the northern United States and reached down to southern England and France in Europe. Smaller ice sheets sat like caps on the Rockies, the Alps, and the Himalayas. The continental glaciation only happened north of the equator, however, so remember that “Ice Age” is only half true.

As you know, the amount of water on and about the earth does not vary. These large glaciers contained millions of tons of water frozen into ice. Because so much water was frozen and contained in the glaciers, the water level of lakes and oceans was lowered. Flooded areas were drained and appeared as dry land. There were times in the Ice Age when there was no English Channel, so that England was not an island, and a land bridge at the Dardanelles probably divided the Mediterranean from the Black Sea.

A very important thing for people living during the time of a glaciation was the region adjacent to the glacier. They could not, of course, live on the ice itself. The questions would be how close could they live to it, and how would they have had to change their way of life to do so.

GLACIERS CHANGE THE WEATHER

Great sheets of ice change the weather. When the front of a glacier stood at Milwaukee, the weather must have been bitterly cold in Chicago. The climate of the whole world would have been different, and you can see how animals and men would have been forced to move from one place to another in search of food and warmth.

On the other hand, it looks as if only a minor proportion of the whole Ice Age was really taken up by times of glaciation. In between came the _interglacial_ periods. During these times the climate around Chicago was as warm as it is now, and sometimes even warmer. It may interest you to know that the last great glacier melted away less than 10,000 years ago. Professor Ernst Antevs thinks we may be living in an interglacial period and that the Ice Age may not be over yet. So if you want to make a killing in real estate for your several hundred times great-grandchildren, you might buy some land in the Arizona desert or the Sahara.

We do not yet know just why the glaciers appeared and disappeared, as they did. It surely had something to do with an increase in rainfall and a fall in temperature. It probably also had to do with a general tendency for the land to rise at the beginning of the Pleistocene. We know there was some mountain-building at that time. Hence, rain-bearing winds nourished the rising and cooler uplands with snow. An increase in all three of these factors--if they came together--would only have needed to be slight. But exactly why this happened we do not know.

The reason I tell you about the glaciers is simply to remind you of the changing world in which prehistoric men lived. Their surroundings--the animals and plants they used for food, and the weather they had to protect themselves from--were always changing. On the other hand, this change happened over so long a period of time and was so slow that individual people could not have noticed it. Glaciers, about which they probably knew nothing, moved in hundreds of miles to the north of them. The people must simply have wandered ever more southward in search of the plants and animals on which they lived. Or some men may have stayed where they were and learned to hunt different animals and eat different foods. Prehistoric men had to keep adapting themselves to new environments and those who were most adaptive were most successful.

OTHER CHANGES

Changes took place in the men themselves as well as in the ways they lived. As time went on, they made better tools and weapons. Then, too, we begin to find signs of how they started thinking of other things than food and the tools to get it with. We find that they painted on the walls of caves, and decorated their tools; we find that they buried their dead.

At about the time when the last great glacier was finally melting away, men in the Near East made the first basic change in human economy. They began to plant grain, and they learned to raise and herd certain animals. This meant that they could store food in granaries and “on the hoof” against the bad times of the year. This first really basic change in man’s way of living has been called the “food-producing revolution.” By the time it happened, a modern kind of climate was beginning. Men had already grown to look as they do now. Know-how in ways of living had developed and progressed, slowly but surely, up to a point. It was impossible for men to go beyond that point if they only hunted and fished and gathered wild foods. Once the basic change was made--once the food-producing revolution became effective--technology leaped ahead and civilization and written history soon began.

Prehistoric Men THEMSELVES

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”