Homo sapiens

“ On every Earth-type planet that had ever been discovered, if there were intelligent life it had developed according to water-oxygen evolution; and the culture invariably parallelled homo sapiens. It was as if a busy and preoccupied nature had hit upon a pattern which worked and never bothered to change the mold. ”

“ The earliest indubitable man hitherto discovered was fully evolved when first met with, he was homo sapiens. By means of his human intelligence this frail, unspecialized being became in a sense the very lord of creation, for instead of remaining, like the animals, entirely subject to his surroundings he subjected his surroundings to himself. ”

“ What is known of the anatomy, development and fossil relations of man is summarized in the statement that he belongs to the genus and species Homo sapiens, placed with the apes and some other forms in the order primates because of agreement in certain peculiar details. ”

“ Hence man may have become truly man—the species, Homo sapiens—even in the Miocene period; and while all other mammals were becoming modified from age to age under the influence of ever-changing physical and biological conditions, he would be advancing mainly in intelligence, but perhaps also in stature, and by that advance alone would be able to maintain himself as the master of all other animals and as the most widespread occupier of the earth. ”

“ Java Man, Homo Erectus, Homo Sapiens, and Pithecantrhopus Neanderthalis, the best known example of prehistoric man and which appeared in Europe, Asia and Africa 150,000 years ago, and knew the use of fire, carved stones, and manufactured utensils, tools, and hunting weapons, and begun to draw and carve. However, Homo Sapiens, during the last 30,000 years has been the only true human species in the world. ”

“ The profound cleavage between the Negroes and the Australoids is now questioned in some quarters.
The differentiation of the human species into types so distinctly contrasted as Whites and Blacks and the problems of the evolution of higher types of man from original stocks bring us to a new classification of the genus Homo. Some anthropologists still maintain that all human beings are included in the species Homo sapiens ”

“ But an extremely primitive race has survived until the present time to demonstrate the original type of Homo sapiens. The aboriginal Australian, like all existing races of men, belongs to the same species as ourselves, but it represents with singularly little modification the original type and colouring of Homo sapiens. ”

“ It is by not any means certain that man—I mean the species Homo sapiens of zoological terminology—has "consummated" the land-population in the sense of appearing at a later period of time than any other. ”

“ If on the other hand, we surmise that homo sapiens originated in the colder parts of the world we still have to account for the fact that his further progress was made not in those parts but in warmer latitudes where a genial climate afforded no apparent provocation for continued effort in the way of invention and general development. ”

“ Homo sapiens evolved from more primitive mammals, not by conscious design but rather by evolution acting through differential reproduction in response to arbitrary environments. It would be silly for people to revere mammals as their gods - these animals did nothing to actively cause the emergence of the human race. ”

“ Yours are the strong genes, the viable strains—mine are the deadly ones. A child of mine would kill itself and you in a natural birth, if it managed to live to term. You're forgetting that you are the original Homo sapiens. ”

“ He says "the question of whether nature or nurture plays the greater part does not arise. As well might we ask whether the locomotive or the steam plays the greater part in transporting the train." My answer is, that by all the needs of a suffering humanity or the development of a rational understanding of the present, past or future of this same species, Homo sapiens, the question does arise ”

“ Some of them, like your husband, probably show no sign of instability until they get here. They look around at the evidence of a civilization that existed before homo sapiens had evolved on the Earth, and it throws them. ”

“ Probably it was in this direction that, at a very early period, in the first beginnings of human life, and in that variety from which Homo sapiens emerged by selection, the intellectual force of the human species was directed, and that the comprehension of the difference between the state of life and the state of death, with the perception of the fact that living creatures might be made through certain co-ordinate actions to pass from the first state to the second, was one of the first and grandest discoveries of the human race. ”

“ Thus, there can be no reasonable question that it is psychologically possible for Homo sapiens to have had an ancestry, which—whether already partly human or still simian—was able to carry denotation to a high level of connotation, without the need of cognition belonging to the order conceptual. ”

“ At length, when they have played long enough—for there is no other reason apparent to homo sapiens—they decide to plant their big, dirty pellet. The place which they have chosen is not half as promising as many they have passed, but that doesn't seem to matter. ”

“ Those who are acquainted with the closeness of the structural relations between the human organisation and that of the mammals which come nearest to him, on the one hand; and with the palæontological history of such animals as horses and dogs, on the other; will not be disposed to question the origin of man from forms which stand in the same sort of relation to Homo sapiens, as Hipparion does to Equus. ”

“ These first "true men" descended from some more ape-like progenitors and are classed by ethnologists with the same species as ourselves, and with all human races subsequent to them under one common, specific term, Homo Sapiens. ”

“ It is a question of the discovery in Tertiary strata near Trinil, Java, of bones which seem to have belonged to a being intermediate between man and the anthropoids. This could be a precursor and perhaps an immediate ancestor of the human species, the link, heretofore lacking, of the chain which, according to the theory of evolution, ought to unite without interruption Homo sapiens with the rest of the animal kingdom. ”

“ The first pictures painted by man, with which we are at present acquainted, are found upon the walls and roofs of certain caves in Southern France and Spain. They were the work of the earliest known representatives of our own species, Homo sapiens, in the phase of culture now distinguished by the name "Aurignacian". ”

“ The increase in intelligence due to these agents did not develop a new species, for, to whatever heights he rises, man still remains Homo sapiens. If, then, the specific identity of all individual men on the globe to-day is true, the superstitions which we have studied are errors of minds like our own, but imperfectly developed and modified by environment. ”

“ We live in the Quarternary period which started about 1.8 million years ago. It includes the period within which modern man evolved to his present form, Homo sapiens becoming dominant between 500,000 and one million years ago. ”

“ The very earliest men, as we know them from fossils, are too far removed from any of the living varieties, are too primitive, to link very definitely with the existing races, which can all be regarded as intergrading varieties of a single species, Homo sapiens. In the latter half of the Old Stone Age, in the Aurignacian period, at a time estimated to have been from twenty to twenty-five thousand years ago, we commence to encounter fossils which seem to foreshadow the modern races. ”

“ It puts under contribution all sciences which have man for their object, as anatomy, palæontology, psychology, archæology, history, and comparative religion. All the races of mankind that are now living, much as they differ in external appearance, such as colour of skin, character of hair, form of skull, face, and body, and stature, belong to one species, Homo Sapiens; but an earlier species of more brutal type, H. neanderthalensis, now completely extinct, is known from fossil remains found in Germany, Belgium, France, Gibraltar, and Croatia. ”

“ The generic name and the trivial name constitute the scientific name of a species and according to this system of classification the scientific name of all living men is Homo sapiens. It is obvious that there are many variations among individual men, but all men have certain general characteristics in common and are therefore placed in the same species. ”

“ Second, some twelve or fourteen million years ago, the main branch which was to lead to the development of man broke away from the branch leading to the ape. Third, about two million years ago, in the vicinity of East Africa, true man broke away from his now extinct manlike cousins. The present species of man-Homo Sapiens--developed through a complex process of natural selection from a large number of different manlike creatures-hominids. ”

“ The present drawing, which under the authority of Linnaeus shows an anthropomorphic series from which the normal type of man, the Homo sapiens, is conspicuously absent, brings zoological similarity into view without suggesting kinship to account for it. There are few ideas more ingrained in ancient and low civilization than that of relationship by descent between the lower animals and man. ”

“ Its object is to liberate right from the grasp of an old metaphysico-religious dogmatism, and from crystalized doctrines derived from superannuated custom and abuse, and to found itself on the applied and social natural history of man, who then only will merit the name of homo sapiens which was given to him by Linnaeus, the great nomenclator of living beings. ”

“ The environment, inasmuch as under this conception are included all other forms of life except man, can muster on its side a certain amount of intelligence of a low order. But man's prerogative is to dominate his world by the aid of intelligence of a high order. When he defied the ice-age by the use of fire, when he outfaced and outlived the mammoth and the cave bear, he was already the rational animal, homo sapiens. ”

“ The next ancestor of whom we have any knowledge is definitely a human being. This is the primitive man who inhabited Europe in earlier Diluvial times, particularly in the interval between the first and the second great ice ages. To him, from the place of his first discovery, the name of the Neandertal man has been applied, and he is classed by scientists as belonging to a different species from modern man, the latter being named Homo sapiens, while he is given the less flattering name of Homo primigenius. He was characterised, as may readily be seen from the skull illustrated in Fig. ”

“ Πάντα ῥεῖ.
But that hope is no longer so loudly and confidently expressed as it was some years ago. For a time all seemed clear and simple. We began with Protoplasm, which anybody might see at the bottom of the sea, developing into Moneres, and we ended with the bimanous mammal called Homo, whether sapiens or insipiens, everything between the two being matter of imperceptible development. ”

“ It matters little whether particular items are corroborated or disproved--e.g. whether the Heidelberg man came before or after the Neanderthalers--the general trend of evolution remains clear. (5) In any case, the result was the evolution of _Homo sapiens, the man we are_--a quite different fellow from the Neanderthaler. (6) Then arose various stocks of primitive men, proving everything and holding fast to that which is good. There were the Palaeolithic peoples, with rude stone implements, a strong vigorous race, but probably, in most cases, supplanted by fresh experiments. ”

“ Nevertheless, the ancestors of man must have gone on acquiring all the distinctive human features during this period, and especially gaining increased volume of brain. If we could find entire skeletons of our Miocene and Pliocene progenitors, analogy leads us to suppose that naturalists would arrange them as at least two, if not more, separate species of the genus Homo. Whether we should call them men or not is a mere matter of nomenclature; but that such links in the chain of evolution must then have existed seems to me indisputable. ”

“ Modifications upon modifications accumulate, new organs are acquired; the survival of the fittest perpetuates them; the animals ascend in the scale of being, until the human type is again evolved out of the degraded descendants of the population which two millions of years previously dwelt as men upon the island, and carried on in some primitive fashion the simpler arts of human life. Is not this just as supposable as the evolution of the human race out of some lower form of organism? ”

“ If this be true, it follows that the differentiation of the mental and physical qualities of the principal human races, the differentiation of the white and black and yellow and brown races, as well as of the chief subraces, such as the Semitic, the races of Europe—the Homo Europaeus, Alpinus and Mediterraneus—was the work of the immensely prolonged prehistoric period. ”

“ And even these physical differences between races of men, it is held by those who account for them by natural selection and hereditary transmission, were brought out when man was much nearer the animal—that is to say, when he had less mind. ”

“ After thus clearing away the racial prejudice, the most formidable obstacle to a clear understanding of our problem, we turned to an investigation of the question whether human types are stable, more particularly whether environment may change the anatomical structure of man, and thus of his mental make-up, and to the correlated question, what man owes to heredity. In treating the general question of the stability of human types, we described some rudimentary organs and some peculiar anatomical traits which prove a phylogenetic development of man, traces of which were found in all races. ”