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

PECULIARITIES OF THE SPECIES HOMO SAPIENS

(V_C) diminished and have marked the earliest stage of differentiation from the apes. It may have been a recurrent experience. Man may have fluctuated between a more and a_ less numerous assemblage and between intenser and lighter tabus. From his very first visible appearance upon the terrestrial stage Homo Sapiens at any rate, in all his varieties, is a social animal becoming steadily more social, with suppressions, with tabus, with a sense of sin. He appears from his very beginnings as a being of incomparable mental powerdivided against itself.

Human society is built up upon a balancing of motive against motive. Man 1s discovered from the first to be a moral animal. He fits in by individual selfsuppression, a thing he-has also imposed upon some of his domesticated animals. His suppressions are individual acquisitions, varying with his training, his social position, and the chances of his life. Through his facility for suppression he has been able to achieve this unprecedented miracle of an economic society without fundamental differentiation. Never before in the whole history of life has such a being appeared.

§ 3 Primary Varieties of Human Life

From the beginning of our certain knowledge, Homo sapiens appears as a widespread number of types, the “races of mankind.” There have evidently been profound local separations and modifications in the prehistoric period, but none so complete and enduring as to break up the species. As geographical conditions have changedand, as we have shown, the last twenty-five thousand years have achieved immense modifications of the map of the worldthese variations have resumed communication with others, have remingled with others, to produce mongrel races. Much nonsense has been talked and written about racial purity. Except possibly in the case of certain very isolated peoples, the now extinct Tasmanians and the Andaman islanders, for example, racial purity is a myth. Men and women are all mongrels, showing in various proportions the characteristics of this imperfectly specialized type or that.

As Professor T. H. Huxley pointed out long ago, there is a central series of human races ranging from the Atlantic coasts on either side of the Mediterranean to the east of Asia, Malaya, and Polynesia. These various peoples are brunette in various

degrees of intensity, dark or black-haired with hair that does not frizz and which may be very hard and straight. South of them, in the old world, are the black peoples of very variable type, with frizzy hair. Their hair, their colour, the abundance of sweatglands in their skins show them to be an adaptation to tropical forest conditions. To the north-east of the central series appears a more distinctly yellow type of race, with oblique eyes, broad cheekbones and very hard, black hair, the Mongolian group of races. These, with their scantier sweatglands and protected eyes, witness to the long influence of drought and dust. To the north-west and north, that is to say, over the centre and north of Europe and once extending far into north Asia, are a series of fair peoples with grey and blue eyes, more specially adapted to the deciduous forests of a temperate climate and insufficiently protected against very bright sunlight. Homo sapiens seems to have been a late comer in America, an immigrant always. It is doubtful if he has been there for more than ten thousand years. The Red Indian peoples find their closest relations among the eastern Asiatics.

That in general terms is the fundamental shape of human ethnology. A rather more detailed account of the races of mankind and a diagram showing their relationships will be found in The Outline of History, and it is unnecessary to repeat these here. As Soon as we attempt greater detail than such broad classifications give, we find ourselves in a tangle of kaleidoscopic racial types, due to the indefatigable mongrelization that has been in progress. Whatever differentiations were going on ten thousand years ago, they have long since been defeated by the steadily increasing communication between one part of the world and another. Man is no longer differentiating locally. Some day, perhaps, ethnology will abandon its attempt to separate what is so obstinately confluent and may set about classing human beings in other categories. A classification of genetic units may become possible, and individuals may become definable by formule which will show the particular grouping of characteristics that has occurred in each case.

Returning now to the primary varieties of our race, man is not only far less specialized and more versatile and migratory than the great apes, but alsohe is far more omnivorous. Homo sapiens varied his menu with his opportunities, and here subsisted on a wholly vegetarian diet, and here on fish, and here

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