The Origin of Man and of His Superstitions. Carveth Read

and because several distinct varieties and even genera, now extant, have that habit—such as wolf, jackal, dingo, dhole, Cape hunting-dog, etc. In the Upper Oligocene of North America, occurs a dog as big as a large modern wolf, and in Europe the bear-like dog, Amphicyon, of about the same size, but said to have been clumsy and slow-moving. There were several other dog-like species; they continue in the Miocene, and some of them increase in bulk; but true modern dogs or wolves (Canis) do not appear before the Pliocene. Then, too, first occur true bears (Ursus); hyænas in the Upper Miocene. “Cats” belong to two sub-families: (i) the true felines, our modern species and their ancestors; and (ii) the machærodonts, or sabre-toothed cats. The latter first appear in North America in the Lower Oligocene; the former in Europe in the Middle Oligocene. The sabre-tooths are so called from their thin, curved upper canines; which were so long (3 to 6 inches) that it is not easy to understand how they could open their mouths wide enough to bite with them. That they were effective in some way is proved by the fact that machærodonts, first appearing in the Lower Oligocene, increased in numbers and diversity of species for ages, and some of them in bulk. In North America, in the Upper Oligocene, one species was as large as a jaguar, and some of the biggest and most terrifying were contemporary with Man, and only became extinct in the Pleistocene. Their limbs were relatively shorter and thicker than those of the Felinæ. These, the true cats, at first progressed more slowly than the Machærodontidæ; but in the Siwalik deposits (Pliocene) there occur, along with machærodonts, forms resembling the leopard and the lynx, with others as large as tigers. The largest of all this group seems to have been the cave-lion, perhaps a large variety of the common African lion, which also lived with Man in Europe in the Pleistocene. These were serious competitors in the hunting-life of Lycopithecus and of primitive Man; and the effect of such competition in exterminating inferior forms is shown by the fate of the carnivorous marsupials of South America (allied to Thylacinus), which were the predatory fauna of that region, until in the Pliocene, North and South America having become united by continuous land, cats and dogs came in from the northern continent and put an end to them; and also by the fate of the creodonts, which in the Oligocene seem everywhere to have been exterminated by the new carnivores. In both cases the beaten competitors were very inferior in the size and complexity of their brains; and if Man has succeeded in the struggle for life against the same foes, in spite of his inferior bodily adaptation, it is probably due to his very superior brains. This may also be the reason why modern Man (Homo sapiens!), wandering everywhere over the world, has everywhere exterminated such experiments in human nature as Pithecanthropus, Eoanthropus, and Neanderthalensis; as others are soon to follow them into the Hades of extinct species.

      These few pages give a ridiculously faint sketch of the animal world amidst which our remote ancestors began their career. But it may serve to indicate that there was always plenty to eat if you could kill it, and plenty of rivals who wanted their share. After the disappearance of the dinosaurs at the close of the Cretaceous period, the mammalia, already numerous, developed rapidly, and spread in ever multiplying numbers and diverging shapes over the whole area of the land. We may take it that from the Middle Eocene (at least) onwards the earth has always been as full of wild beasts as it would hold. To understand what it was like in the Middle Oligocene, one should read the adventures of hunters in South Africa seventy or eighty years ago (their verisimilitude is vouched for by Livingstone),[27] before a gun in the hands of every Kaffir had begun to thin the vast herds that then covered the whole landscape, and in whose numbers the wild hunters and the lions could make no appreciable diminution. The little Bushmen regarded themselves and the lions as joint owners and masters of all the game. The masters fought one another, indeed; but there was no necessity to fight, for there was more than enough for both: lions were then sometimes met in gangs of ten or a dozen. Game throughout the Cainozoic ages was abundant and of all sizes: many small, many middle-sized and some prodigious. Even in the Eocene, some of the Amblypoda (Dinoceras, Am.) and of the Barypoda (Arsinotherium, Af.) were as big as rhinoceroses; in the Oligocene, Titanotheres not much smaller than elephants; in South America, in Miocene and Pliocene times, the Toxodonts; in the Pleistocene, Ground-sloths of huge bulk, and Glyptodonts. Of Families still represented amongst living animals, dinotheres and mastodons occur in the Miocene; and elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, giraffe have abounded from the Pliocene to recent times, in many species, over most of Africa and the northern hemisphere. Even the marsupials in Australia produced a species (Diprotodon) as large as a rhinoceros with a skull three feet long. Any one of these would have been a meal for a whole pack of hunters, if they could kill it—as we may be sure they could.

§ 5. Conclusion

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      From the addiction of some ancestral ape to animal food, and to the life of a hunter in order to obtain it, then, the special characteristics of Man seem to be natural consequences. The hypothesis from which everything follows is exceptionally simple and moderate. It is generally admitted that our ancestor was a large anthropoid—possibly more gregarious than others, possibly more apt to live upon the ground; but neither of these suppositions is requisite. He was adapted to his life, as the chimpanzee and gorilla are to theirs: in which, probably, they have gone on with little change for ages. But into his life a disturbing factor entered—the impulse to attack, hunt and eat animals, which extensively replaced his former peaceable, frugivorous habit. The cause of this change may have been a failure in the supply of his usual diet, or an “accidental variation” of appetite. Not a great number need have shared in the hunting impulse; it is enough that a few should have felt it, or even one. If advantageous and inheritable, it would spread through his descendants. It was advantageous (a) in enlarging their resources of nutrition, and (b) in enabling them to escape from the tropical forest. On the other hand, to those least fit for the new life it brought the disadvantages of more strenuous exertion and of competition with other carnivorous types. But with hands and superior intelligence, those that had the requisite character succeeded. There was rapid selection of those whose variations of structure, character, activity were most effective in dealing with game and with enemies; especially of those who combined and co-operated, and learned to direct co-operation by some rudimentary speech.

      But, again, the hunting impulse here assumed to have possessed some anthropoid was not something entirely new; anthropoids and many other Primates are known to seize and devour birds, lizards and even small mammals when chance offers an easy opportunity. It is merely a greater persistence in this behaviour that turns it into hunting. How very improbable that such a change should not sometimes occur! Is it not likely to have occurred often, and with many failures? Similarly, of the resulting changes: the differentiation of our hands and feet is only an advance upon what you see in the gorilla; as for our ground-life, can the adult male gorilla be fairly called arboreal? Several Primates use unwrought weapons; most of them lead a gregarious life, to which our own is a return; they are co-operative at least in defence; like many other animals, they communicate by gestures and inarticulate vocal cries. Co-operative hunting, indeed, seems to be new in our Order; but since wolves and dogs, or their ancestors, fell in with it some time or other, why should it be beyond the capacity of apes? On second thoughts, is the co-operative raiding of plantations by baboons something altogether different from hunting in pack? Thus at each occasion of change in structure or function, Lycopithecus merely carried some tendency of the other Primates a little further, and a little further; until, certainly, he went a long way. The whole movement can be distinctly pictured throughout, and it has an air of being natural or even inevitable. Few hypotheses ask us to grant less than this one.

      Moreover, if the story is not true, Man is an exception to the rule of animal life, that the structure of every organism is made up of apparatus subserving its peculiar conditions of nutrition and reproduction. Indeed, conditions of nutrition are the ground of the differentiation of animals and plants. Conditions of reproduction need not here be considered, as the apparatus is the same in the anthropoids and in ourselves. With many species to avoid being eaten and to mate are the reasons for some secondary characters, such as protective armour or coloration, fleetness with its correlative structures, nuptial plumage, and so forth. But to avoid being eaten and to mate, it is first of all necessary to eat and live; and accordingly, for each sort of animal, starting