The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 9

PECULIARITIES

OF THE

CEEWACE MMB ARON st

SPECIES

HOMO SAPIENS

1. Fire, Tools, Speech, and Economics.

S 3 . Primary Varieties of Human Life. § 4.

Si Fire, Tools, Speech, and Economics

N these concluding Books we have returned

to that point of maximum interest from which we started out upon our general survey of biology, the life of Mr. Everyman. But whereas hitherto it has been convenient and interesting to study Mr. Everyman as an individual, we now propose to study him collectively as Man, Homo sapiens, the last surviving species of the family of the Hominidz, which differentiated from the great apes in the shrinking forests of the Miocene or Pliocene Age (V, C and D). We have described his body and its evolution; his brain and his mind. We have studied the operation of his mind until at last we had to stop short at that apparently insoluble mystery of life, consciousness. Our last Book culminated in a great interrogation : is there an immortal individual consciousness? Does the individual consciousness survive matter? We left that question open.

Now we are going to consider our Mr. Everyman very briefly as a unit in a rapidly developing species of animal. We are going to treat Homo sapiens as a species among other species. It isa species which now dominates life, which is producing a whole multitude of unprecedented problems and novel biological situations, and seems to be breaking more and more away from the control of the blind forces that have hitherto determined the course of evolution.

Homo sapiens differs widely in his action upon his environment from any other form of life. Let us examine in what that difference consists. In common with the rest of the Hominide, the apes and some monkeys, the human animal uses its hands to pick up sticks and stones, to make tools of them and supplement its forces and extend its range. This readiness to use tools is closely associated with the high development of the hand and with the unprecedentedly efficient use of that hand which the possession of a spot of distinct vision has made possible. But modern man carries this tool-using disposition to an extent immeasurably beyond the range

§ 2. Origins af Homo sapiens. § 3. The Development of Human Interaction.

of kindred types. All of the Hominide fabricated tools, chipping flint and wood to forms more convenient and effective, but the adaptation of tool to use is comparatively crude and primitive in all other species of Homo except our own. All other species of man reached their highest mechanical aid in a shaped flint or a pointed stake ; Homo sapiens still soars on, with no sign of any finality, from the dynamo and the aeroplane engine. Other Hominide also supplemented their powers with artificially made fire. But their use of fire was incidental, while Modern Man now at a great rate burns his world for his ends. More definitely restricted, it would seem, to Man is the use of articulate speech. Great numbers of vertebrated species communicate by sounds, but all surviving races of Homo have conventionalized their vocal sounds to convey complex meanings in a way no animal does. They have language. Whether Homo neanderthalensis had, strictly speaking, a language is questionable.

The fossil extinct species and genera of men lived in small groups as the great apes do, small family groups usually about an old male; their remains never indicate larger social aggregations. But the true men (Homo sapiens) from the earliest appearance of their remains are seen to be going beyond that primitive assembly. Some antagonism has been allayed. Some kind of toleration has been established among the adult males; the family group has been expanded into the tribe. That, however, is the less important aspect of the matter. Many other animals have increased and decreased in their gregariousness. As the excavator, explorer, and archeologist trace out man’s history to us, we realize that in the last fifty thousand years or so he has not merely become rapidly more and more gregarious, but also, what is far more remarkable, he has left that life of haphazard which is the lot of nearly all the rest of the animal creation, that practice of eating your food where you find it and taking no thought for the morrow, and he has become an economic animal, preparing for the future, cultivating and storing food,

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