Part 18

Prehistoric Man, 3rd edit. vol. i. p. 117.

3. Yet another important line of evidence as to the extreme antiquity of the human type has been brought prominently forward by Prof. Mivart. He shows, by a careful comparison of all parts of the structure of the body, that man is related not to any one, but almost equally to many of the existing apes--to the orang, the chimpanzee, the gorilla, and even to the gibbons--in a variety of ways; and these relations and differences are so numerous and so diverse that, on the theory of evolution, the ancestral form which ultimately developed into man must have diverged from the common stock whence all these various forms and their extinct allies originated. But so far back as the Miocene deposits of Europe we find the remains of apes allied to these various forms, and especially to the gibbons; so that in all probability the special line of variation which led up to man branched off at a still earlier period. And these early forms, being the initiation of a far higher type, and having to develop by natural selection into so specialized and altogether distinct a creature as man, must have risen at a very early period into the position of a dominant race, and spread in dense waves of population over all suitable portions of the great continent--for this, on Mr. Darwin’s hypothesis, is essential to developmental progress through the agency of natural selection.

Man and Apes, pp. 171-193.

Under these circumstances we might certainly expect to find some relics of these earlier forms of man along with those of animals, which were presumably less abundant. Negative evidence of this kind is not very weighty, but still it has some value. It has been suggested that as apes are mostly tropical, and anthropoid apes are now confined almost exclusively to the vicinity of the equator, we should expect the ancestral forms of man to have inhabited these same localities--West Africa and the Malay Islands. But this objection is hardly valid, because existing anthropoid apes are wholly dependent on a perennial supply of easily accessible fruits, which is only found near the equator; while not only had the south of Europe an almost tropical climate in Miocene times, but we must suppose even the earliest ancestors of man to have been terrestrial and omnivorous, since it must have taken ages of slow modification to have produced the perfectly erect form, the short arms, and the wholly non-prehensile foot, which so strongly differentiate man from the arboreal apes.

The common statement of travellers as to savages having great prehensile power in the toes, has been adopted by some naturalists as indicating an approach to the apes. But this notion is founded on a complete misconception. Savages pick up objects with their feet, it is true, but always by a lateral motion of the toes, which we should equally possess if we never wore shoes or stockings. In no savage have I ever seen the slightest approach to opposability of the great toe, which is the essential distinguishing feature of apes; nor have I ever seen it stated that any variation in this direction has been detected in the anatomical structure of the foot of the lower races.

The conclusion which I think we must arrive at is, that if man has been developed from a common ancestor with all existing apes, and by no other agencies than such as have affected their development, then he must have existed, in something approaching his present form, during the tertiary period--and not merely existed, but predominated in numbers, wherever suitable conditions prevailed. If then, continued researches in all parts of Europe and Asia fail to bring to light any proofs of his presence, it will be at least a presumption that he came into existence at a much later date, and by a much more rapid process of development. In that case it will be a fair argument that, just as he is in his mental and moral nature, his capacities and aspirations, so infinitely raised above the brutes, so his origin is due, in part, to distinct and higher agencies than such as have affected their development.

Antiquity of Intellectual Man.--There is yet another line of inquiry bearing upon this subject to which I wish to call your attention. It is a somewhat curious fact that, while all modern writers admit the great antiquity of man, most of them maintain the very recent development of his intellect, and will hardly contemplate the possibility of men equal in mental capacity to ourselves having existed in prehistoric times. This question is generally assumed to be settled by such relics as have been preserved of the manufactures of the older races, showing a lower and lower state of the arts; by the successive disappearance in early times of iron, bronze, and pottery; and by the ruder forms of the older flint implements. The weakness of this argument has been well shown by Mr. Albert Mott in his very original but little-known presidential address to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool in 1873. He maintains that “our most distant glimpses of the past are still of a world peopled as now with men both civilised and savage,” and “that we have often entirely misread the past by supposing that the outward signs of civilisation must always be the same, and must be such as are found among ourselves.” In support of this view he adduces a variety of striking facts and ingenious arguments, a few of which I will briefly summarize.

Sculptures on Easter Island.--On one of the most remote islands of the Pacific--Easter Island, 2,000 miles from South America, 2,000 from the Marquesas, and more than 1,000 from the Gambier Islands, are found hundreds of gigantic stone images, now mostly in ruins. They are often forty feet high, while some seem to have been much larger, the crowns on their heads, cut out of a red stone, being sometimes ten feet in diameter, while even the head and neck of one is said to have been twenty feet high. These images once all stood erect on extensive stone platforms.

Journ. of Roy. Geog. Soc. 1870, pp. 177, 178.

The island containing these remarkable works of art has only an area of about thirty square miles, or considerably less than Jersey. Now as one of the smallest images (eight feet high) weighs four tons, the largest must weigh over a hundred tons, if not much more; and the existence of such vast works implies a large population, abundance of food, and an established government. Yet how could these coexist on a mere speck of land wholly cut off from the rest of the world? Mr. Mott maintains that these facts necessarily imply the power of regular communication with larger islands or a continent, the arts of navigation, and a civilisation much higher than now exists in any part of the Pacific. Very similar remains in other islands scattered widely over the Pacific add weight to this argument.

North American Earthworks.--The next example is that of the ancient mounds and earthworks of the North American continent, the bearing of which is even more significant. Over the greater part of the extensive Mississippi valley, four well-marked classes of these earthworks occur. Some are camps, or works of defence, situated on bluffs, promontories, or isolated hills; others are vast inclosures in the plains and lowlands, often of geometric forms, and having attached to them roadways or avenues often miles in length; a third are mounds corresponding to our tumuli, often seventy to ninety feet high, and some of them covering acres of ground; while a fourth group consists of representations of various animals modelled in relief on a gigantic scale, and occurring chiefly in an area somewhat to the north-west of the other classes, in the plains of Wisconsin.

The first class--the camps or fortified inclosures--resemble in general features the ancient camps of our own islands, but far surpass them in extent. Fort Hill, in Ohio, is surrounded by a wall and ditch a mile and a half in length, part of the way cut through solid rock. Artificial reservoirs for water were made within it, while at one extremity, on a more elevated point, a keep is constructed with its separate defences and water-reservoirs. Another, called Clark’s Work, in the Scioto valley, which seems to have been a fortified town, incloses an area of 127 acres, the embankments measuring three miles in length, and containing not less than three million cubic feet of earth. This area incloses numerous sacrificial mounds and symmetrical earthworks, in which many interesting relics and works of art have been found.

The second class--the sacred inclosures, may be compared for extent and arrangement with Avebury or Carnak, but are in some respects even more remarkable. One of these at Newark, Ohio, covers an area of several miles, with its connected groups of circles, octagons, squares, ellipses, and avenues on a grand scale, and formed by embankments from twenty to thirty feet in height. Other similar works occur in different parts of Ohio; and by accurate survey it is found, not only that the circles are true, though some of them are one-third of a mile in diameter, but that other figures are truly square, each side being over 1,000 feet long; and, what is still more important, the dimensions of some of these geometrical figures in different parts of the country and seventy miles apart, are identical. Now this proves the use, by the builders of these works, of some standard measures of length; while the accuracy of the squares, circles, and, in a less degree, of the octagonal figures, shows a considerable knowledge of rudimentary geometry and some means of measuring angles. The difficulty of drawing such figures on a large scale is much greater than any one would imagine who has not tried it; and the accuracy of these is far beyond what is necessary to satisfy the eye. We must therefore impute to the builders the wish to make these figures as accurate as possible; and this wish is a greater proof of habitual skill and intellectual advancement than even the ability to draw such figures. If, then, we take into account this ability and this love of geometric truth, and further consider the dense population and civil organisation implied by the construction of such extensive systematic works, we must allow that these ancient people had reached the earlier stages of a civilisation of which no traces existed among the savage tribes who alone occupied the country when first visited by Europeans.

The animal mounds are of comparatively less importance for our present purpose, as they imply a somewhat lower grade of advancement; but the sepulchral and sacrificial mounds exist in vast numbers, and their partial exploration has yielded a quantity of articles and works of art which throw some further light on the peculiarities of this mysterious people. Most of these mounds contain a large concave hearth or basin of burnt clay, of perfectly symmetrical form, on which are found deposited more or less abundant relics, all bearing traces of the action of fire. We are therefore only acquainted with such articles as are practically fire-proof, or have accidentally escaped combustion. These consist of bone and copper implements and ornaments, discs, and tubes; pearl, shell, and silver beads, more or less injured by the fire; ornaments cut in mica; ornamental pottery; and numbers of elaborate carvings in stone, mostly forming pipes for smoking. The metallic articles are all formed by hammering, but the execution is very good; plates of mica are found cut into scrolls and circles; the pottery, of which very few remains have been found, is far superior to that of any of the Indian tribes, since Dr. Wilson is of opinion that it must have been formed on a wheel, as it is often of uniform thickness throughout (sometimes not more than one-sixth of an inch), polished, and ornamented with scrolls and figures of birds and flowers in delicate relief. But the most instructive objects are the sculptured stone pipes, representing not only various easily recognizable animals, but also human heads, so well executed that they appear to be portraits. Among the animals, not only are such native forms as the panther, bear, otter, wolf, beaver, raccoon, heron, crow, turtle, frog, rattlesnake, and many others well represented, but also the manatee, which perhaps then ascended the Mississippi as it now does the Amazon, and the toucan, which could hardly have been obtained nearer than Mexico. The sculptured heads are especially remarkable, because they present to us the features of an intellectual and civilised people. The nose in some is perfectly straight, and neither prominent nor dilated; the mouth is small, and the lips thin; the chin and upper lip are short, contrasting with the ponderous jaw of the modern Indian, while the cheek-bones present no marked prominence. Other examples have the nose somewhat projecting at the apex in a manner quite unlike the features of any American indigenes; and although there are some which show a much coarser face, it is very difficult to see in any of them that close resemblance to the Indian type which these sculptures have been said to exhibit. The few authentic crania from the mounds present corresponding features, being far more symmetrical and better developed in the frontal region than those of any American tribes, although somewhat resembling them in the occipital outline; while one was described by its discoverer (Mr. W. Marshall Anderson) as a “beautiful skull, worthy of a Greek.”

Woven cloth, apparently of flax or hemp, as well as gauges supposed to have been used to regulate the thickness of the thread, have also been found in several of the mounds of Ohio. (Foster’s Prehistoric Races of the United States, 1873, pp. 225-229.)

Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, 3rd edit. vol. ii. pp. 123-130.

The antiquity of this remarkable race may perhaps not be very great as compared with the prehistoric man of Europe, although the opinion of some writers on the subject seems affected by that “parsimony of time” on which the late Sir Charles Lyell so often dilated. The mounds are all overgrown with dense forest, and one of the large trees was estimated to be 800 years old, while other observers consider the forest growth to indicate an age of at least 1,000 years. But it is well known that it requires several generations of trees to pass away before the growth on a deserted clearing comes to correspond with that of the surrounding virgin forest, while this forest, once established, may go on growing for an unknown number of thousands of years. The 800 or 1,000 years estimate from the growth of existing vegetation is a minimum which has no bearing whatever on the actual age of these mounds; and we might almost as well attempt to determine the time of the glacial epoch from the age of the pines or oaks which now grow on the moraines.

The important thing for us, however, is that when North America was first settled by Europeans, the Indian tribes inhabiting it had no knowledge or tradition of any preceding race of higher civilisation than themselves. Yet we find that such a race existed; that they must have been populous and have lived under some established government; while there are signs that they practised agriculture largely, as, indeed, they must have done to have supported a population capable of executing such gigantic works in such vast profusion; for it is stated that the mounds and earthworks of various kinds in the state of Ohio alone, amount to between eleven and twelve thousand. In their habits, customs, religion, and arts, they differed strikingly from all the Indian tribes; while their love of art and of geometric forms, and their capacity for executing the latter upon so gigantic a scale, render it probable that they were a really civilised people, although the form their civilisation took may have been very different from that of later peoples, subject to very different influences and the inheritors of a longer series of ancestral civilisations. We have here, at all events, a striking example of the transition, over an extensive country, from comparative civilisation to comparative barbarism, the former leaving no tradition and hardly any trace of its influence on the latter.

As Mr. Mott well remarks:--Nothing can be more striking than the fact that Easter Island and North America both give the same testimony as to the origin of the savage life found in them, although in all circumstances and surroundings the two cases are so different. If no stone monuments had been constructed in Easter Island, or mounds containing a few relics saved from fire, in the United States, we might never have suspected the existence of these ancient peoples. He argues, therefore, that it is very easy for the records of an ancient nation’s life entirely to perish or to be hidden from observation. Even the arts of Nineveh and Babylon were unknown only a generation ago, and we have only just discovered the facts about the mound-builders of North America.

But other parts of the American continent exhibit parallel phenomena. Recent investigations show that in Mexico, Central America, and Peru the existing race of Indians has been preceded by a distinct and more civilised race. This is proved by the sculptures of the ruined cities of Central America, by the more ancient terra-cottas and paintings of Mexico, and by the oldest portrait-pottery of Peru. All alike show markedly non-Indian features, while they often closely resemble modern European types. Ancient crania, too, have been found in all these countries, presenting very different characters from those of any of the existing indigenous races of America.

Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, 3rd edit. vol. ii. pp. 125, 144.

The Great Pyramid.--There is one other striking example of a higher being succeeded by a lower degree of knowledge, which is in danger of being forgotten because it has been made the foundation of theories which seem wild and fantastic, and are probably in great part erroneous. I allude to the Great Pyramid of Egypt, whose form, dimensions, structure, and uses have recently been the subject of elaborate works by Prof. Piazzi Smyth. Now the admitted facts about the pyramid are so interesting and so apposite to the subject we are considering, that I beg to recall them to your attention. Most of you are aware that this pyramid has been carefully explored and measured by successive Egyptologists, and that the dimensions have lately become capable of more accurate determination, owing to the discovery of some of the original casing-stones, and the clearing away of the earth from the corners of the foundation showing the sockets in which the corner-stones fitted. Prof. Smyth devoted many months of work with the best instruments, in order to fix the dimensions and angles of all accessible parts of the structure; and he has carefully determined these by a comparison of his own and all previous measures, the best of which agree pretty closely with each other. The results arrived at are:--

1. That the pyramid is truly square, the sides being equal and the angles right angles.

2. That the four sockets on which the four first stones of the corners rested, are truly on the same level.

3. That the directions of the sides are accurately to the four cardinal points.

4. That the vertical height of the pyramid bears the same proportion to its circumference at the base, as the radius of a circle does to its circumference.

Now all these measures, angles, and levels are accurate, not as an ordinary surveyor or builder could make them, but to such a degree as requires the very best modern instruments and all the refinements of geodetical science to discover any error at all. In addition to this we have the wonderful perfection of the workmanship in the interior of the pyramid, the passages and chambers being lined with huge blocks of stones fitted with the utmost accuracy, while every part of the building exhibits the highest structural science.

In all these respects this largest pyramid surpasses every other in Egypt. Yet it is universally admitted to be the oldest, and also the oldest historical building in the world.