Human ancestor

“ The two principles, already insisted upon in the Ethnology, of the specific unity of all existing varieties of the human family and the dispersion of their generalized precursors over the whole world in Pleistocene times are borne in view throughout. Subsequent to this dispersion, the four primary divisions of man have each had its Pleistocene ancestor, from whom each has sprung independently and divergently by continuous adaptation to their several environments. ”

“ The human beings that people the earth to-day are offspring of human ancestors reaching back to the appearance of the human animal in the long process of the evolution of life on earth. So far as we can see, posterity will be for countless generations physically similar to ourselves, as they certainly will, unless all records or evidences of the fact are obscured, trace their ancestry continuously back to us. ”

“ It looks to the grandest genealogy in the universe, the ancestry of a whole race; not a few favored individuals, but all humanity. My brethren, fellow sharers of immortality, open this family record. Trace your ancestry back to the most august parentage in the universe: One is our Father, God; One our elder brother, Jesus. We all draw lineage from the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Herein consists the value and dignity of human life. I go back to the origin of the globe. I find that for five days the creative hand of the Almighty is busy in fitting up an abode of palatial splendor. ”

“ I have thought sometimes that the explanation might be found in heredity,—in a deep-seated habit of the human mind descending from parent to child through countless ages and generations. Far back of history, in the dim twilight of primitive life, we may imagine our ancestors living in such wildness as can scarcely be found on earth to-day even among the lowest savages ”

“ Turning to the influence of heredity, we recognized that by it are determined all the most fundamental features of each race and type of man, and that often the individual reverts to the traits of the one or the other of his parents, or of his remote ancestors, in such manner that one trait may belong to one ancestor, another to another. ”

“ Articles on the Sun-Ray origin of the Pyramids and Cuneiform Character
[Image] Edinburgh Castle, From the Vennel
AUTOBIOGRAPHY. CHAPTER 1. My Ancestry Our history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us. The sentiment of ancestry seems to be inherent in human nature, especially in the more civilised races. At all events, we cannot help having a due regard for the history of our forefathers. Our curiosity is stimulated by their immediate or indirect influence upon ourselves. ”

“ Kind Determined by Origin.—It is inheritance in the sense of community of origin that determines whether a given living creature shall be man, beast, bird, fish, or what not. A given individual is human because his ancestors were human. In addition to this stock supply of human qualities he has certain well-marked features which we recognize as characteristics of race. That is, if he is of Anglo-Saxon or Italian or Mongolian parentage, naturally his various qualities will be Anglo-Saxon, Italian, or Mongolian. ”

“ For the early beginnings of man we can only grope among the relics of his progress which he has left for the speculation of his more intelligent descendants, in the shape of the rude implements and dwellings which he used in the childhood of the race.
From time to time actual remains of early man are found buried among the uppermost strata, and from them we can make some guesses at his age. Virtually three links have been found in the chain of human ancestry. ”

“ Errors in Ethnology.—The Bible assumption of the origin of man within a period of six thousand years, and the descent of the whole race from a single pair, is directly at variance with the teachings of ethnological science, which discloses the true history of man, and proves, according to Agassiz and other modern naturalists, that the human race has descended from at least five pairs of original progenitors. ”

“ This history professes to inform us how man was placed upon the earth; and how, from one centre, the human family spread itself in various branches into all parts of the world. This genealogy of the human race is accompanied by a chronology, from which it results that the antiquity of the human race does not exceed a few thousand years. ”

“ Our ancestors learned because they must; and they passed on what they had learned to their successors—but in a form dictated by their wish to keep human behaviour as near as possible to the simple and easy character of animal life. ”

“ If we go back ten generations, we have over a thousand ancestors in our line of descent. Each of these people was, in some measure, different from the others. Our inheritance comes from all of them and from each of them. ”

“ With these authoritative utterances from the most celebrated representatives of the development school, we shall rest the fanciful hypothesis of the autochthonic origin of the ancient American population. Some who may not concur in our opinion as to the question of man’s development from lower animal forms, may be willing to admit that the Americans had an old world origin, which certainly, in the light of facts, is the 196only rational view. [289] The unity of the human family is a theory, if not a fact, which is supported by a mass of testimony of the most diversified character. ”

“ And accordingly profound truths—scientific, cosmographic, astronomical, geographical, philosophic or religious—were discovered. There was no knowledge which the early ancestors of the human race were not supposed to have possessed, and their descendants to have forgotten. ”

“ Then there are factious names, of a religious or sacred character, each of which directly relates to the accepted affinity existing between a living person and an ancestral spirit of semi-human origin. ”

“ It will be noted that when we hear the specialists in anatomy and biology, their expressions on the subject of man's ancestry are, as a rule, characterized by a strong dissent from the development theory, while the belief in a development of man from an ape-like ancestor, uttered with a note of cocksureness, is found mainly among amateurs in these sciences. ”

“ These facts of themselves afford an irresistible presumption that the origin of the human race must be sought much further back, and it remains to consider what positive evidence has been adduced in support of this presumption. ”

“ Each of their represents a long line of ancestry, and often a particular parent may be chosen, not for anything that he is or has in himself, but because of some quality which appeared to an unusual degree in one of his ancestors — because he possesses a power which he has not used, though it is latent in his physical body because it is physically descended from that ancestor. ”

“ For just as in the case of plants it is natural that their qualities should be transmitted for a long time, or rather that, in general, the succeeding generation should resemble its ancestors; so too in the case of human beings it is natural that the morals of descendants should resemble those of their ancestors. ”

“ Every generation of human beings carries the blood of thousands of ancestors, stretching back through thousands of years, superimposed upon a prehuman inheritance of still greater antiquity and the face and body of every living man offer an intricate mass of hieroglyphs that science will some day learn to read and interpret.
Only the foregoing main characters will be used as the basis for determining race and attention will be called later to such temperamental and spiritual traits as seem to be associated with distinct physical types. ”

“ If the problems of British ethnology can be solved, history, physical anthropology, archaeology, and philology must combine.
II">THE METHODS OF ANTHROPOLOGY
A lay reader who takes up a treatise on ethnology ought to understand the methods by which anthropologists differentiate the various human types. ”

“ Moreover (it is inferred) the influence of that event did not extend to the whole Human Race, but merely to that small portion of it who were the ancestors of the Semetic or Syro-Phœnician nations.
In these pages are embodied proofs, from Language, of the two following propositions:—1. That the various nations of our Globe are descended from one Parent Tribe. 2. That the introduction of the Human Species into the system to which it belongs, cannot be referred to an epoch more ancient than the era indicated as the date of that event by our received systems of chronology. ”

“ The question has often been asked, if man has descended from an ape ancestor why is it that no traces of this ancestral form have been found in a fossil state? If man has gone through such an extended course of development, why has he left no remains? ”

“ Ancestry alone furnishes the material for the factor, and no amount of induced change can get itself registered in the organism so as to come into this charmed circle of ancestral characters which alone seem to be passed on to posterity. ”

“ As men, in the dim, prehistoric past, ascribed to their first progenitors a celestial, a terrestrial, a subterranean, a subaqueous origin, a coming into being from animals, birds, insects, trees, plants, rocks, stones, etc.,—for all were then akin,—so, after long centuries have rolled by, father, mother, nurse, older brother or sister, speaking of the little one in whom they see their stock renewed, or their kinship widened, resurrect and regild the old fables and rejuvenate and reanimate the lore that lay sunk beneath the threshold of racial consciousness. ”

“ The men visit him and subject him to all sorts of indignities, in order to impress him with the necessity of absolute obedience to the society.... They believe that the skull of the father or other ancestor, when it has been properly prepared, becomes the residence of the ancestor. ”

“ These ancient peoples, at any rate those who were our direct ancestors, or who were closely related to them, are thus, in the language of evolution, which takes no count of time or of the number of generations, our very near relations. The generations which separate them from us and the few hundred generations between them and those of their direct ancestors, who were at the same time ours, represent a limited period from the point of view of the ethnological history of mankind. ”

“ And did the division of mankind into distinct and widely different races, which is such a prominent feature at the present day and ever since the commencement of history, exist in the case of the palæolithic man, whose remains are so widespread? ”

“ But all human races and tribal types, known to us either from historical monuments, or who still live to-day in their primitive homes, in spite of climatic and cultural influences, have reproduced their original types in such a way that the anthropologist can tell, at a glance, the different types of humanity, according to their physiological and psychical characteristics. ”

“ The recent study of anthropologists and archaeologists has brought to light much knowledge of primitive man which may be judged on its own evidence and own merits. The verification of these early cultures by the living races who have reached a similar degree of progress is of great importance. ”

“ But they are to be read by the light of the earlier one—placed as a lantern to the wary upon the threshold of his work in 1753—to the effect that a single, well-substantiated case of degeneration would make it conceivable that all living beings were descended from but one common ancestor. ”

“ Their parents' parents had been similarly attracted and impelled, and so on back and back through the whole long line of ancestry, through half a million years to primitive men, back beyond them again through the long animal ancestry for scores of millions of years to the beginning of life. ”

“ This same process continued through the successive generations of the human family. The distinctively human qualities acquired at the outset, together with the accumulation of inherited animal qualities, were handed down to the races that succeeded. They, in turn, bestowed all that had been bequeathed to them, together with their newly acquired race characteristics, to their descendants. Finally, the national characteristics, which in our time we may suppose to include all the traits that characterize civilized man, were differentiated. ”

“ And with these stones have been found many other indications of the progressing powers of man, in the shaping of bone, the invention and use of a considerable variety of implements and ornaments, and the earliest efforts of art, as stated in a preceding section. There is no occasion to go into the detail of these steps of progress. When they are reached, this section of our work ends. We are concerned here simply with man's ancestor and man in his earliest stage of existence, not with man in his later course of development. ”

“ As there were no historical records of such beginning, the scientific imagination of early peoples constructed the first parents in various ways, often by personifying the tribe and transferring its name to the mythical ancestor. ”

“ When you can trace back the ancestry of any man we bring you with what you call negro characteristics, tell us who his father and grandfather were, and so on, until you reach one of your negro immigrants—when you can do this with all our inhabitants, and show us that every man with these characteristics is the descendant of one of these immigrants, and that every man with European characteristics has some of the blood of one of your European immigrants in his body, you may claim that you have given us scientific proof of your hypothesis. ”