Early humans

“ Indirect evidence that early human nature differed from later human nature, by having this extreme emotional variability, is yielded us by the contrast between the child and the adult among ourselves. ”

“ Judging from the behaviour of little children, and from the myths of savages, early man may have half-consciously extended his own sense of personal and potent and animated existence to the whole of nature as known to him. ”

“ That it is not in the nature of the I to leave its sheaths in the condition in which it finds them when entering them at the beginning of life, can be seen from the activities it performs in them during the first period after birth. Indeed, in man's early childhood we meet a number of events in which we can perceive something like ur-deeds of the I. They are the acquisition of the faculties of walking, speaking and thinking. ”

“ The attempt of science to record and interpret the story of early man in the Old World has been an extraordinary triumph over the obstacles of half a million years of prehistoric darkness. Hundreds of men and women, laboring long and ingeniously, have won to an almost miraculous success, and the end is not yet in sight. ”

“ Already, as we have seen, in Early Quaternary Times this development had reached the flower called human.
At this time we find our prehistoric human ancestors in Europe. They walk as we walk; they have our hands and brains. Their speech is rudimentary, but the brain-centers related to the higher senses are well developed, and they control perfectly all motions of the bodily members. The anterior centers of the brain are keenly awake, and they have long been busy in the hoarding of experience and the developing of ideas. ”

“ The first and second volumes which I am now publishing contain essays on the early thoughts of mankind, whether religious or mythological, and on early traditions and customs. There is to my mind no subject more absorbing than the tracing the origin and first growth of human thought;—not theoretically, or in accordance with the Hegelian laws of thought, or the Comtian epochs ”

“ The story of the mental development of man is constructed from travelers' accounts of primitive peoples, from the records of early civilizations, from the sequences of thought and belief that are considered in the history of culture, from the study of the intellectual growth of childhood, from the observation of the less progressive elements of current civilizations. ”

“ Altogether, early man was a miserable creature who lived in a world of fright and hunger, who was surrounded by a thousand enemies and who was for ever haunted by the vision of friends and relatives who had been eaten up by wolves and bears and the terrible sabre-toothed tiger. ”

“ No single work known to the writer deals comprehensively with the scientific attainments of early man; indeed, the subject is usually ignored, except where practical phases of the mechanical arts are in question. But of course any attempt to consider the condition of primitive man talies into account, by inference at least, his knowledge and attainments. Therefore, most works on anthropology, ethnology, and primitive culture may be expected to throw some light on our present subject. ”

“ What we lack is a knowledge of the type and form of the instincts of man in his first stages, and the degree and kind of intelligence he had. But the reconstructed pre-human history of man so far as we can make it seems to show, as we have already suggested, that early man could have had no definite herd instincts or pack instincts such as some of the animals have, that his habits were plastic and guided by intelligence rather than by impulse. ”

“ He would have had us think that early man never had lusts or fears, cravings for power, nightmares or fantasies, but that he meditated perpetually on the beneficent source of light and life in the sky. ”

“ for as in man the ripeness of strength of the body and mind cometh much about an age, save that the strength of the body cometh somewhat the more early, so in states, arms and learning, whereof the one correspondeth to the body, the other to the soul of man, have a concurrence or near sequence in times. ”

“ As societies do not advance concurrently, but at different rates of progress, there have been epochs at which men trained to habits of methodical observation have really been in a position to watch and describe the infancy of mankind. ”

“ But science should accept it as a chapter in the history of anthropology, a chapter which has only proved not to be true, because of the limited range of early man in the facts about man, but a chapter, nevertheless, which has the inherent value of a faithful record of man's search after truth. ”

“ The simple mind of Early Man and the Animals was of that character—a consciousness, so to speak, continuous through nature, and though running to points of illumination and foci of special activity in individuals, yet at no point essentially broken or imprisoned in separate compartments. (And it is this CONTINUITY of the primitive mind which enables us, as I have already explained, to understand the mysterious workings of instinct and intuition.) To some such unity-consciousness we have to return ”

“ We have now arrived at the point in the inquiry into the condition of early man which is marked by the dawn of agriculture, by the arrival of domestic animals, and the invention of many useful arts; at that fountain-head whence the civilisation of Europe, such as we know it now, was derived. From this time forward to the borders of history we have to record the advance of man in culture and his passage from the condition of the farmer and herdsman to that of the merchant and manufacturer. ”

“ It may bear comparison with one of the great changes in the mental life of the individual man, perhaps rather with the expansion and fixing of the mind which accompanies the passage from infancy into youth, than with the later steps from youth into manhood, or from manhood into old age. ”

“ Early man, regarding all objects as possibly endowed with power, selects out of the whole mass by observation and experience certain objects which affect his life, his relations with which he finds it desirable to define. ”

“ The powers gained enabled early man easily to hold the position he had won, and there was no further [124] special strain upon his faculties until a new contest began, that between man and nature, supplemented by a still more vital struggle, that between man and man. ”

“ All history, and more especially the history of early man, must deal primarily with externals. Thence it infers the inner life; and thereby it controls the tendency known as 'the psychologist's fallacy', namely, that of reading one's own mind into that of another man without making due allowance for differences of innate capacity and of acquired outlook. In what follows, then, let us, as anthropologists, be content to judge human progress in prehistoric times primarily by its external and objective manifestations ”

“ for the mythical, it is true, represents an early and primitive stage in the life of humanity, but a late and mature one in the life of the individual. ”

“ This would still leave us with an American whose antiquity is quite respectable.
The best proof of the age of early man was for a long time geological. Archaeologists dated man by the earth and rocks in which they found his tools or his bones. Unfortunately, they had not too much geological evidence in the Americas. In the past ten years, however, radiocarbon (of which you will learn more later) has made it possible to know much about when man reached the New World and where he lived.
11 2
THE ROAD OF EARLY MAN
I have been a stranger in a strange land. ”

“ It has already been stated that various parts in the same individual, which are exactly alike during an early embryonic period, become widely different and serve for widely different purposes in the adult state. ”

“ The deepest ground of this tendency must probably be looked for in the primitive ideas of the race, and the transmission by inheritance of the effect of its firmly fixed habits of mind. The undisciplined mind of early man, incapable of distinguishing the object of perception from the product of spontaneous imagination, and taking his own double existence as the type of all existence, actually saw the stream, the ocean, and the mountain as living beings ”

“ The record of early man in North America may be dealt with on five levels, each overlapping another. The most recent is sometimes called the Archaic Period—the stage before native civilizations took shape—and it lies outside the range of early man as we define him. ”

“ As the wind sweeps by, and the hut doors close,
And the bats dip down in the shaft or quiver
In the ghostly light, round the grey horse goes;
And he feels the strain on his untouched shoulder,
Hears again the voice that was dear to him,
Sees the form he knew — and his heart grows bolder
As he works his shift by the broken whim.
He hears in the sluices the water rushing
As the buckets drain and the doors fall back;
When the early dawn in the east is blushing,
He is limping still round the old, old track. ”

“ Yes, yes, children must early be made to practise piety, godliness, and propriety; a person of good breeding is one into whom "good maxims" have been instilled and impressed, poured in through a funnel, thrashed in and preached in. ”

“ It is na beauty's fairest bloom,
⁠It is na maiden charms consign'd,
And hurried to an early tomb,
⁠That wrings my heart and clouds my mind;
But sparkling wit, and sense refin'd,
⁠And spotless truth without disguise,
Make me with sighs enrich the wind
⁠That fans the grave whare Mary lies. ”

“ What boots a life which in such haste forsakes thee?
Thou'rt wondrous frolic, being to die so soon,
And passing proud a little colour makes thee.
If thee thy brittle beauty so deceives,
Know then the thing that swells thee is thy bane;
For the same beauty doth, in bloody leaves,
The sentence of thy early death contain.
Some clown's coarse lungs will poison thy sweet flower,
If by the careless plough thou shalt be torn;
And many Herods lie in wait each hour
To murder thee as soon as thou art born—
Nay, force thy bud to blow—their tyrant breath
Anticipating life, to hasten death! ”

“ The continuity between geology, prehistoric archæology, and history is so direct that it is impossible to picture early man in this country without using the results of all these three sciences. The history of the earth is necessary to the history of man, if a broad view be taken instead of a narrow specialism flowing from the tendency of the age towards minuteness of detail. ”

“ All the emanations of the human body, all the spontaneous manifestations of its activities, were mysterious and ominous to early man, pregnant with terror unless met with immense precautions and surrounded by careful ritual. The manifestations of sex were the least intelligible and the most spontaneous. Therefore the things of sex were those that most lent themselves to feelings of horror and awe, of impurity and of purity. They seemed so highly charged with magic potency that there were no things that men more sought to avoid, yet none to which they were impelled to give more thought. ”

“ When the young is fully developed it simply kicks the coffin to pieces in which its mother interred it, and, burrowing its way up to the sunshine, enters on the pleasures and pains of an independent existence from earliest infancy--that is, if a species born into the world in full possession of all the wisdom of the ancients, can be said ever to know infancy. ”

“ Whatever the brain of primitive man was it held at birth unlimited and innumerable instincts like those of its progenitors; and round and smooth in babyhood, as it was, it surely gathered its sensations, one after another in separate and habitual channels, until when manhood arrived it had its convolutions, its folds and wrinkles. ”

“ We can safely say that the later development of man took place in other situations and under other conditions. We may fairly say the same in regard to the ape. Vigorous influences must have been brought to bear upon the ancestor of man as the instigating causes of its mental development into man; and similarly vigorous influences must have been brought to bear upon primitive man to set in [117] train his mental development into intellectual man. ”

“ All the arts and industries have grown out of men's effort to get enough to eat and protection against cold and heat—just as language, with all its uses, out of men's effort to communicate with their fellows. As a solitary man now would never form even the beginnings of speech, as one separated from society unlearns his speech by disuse and becomes virtually dumb, so early man, with all his powers, would never have acquired speech, save as to those powers was added sociality with the needs it brought. ”

“ With regard to children it is to be expected, on the general theory of evolution by inheritance, that if we were attentively to study the order in which their mental faculties develop, we should find that the historical sequence is, as it were, a condensed epitome of the order in which these faculties were developed during the evolution of the human species. And this expectation is fairly well realized. Very young children present only those lower faculties of mind which in animals we call instincts. ”

“ After this general survey, the subject of innate tendencies may be considered through the discussion of such chapters as Drummond's "The ascent of the body," "The scaffolding left in the body," "The arrest of the body," "The dawn of mind," "The evolution of language," etc. These discussions naturally lead to a consideration of the lengthening period of human infancy, and the importance of infancy in education. This in turn leads to a brief consideration of the periods of childhood, adolescence, and maturity, largely from a biological point of view. ”