Anthropology by Robert Ranulph Marett (top ten books to read txt) 📕

It remains to say a word about the types of pre-historic men as judged by their bony remains and especially by their skulls. Naturally the subject bristles with uncertainties.

By itself stands the so-called Pithecanthropus (Ape-man) of Java, a regular "missing link." The top of the skull, several teeth, and a thigh-bone, found at a certain distance from each other, are all that we have of it or him. Dr. Dubois, their discoverer, has made out a fairly strong case for supposing that the geological stratum in which the remains occurred is Pliocene—that is to say, belongs to the Tertiary epoch, to which man has not yet been traced back with any strong probability. It must remain, however, highly doubtful whether this is a proto-human being, or merely an ape of a type related to the gibbon. The intermediate character is shown especially in the head form. If an ape, Pithecanthropus had an enormous brain; if a man, he must have verged on what we should consider idiocy.

Also standing somewhat by itself is the Heidelberg man. All that we have of him is a well-preserved lower jaw with its teeth. It was found more than eighty feet below the surface of the soil, in company with animal remains that make it possible to fix its position in the scale of pre-historic periods with some accuracy. Judged by this test, it is as old as the oldest of the unmistakable drift implements, the so-called Chellean (from Chelles in the department of Seine-et-Marne in France). The jaw by itself would suggest a gorilla, being both chinless and immensely powerful. The teeth, however, are human beyond question, and can be matched, or perhaps even in respect to certain marks of primitiveness out-matched, amongst ancient skulls of the Neanderthal order, if not also amongst modern ones from Australia.

We may next consider the Neanderthal group of skulls, so named after the first of that type found in 1856 in the Neanderthal valley close to Düsseldorf in the Rhine basin. A narrow head, with low and retreating forehead, and a thick projecting brow-ridge, yet with at least twice the brain capacity of any gorilla, set the learned world disputing whether this was an ape, a normal man, or an idiot. It was unfortunate that there were no proofs to hand of the age of these relics. After a while, however, similar specimens began to come in. Thus in 1866 the jaw of a woman, displaying a tendency to chinlessness combined with great strength, was found in the Cave of La Naulette in Belgium, associated with more or less dateable remains of the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and reindeer. A few years earlier, though its importance was not appreciated at the moment, there had been discovered, near Forbes' quarry at Gibraltar, the famous Gibraltar skull, now to be seen in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Any visitor will notice at the first glance that this is no man of to-day. There are the narrow head, low crown, and prominent brow-ridge as before, supplemented by the most extraordinary eye-holes that were ever seen, vast circles widely separated from each other. And other peculiar features will reveal themselves on a close inspection; for instance, the horseshoe form in which, ape-fashion, the teeth are arranged, and the muzzle-like shape of the face due to the absence of the depressions that in our own case run down on each side from just outside the nostrils towards the corners of the mouth.

And now at the present time we have twenty or more individuals of this Neanderthal type to compare. The latest discoveries are perhaps the most interesting, because in two and perhaps other cases the man has been properly buried. Thus at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, in the French department of Corrèze, a skeleton, which in its head-form closely recalls the Gibraltar example, was found in a pit dug in the floor of a low grotto. It lay on its back, head to the west, with one arm bent towards the head, the other outstretched, and the legs drawn up. Some bison bones lay in the grave as if a food-offering had been made. Hard by were flint implements of a well-marked Mousterian type. In the shelter of Le Moustier itself a similar burial was discovered. The body lay on its right side, with the right arm bent so as to support the head upon a carefully arranged pillow of flints; whilst the left arm was stretched out, so that the hand might be near a magnificent oval stone-weapon chipped on both faces, evidently laid there by design. So much for these men of the Neanderthal type, denizens of the mid-palæolithic world at the very latest. Ape-like they doubtless are in their head-form up to a certain point, though almost all their separate features occur here and there amongst modern Australian natives. And yet they were men enough, had brains enough, to believe in a life after death. There is something to think about in that.

Without going outside Europe, we have, however, to reckon with at least two other types of very early head-form.

In one of the caves of Mentone known as La Grotte des Enfants two skeletons from a low stratum were of a primitive type, but unlike the Neanderthal, and have been thought to show affinities to the modern negro. As, however, no other Proto-Negroes are indisputably forthcoming either from Europe or from any other part of the world, there is little at present to be made out about this interesting racial type.

In the layer immediately above the negroid remains, however, as well as in other caves at Mentone, were the bones of individuals of quite another order, one being positively a giant. They are known as the Cro-Magnon race, after a group of them discovered in a rock shelter of that name on the banks of the Vezère. These particular people can be shown to be Aurignacian—that is to say, to have lived just after the Mousterian men of the Neanderthal head-form. If, however, as has been already suggested, the Galley Hill individual, who shows affinities to the Cro-Magnon type, really goes back to the drift-period, then we can believe that from very early times there co-existed in Europe at least two varieties; and these so distinct, that some authorities would trace the original divergence between them right back to the times before man and the apes had parted company, linking the Neanderthal race with the gorilla and the Cro-Magnon race with the orang. The Cro-Magnon head-form is refined and highly developed. The forehead is high, and the chin shapely, whilst neither the brow-ridge nor the lower jaw protrudes as in the Neanderthal type. Whether this race survives in modern Europe is, as was said in the last chapter, highly uncertain. In certain respects—for instance, in a certain shortness of face—these people present exceptional features; though some think they can still find men of this type in the Dordogne district. Perhaps the chances are, however, considering how skulls of the neolithic period prove to be anything but uniform, and suggest crossings between different stocks, that we may claim kinship to some extent with the more good-looking of the two main types of palæolithic man—always supposing that head-form can be taken as a guide. But can it? The Pygmies of the Congo region have medium heads; the Bushmen of South Africa, usually regarded as akin in race, have long heads. The American Indians, generally supposed to be all, or nearly all, of one racial type, show considerable differences of head-form; and so on. It need not be repeated that any race-mark is liable to deceive.

We have sufficiently considered the use to which the particular race-mark of head-form has been put in the attempted classification of the very early men who have left their bones behind them. Let us now turn to another race-mark, namely colour; because, though it may really be less satisfactory than others, for instance hair, that is the one to which ordinary people naturally turn when they seek to classify by races the present inhabitants of the earth.

When Linnæus in pre-Darwinian days distinguished four varieties of man, the white European, the red American, the yellow Asiatic, and the black African, he did not dream of providing the basis of anything more than an artificial classification. He probably would have agreed with Buffon in saying that in every case it was one and the same kind of man, only dyed differently by the different climates. But the Darwinian is searching for a natural classification. He wants to distinguish men according to their actual descent. Now race and descent mean for him the same thing. Hence a race-mark, if one is to be found, must stand for, by co-existing with, the whole mass of properties that form the inheritance. Can colour serve for a race-mark in this profound sense? That is the only question here.

First of all, what is the use of being coloured one way or the other? Does it make any difference? Is it something, like the heart-line of the hand, that may go along with useful qualities, but in itself seems to be a meaningless accident? Well, as some unfortunate people will be able to tell you, colour is still a formidable handicap in the struggle for existence. Not to consider the colour-prejudice in other aspects, there is no gainsaying the part it plays in sexual selection at this hour. The lower animals appear to be guided in the choice of a mate by externals of a striking and obvious sort. And men and women to this day marry more with their eyes than with their heads.

The coloration of man, however, though it may have come to subserve the purposes of mating, does not seem in its origin to have been like the bright coloration of the male bird. It was not something wholly useless save as a means of sexual attraction, though in such a capacity useful because a mark of vital vigour. Colour almost certainly developed in strict relation to climate. Right away in the back ages we must place what Bagehot has called the race-making epoch, when the chief bodily differences, including differences of colour, arose amongst men. In those days, we may suppose, natural selection acted largely on the body, because mind had not yet become the prime condition of survival. The rest is a question of pre-historic geography. Within the tropics, the habitat of the man-like apes, and presumably of the earliest men, a black skin protects against sunlight. A white skin, on the other hand—though this is more doubtful—perhaps economizes sun-heat in colder latitudes. Brown, yellow and the so-called red are intermediate tints suitable to intermediate regions. It is not hard to plot out in the pre-historic map of the world geographical provinces, or "areas of characterization," where races of different shades corresponding to differences in the climate might develop, in an isolation more or less complete, such as must tend to reinforce the process of differentiation.

Let it not be forgotten, however, that individual plasticity plays its part too in the determination of human colour. The Anglo-Indian planter is apt to return from a long sojourn in the East with his skin charged with a dark pigment which no amount of Pears' soap will remove during the rest of his life. It would be interesting to conduct experiments, on the lines of those of Professor Boas already mentioned, with the object of discovering in what degree the same capacity for amassing protective pigment declares itself in children of European parentage born in the tropics or transplanted thither during infancy. Correspondingly, the tendency of dark stocks to bleach in cold countries needs to be studied. In the background, too, lurks the question whether such effects of individual plasticity can be transmitted to offspring, and become part of the inheritance.

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