CHAPTER V

THE PRIMITIVE ANCESTRY OF THE CHILD

Man is a migrating animal. We are all descended from immigrants. This migratory propensity is at work now. It was at work in prehistoric times. It moved even our prehuman ancestors. As a result, man very early settled the whole globe.

Once upon a time this globe was not habitable. It was either a semimolten mass or a barren mineral sphere. Now our cities are built on a sedimentary masonry thousands of fathoms deep. How long did it take nature to evolve this crust, some fifty miles thick, on which we live? Four vast epochs, the Paleozoic, the Mesozoic, the Tertiary, and the Quaternary, aggregating, according to one geological estimate, some one hundred million years.

Three fourths of this vast span belong to the Paleozoic period. In this period the most ancient stratified crystalline rocks quartzites, gneiss, and limestone - were developed. In this era also were developed the most primitive forms of animal life, so viscid that they could not persist in fossil form. With the lapse of millions of years there appeared in due succession, through the gradual processes of transformism which have operated since the dawn of time, worms, crustacea, brachiopods, fish, amphibia, and reptiles.

Representatives of all these genera appeared before the close of the long Paleozoic era. In the next era, the Mesozoic, which lasted some ten million years, the reptilessome of which attained an enormous size came to their

lordship of water, air, and land. This period also produced the archæopteryx, with toothed bill, vestigial wing-claws, and jointed tail feathers, — an early, uncanny bird, bearing all over the marks of his reptilian ancestry.

The lowest Mesozoic mammals, likewise, were closely allied to an ancestral reptilian form. The young of the monotreme to this day completes its development in a hatched egg. The marsupial mammals, who carry their offspring in a protecting pouch, or fold of the skin, originated in Mesozoic times, while the higher placental mammals did not appear until Tertiary. The Primates, who constitute an independent order of the placentals, include the half-apes and the Anthropoidea. According to the zoological classification the Anthropoidea are subdivided into five families, -the marmosets, the American monkeys, the tailed and tailless apes, and the Hominidæ, or man himself.

The Tertiary era began some four million years ago. Even in this remote age the world had taken on many of its modern aspects, and could we have visited a mid-Tertiary meadow we should have seen enough familiar plants, grasses, flowers, insects, birds, and beasts to feel not altogether strange. The forests numbered oak, pine, cypress, spruce, and maples. Bees hummed, butterflies played in the sunshine, and birds sang. Most of the world was perennially bathed in warm weather. California sequoias grew as far north as Greenland, magnolias in Canada, and palms flourished over northern Europe. Not only the hyena, cave bear, and bison, but tropical and subtropical animals like the lion, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, and elephant ranged throughout Britain and the continent with which it was still continuous. Sumatra and Java, like the British Isles, were then part of the mother continent. What is now the blue Mediterranean was a broad stretch of jungle and

prairie, alive with the colors, movements, and sounds of African fauna. In this region, where the great civilizations of the world were to plant their seaports, all was now a savage wild. France flared with abundant volcanoes, for in this period the earth's crust was extensively unquiet, warping into plateaus and buckling into lofty mountains. On one occasion an eruption in tropical Java buried a multitude of living beings.

Several hundreds of thousands of years later Professor Dubois made excavations in the neighborhood of this eruption and unearthed masses of old bones from Tertiary elephants and other large mammals. Among these relics were a skull cap and thigh bone which prompted the interest of the whole anthropological world; for these two bones made it certain that a creature with human characteristics walked erect in Pliocene antiquity.

The ambiguous name of this being, Pithecanthropus erectus, suggests his primitive character. He had the jaws and protruding brow ridges of a gorilla, but a cranial capacity little less than that of the lowest living savage, and twice that of the highest ape. If not the first man, he represents at least man's immediate precursor.

It should be said, parenthetically, that this does not mean that the ape is a degenerate man, or that man is a developed monkey, as uninformed people declare. Man is not descended from a monkey. Man and ape represent each a distinct species, equally descended from a common generalized prototype. This generalized, human-simian ancestor was the remote precursor of man, and lived in Miocene times, say a million years before Pithecanthropus erectus. It should also be said that in this chapter we are trying to tell a simple narrative, and not attempting a critical discussion of the moot questions concerning the history of man.

There are wide differences in interpretations and chronological estimates, and many matters are not settled. But that there have been genesis and growth, and a long, long period of development, every one nowadays agrees. For the teacher many of the details in geology and theories of descent are not important. But the genetic point of view, the feeling for the ancient biological antecedents, the psy-! chological heredity and unfolding, the historical, recapitulatory significance of childhood, this is important. These large themes are surely worthy of some reflection by those who are dealing with growing children.

There is good reason to believe that the Indo-Malay country, where Homo Javanensis lived, was the cradleland of humanity. According to A. H. Keane, who holds the monogenetic theory in regard to human origin, the race had here its first center, and from here it dispersed to ultimately people the globe. "These generalized pleistocene precursors," he says, "moved about like the other migrating faunas unconsciously, everywhere following the lines of least resistance, advancing or receding, and acting generally on blind impulse rather than of any set purpose."

Should we not have the courage of thought to picture to ourselves the character of these early migrations and immigrants? There were, even in these rude hordes, mothers, fathers, and children, holding each other now and then by the hand, giving signals of warning and distress, assisting each other on the march. But these early forebears were indeed rude in outward aspect. Their eyes were peering and set deep under enormous brow ridges; their lower jaws, large and strong. They wore no protecting garment other than their own semishaggy coat. Agile in their native homes, the trees, they walked the earth with clumsy gait, their broad shoulders stooping, their knees bent. The

immaturity and imperfection of the sprawling infant do not excite disgust. Why should we not look with equanimity at least upon these first scenes in the childhood of the race? This rude progenitor, though he traveled not by map or car, had within him the germs of the whole atlas of human culture. He already possessed the rudiments of speech, which is the instrument of all civilization. He could break a branch and fashion it to serve a simple purpose; this is the ability to make and use tools, and is the root of all mechanical achievement. The children clung to their mothers; the male fought and foraged to preserve mother and child. Even in the rough hordes the outlines of family life had emerged. There was parental sympathy, and this is the root of all morality.

Those who desire to speculate about the mental traits of this most primitive human type can get suggestions from the psychology of man's nearest anthropoid relative. Studies in the laboratory have shown that, even under the rather artificial conditions of captivity, the American monkey has a high degree of intelligence or associative memory; that he has a certain amount of practical judgment, which is a simple form of reasoning; that he does not learn exclusively by the mechanical process of trial and error; that he can imitate in a purposive, productive manner. Dr. Kinnaman's two monkeys, Jack and Jill, learned to thread a complicated maze of seven blind alleys and twenty-seven corners in one hundred thirteen and sixty-six trials respectively. They also solved certain mechanical puzzles with the same rapidity and success as a doctor of philosophy.

A most suggestive and intimate account of "A Monkey with a Mind" has recently been furnished by Dr. Lightner Witmer. Peter, strictly speaking, is not a monkey, but a chimpanzee. The chimpanzee in many respects comes