The Outline of History - H. G. Wells (most recommended books txt) 📗

of the Nile, many hundreds of feet above its present level, implements of the European types have been discovered; while in Somaliland, in an ancient river-valley at a great elevation above the sea, Sir H. W. Seton-Karr has collected a large number of implements formed of flint and quartzite, which, judging from their form and character, might have been dug out of the drift deposits of the Somme and the Seine, the Thames or the ancient Solent.

 

Phases of spreading and intermixture have probably alternated with phases of settlement and specialization in the history of mankind. But up to a few hundred years ago it is probable that since the days of the Paloeolithic Age at least mankind has on the whole been differentiating. The species has differentiated in that period into a very great number of varieties, many of which have reblended with others, which have spread and undergone further differentiation or become, extinct. Wherever there has been a strongly marked local difference of conditions and a check upon intermixture, there one is almost obliged to assume a variety of mankind must have appeared. Of such local varieties there must have been a great multitude.

 

In one remote corner of the world, Tasmania, a little cutoff population of people remained in the early Palolithic stage until the discovery of that island by the Dutch in 1642. They are now, unhappily, extinct. The last Tasmanian died in 1877. They may have been cut off from the rest of mankind for 15,000 or 20,000 or 25,000 years.

 

But among the numerous obstacles and interruptions to intermixture there have been certain main barriers, such as the Atlantic Ocean, the highlands, once higher, and the now vanished seas of Central Asia and the like, which have cut off great groups of varieties from other great, groups of varieties over long periods of time. These separated groups of varieties developed very early certain broad resemblances and differences. Most of the varieties of men in eastern Asia and America, but not all, have now this in common, that they have yellowish buff skins, straight black hair, and often high cheek-bones. Most of the native peoples of Africa south of the Sahara, but not all, have black, or blackish skins, flat noses, thick lips, and frizzy hair. In north and western Europe a great number of peoples have fair hair, blue eyes, and ruddy complexions; and about the Mediterranean there is a prevalence of white-skinned peoples with dark eyes and black hair. The black hair of many of these dark whites is straight, but never so strong and waveless as the hair of the yellow peoples. It is straighter in the east than in the west. In southern India we find brownish and darker peoples with straight black hair, and these as we pass eastward give place to more distinctly yellow peoples. In scattered islands and in Papua and New Guinea we find another series of black and brownish peoples of a more lowly type with frizzy hair.

 

[Fig. 0109 Heads of Australoid Types]

 

But it must be borne in mind that these are very loosefitting generalizations. Some of the areas and isolated pockets of mankind in the Asiatic area may have been under conditions more like those in the European area; some of the African areas are of a more Asiatic and less distinctively African type. We find a wavy-haired, fairish, hairy-skinned race, the Ainu, in Japan. They are more like the Europeans in their facial type than the surrounding yellow Japanese. They may be a drifted patch of the whites or they may be a quite distinct people. We find primitive black people in the Andaman Islands far away from Australia and far away from Africa. There is a streak of very negroid blood traceable in south Persia and some parts of India. These are the Asiatic negroids. There is little or no proof that all black people, the Australians, the Asiatic negroids, and the negroes, derive from one origin, but only that they have lived for vast periods under similar conditions.

 

We must not assume that human beings in the eastern Asiatic area were all differentiating in one direction and all the human beings in Africa in another. There were great currents of tendency, it is true, but there were also backwaters eddies, admixtures, readmixtures, and leakages from one main area to the other. A coloured map of the world to show the races: would not present just four great areas of colour it would have to be dabbed over with a multitude of tints and intermediate shades, simple here mixed and overlapping there.

 

In the early Neolithic Period in Europe"it may be 10,000 or 12,000 years ago or so"man was differentiating all over the world, and be had already differentiate to a number of varieties, but he has never differentiated into different species . A species, we must remember, in biological language is distinguished from a variety by the fact that varieties can interbreed, while species either do not do so or produce, offspring which, like mules, are sterile. All mankind can interbreed freely, can learn to understand the same speech, can adapt itself to cooperation. And in the present age, man is probably no longer undergoing differentiation at all. Readmixture is now a far stronger force than differentiation. Men mingle more and more. Mankind from the view of a biologist is an animal species in a state of arrested differentiation and possible readmixture.

 

12.2 The Main Races of Mankind

 

It is only in the last fifty or sixty years that the varieties of men came to be regarded in this light, as a tangle of differentiations, recently arrested or still in, progress. Before that time students of mankind, influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the story of Noah and the Ark and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, were inclined, to classify men into, three or four great races and they were disposed to regard these races as having always been separate things, descended from originally separate ancestors. They ignored the great possibilities of blended races and of special local isolations and variations. The classification has varied considerably, but there has been rather too much readiness to assume that mankind must be completely divisible into three or four main groups. Ethnologists (students of race) have fallen into grievous disputes about a multitude of minor peoples, as to whether they were of this or that primary race or mixed, or strayed early forms, or what not. But all races are more or less mixed. There are, no doubt, four main groups, but each is a miscellany, and there are little groups that will not go into any of the four main divisions.

 

Subject to these reservations, when it is clearly understood that when we speak of these main divisions we mean not simple and pure races, but groups of races, then they have a certain convenience in discussion. Over the European and Mediterranean area and western Asia there are, and have been for many thousand years, white peoples, usually called the CAUCASIANS, subdivided into two or three subdivisions, the northern blonds or Nordic race, an alleged intermediate race about which many authorities are doubtful, the so-called Alpine race, and the southern dark whites, the Mediterranean or Iberian race; over eastern Asia and America a second group of races prevails, the MONGOLIANS, generally with yellow skins, straight black hair, and sturdy bodies; over Africa, the NEGROES, and in the region of Australia and New Guinea the black, primitive AUSTRALOIDS. These are convenient terms, provided the student bears in mind that they are not exactly defined terms. They represent only the common characteristics of certain main groups of races; they leave out a number of little peoples who belong properly to none of these divisions, and they disregard the perpetual mixing where the main groups overlap.

 

12.3 The Heliolithic Culture of Brunet Peoples

 

The Mediterranean or Iberian division of the Caucasian face had a wider range in early times, and was a less specialized and distinctive type than the Nordic. It is very hard to define its southward boundaries from the Negro, or to mark off its early traces in Central Asia from those of early Mongolians. Wilfred Scawen Blunt [1] says that Huxley had long suspected a common origin of the Egyptians and the Dravidians of India, perhaps a, long belt of brown-skinned men from India to Spain in very early days.

 

It is possible that this belt of Huxley's of dark-white and brown-skinned men, this race of brunet-brown folk, ultimately spread even farther than India; that they reached to the shores of the 'Pacific, and that they were everywhere the original possessors of the Neolithic culture and the beginners of what we call civilization. It is possible that these Brunet peoples are so to speak the basic peoples of our modern world. The Nordic and the Mongolian peoples may have been but northwestern and northeastern branches from this more fundamental stem. Or the Nordic race may have been a branch, while the Mongolian like the Negro, may have been another equal and distinct stem with which the brunet-browns met and mingled in South China. Or the Nordic peoples also may have developed separately from a palolithic stage.

 

[Fig. 0112 Negro Types]

 

At some period in human history (see Elliot Smith's Migra tions of Early Culture) there seems to have been a special type of Neolithic culture widely distributed in the world which had a group of features so curious and so unlikely to have been independently developed in different regions, of the earth, as to compel us to believe that it was in effect one culture. It reached through all the regions inhabited by the brunet Mediterranean race, and beyond through India, further India, up the Pacific coast of China, and it spread at last across the Pacific and to Mexico and Peru. It was a coastal culture not reaching deeply inland.

 

[Fig. 0113a Mongolian Types]

 

This peculiar development of the Neolithic culture, which Elliot Smith called the heliolithic [2] culture, included many or all of the following odd practices: (1) circumcision, (2) the very queer custom of sending the father to bed when a child is born, known as the couvade, (3) the practice of massage, (4) the making of mummies, (5) megalithic monuments [3](e.g. Stonehenge), (6) artificial deformation of the heads of the young by bandages, (7) tattooing, (8) religious association of the sun and the serpent, and (9) the use of the symbol known as the swastika (see figure) for good luck. This odd little symbol spins gaily round the world; it seems incredible that men would have invented and made a pet of it twice over.

 

[Fig. 0113b Caucasian Types]

 

Elliot Smith traces these associated practices in a sort of constellation all over this great Mediterranean-India Ocean-Pacific area. Where one occurs, most of the others occur. They link Brittany with Borneo and Peru. But this constellation of practices does not crop up in the primitive homes of Nordic or Mongolian peoples, nor does it extend southward much beyond equatorial Africa.

 

[Fig. 0114 Map of Europe, Asia, Africa, 15,000 Years ago]

 

For thousands of years, from 15,000 to 10,000 B.C., such a heolithic culture and its brownish possessors may have been oozing round the world through the warmer regions of the world, drifting by canoes often across wide stretches of sea. It was then the highest culture in the world; it sustained the largest, most highly developed communities. And its region of origin may have been, as Elliot Smith suggests, the Mediterranean and North African region. It migrated slowly age by age. It must have been spreading up the Pacific Coast and across the island stepping-stones to America, long after it had passed on into other developments in its areas of origin.

 

Many of the peoples of