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

BOOK 9

naked skin of the face varies almost as much as man’s skin—it may be as black as a negro’s, or dark brown, or lighter brown, or almost as pinky-white as a white man’s.

Some interesting speculations upon the social life of the primordial Hominide were made years ago by J. J. Atkinson in his Primal Law (Social Origins and Primal Law. Lang & Atkinson). His views, like Darwin’s, have been revised and modified in several particulars, but they still remain of paramount importance and value in human biology. The whole theory of psychoanalysts rests upon such ideas and is in entire harmony with them.

Atkinson, arguing back from the practically universal tabus against various forms of incest, and the world-wide traces of the custom of exogamy (the custom which makes ordinary males capture wives from another tribe and abstain from marriage with the women of their own people), developed a remarkably plausible theory of the early constitution of human, or rather sub-human, society. He assumed that the normal social* group among the earlier Hominide was, to begin with, like the more usual social group of the great apes, a small family herd under the leadership of a big male. As the other males approached maturity this head male drove them off, the young females for the most part remaining with him and bearing him offspring. Of course, such a normal type of group does not exclude, indeed it almost requires, that sometimes two or three brothers who had been chased off have wandered together and even have attracted a stray female or so. Such leaderless groups otcur among the gorillas, but they are much rarer than the family group. The adult male’s fierce jealousy for his females and for his territory ensured the prevalence of the family group, and the restoration of fresh family groups when the old ones were broken up. It is a grouping well adapted to forest conditions where food is scattered, and forthcoming only in sure and sufficient quantity for a limited number of individuals. It has consequently remained to this day the typical social method of the forest primates, though chimpanzees will sometimes band themselves together in larger groups.

But the Hominide, being less highly specialized for forest life, more inclined to eat animal food, and better adapted to bush, grass, and rock country where fruits and roots are found less easily than prey best hunted in co-operation, would be advantaged by any mental or temperamental adaptations that would admit of the primitive families

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THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 1

growing into larger social groups. ‘This adaptation became possible, Atkinson suggests, through the interplay of certain natural dispositions on the part of the females and young males.

Briefly, the mothers, after the fashion of most mammals, were disposed to protect and cherish their male quite as much as their female offspring. But an adult male in the breeding season—and all round the year is the breeding season for the primatesis apt to be intolerant of competitive males. In order to keep their young sons by them, then, it was necessary for the mothers to inspire their young with awe for his seniors, and particularly for the ruling Old Man, and to make the juniors chary of infringing his rights and rousing his jealousy. By example and crude precept, the natural awe of the young male for his father’s strength and possible rage was given form and direction. The young males grew up learning that his personal possessions and particularly the females of their group were tabu to them, that certain things must not be done in his sight or proximity. The fear of the Old Man was the beginning of wisdom and decency. Many of them retained their natural infantile disposition to propitiate beyond adolescence. The younger male deferred to the older male ; so, said Atkinson, men learnt the elements of selfsuppression, and the idea of sin, and particularly the sin of incest, was born in the human mind. So, say the psycho-analysts, the first repressed complexes arose.

Human society became possible through this primary suppression, and it is hard to imagine how it could have become possible in any other way. No other animal but Homo sapiens betrays the slightest objection to incest, and that the objection to incest is a tradition and not an instinct, the records of any provincial criminal court will show. A few eminent sociologists like Dr. Hobhouse are of the opposite opinion and believe that there is an instinctive objection to incest, but all the known facts point to an imposed and habitual avoidance as the real bar against this form of intercourse.

And now comes the next step in the history of the fundamental human institutions. As the young man, growing in strength and desire, wandered discontented upon the borders of the family territory, he discovered there were other women in the world, women who were not his chief's women, women unprotected by the tabu. He went for one of these women when he got the chance.

Conceivably if she was a neglected woman