Robert Marett - Anthropology

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* * * * *

Now let us proceed farther north into what was for the earlier
Mediterranean folk the breeding-ground of barbarous outlanders,
forming the chief menace to their circuit of settled civic life. It
is necessary to regard northern Europe and northern Asia as forming
one geographic province. Asia Minor, together with the Euphrates
valley and with Arabia in a lesser degree, belongs to the Mediterranean
area. India and China, with the south-eastern corner of Asia that lies
between them, form another system that will be considered separately
later on.

The Eurasian northland consists naturally, that is to say, where
cultivation has not introduced changes, of four belts. First, to the
southward, come the mountain ranges passing eastwards into high
plateau. Then, north of this line, from the Lower Danube, as far as
China, stretches a belt of grassland or steppe-country at a lower level,
a belt which during the milder periods of the ice-age and immediately
after it must have reached as far as the Atlantic. Then we find, still
farther to the north, a forest belt, well developed in the Siberia
of to-day. Lastly, on the verge of the Arctic sea stretches the tundra,
the frozen soil of which is fertile in little else than the lichen
known as reindeer moss, whilst to the west, as, for instance, in our
islands, moors and bogs represent this zone of barren lands in a milder
form.

The mountain belt is throughout its entire length the home of
round-headed peoples, the so-called Alpine race, which is generally
supposed to have originally come from the high plateau country of Asia.
These round-headed men in western Europe appear where-ever there are
hills, throwing out offshoots by way of the highlands of central France
into Brittany, and even reaching the British Isles. Here they
introduced the use of bronze (an invention possibly acquired by contact
with Egyptians in the near East), though without leaving any marked
traces of themselves amongst the permanent population. At the other
end of Europe they affected Greece by way of a steady though limited
infiltration; whilst in Asia Minor they issued forth from their hills
as the formidable Hittites, the people, by the way, to whom the Jews
are said to owe their characteristic, yet non-Semitic, noses. But are
these round-heads all of one race? Professor Ridgeway has put forward
a rather paradoxical theory to the effect that, just as the long-faced
Boer horse soon evolved in the mountains of Basutoland into a
round-headed pony, so it is in a few generations with human
mountaineers, irrespective of their breed. This is almost certainly
to overrate the effects of environment. At the same time, in the present
state of our knowledge, it would be premature either to affirm or deny
that in the very long run round-headedness goes with a mountain life.

The grassland next claims our attention. Here is the paradise of the
horse, and consequently of the horse-breaker. Hence, therefore, came
the charging multitudes of Asiatic marauders who, after many repulses,
broke through the Mediterranean cordon, and established themselves
as the modern Turks; whilst at the other end of their beat they poured
into China, which no great wall could avail to save, and established
the Manchu domination. Given the steppe-country and a horse-taming
people, we might seek, with the anthropo-geographers of the bolder
sort, to deduce the whole way of life, the nomadism, the ample food,
including the milk-diet infants need and find so hard to obtain farther
south, the communal system, the patriarchal type of authority, the
caravan-system that can set the whole horde moving along like a swarm
of locusts, and so on. But, as has been already pointed out, the horse
had to be tamed first. Palaeolithic man in western Europe had
horse-meat in abundance. At Solutre, a little north of Lyons, a heap
of food-refuse 100 yards long and 10 feet high largely consists of
the bones of horses, most of them young and tender. This shows that
the old hunters knew how to enjoy the passing hour in their improvident
way, like the equally reckless Bushmen, who have left similar Golgothas
behind them in South Africa. Yet apparently palaeolithic man did not
tame the horse. Environment, in fact, can only give the hint; and man
may not be ready to take it.

The forest-land of the north affords fair hunting in its way, but it
is doubtful if it is fitted to rear a copious brood of men, at any
rate so long as stone weapons are alone available wherewith to master
the vegetation and effect clearings, whilst burning the brushwood down
is precluded by the damp. Where the original home may have been of
the so-called Nordic race, the large-limbed fair men of the Teutonic
world, remains something of a mystery; though it is now the fashion
to place it in the north-east of Europe rather than in Asia, and to
suppose it to have been more or less isolated from the rest of the
world by formerly existing sheets of water. Where-ever it was, there
must have been grassland enough to permit of pastoral habits, modified,
perhaps, by some hunting on the one hand, and by some primitive
agriculture on the other. The Mediterranean men, coming from North
Africa, an excellent country for the horse, may have vied with the
Asiatics of the steppes in introducing a varied culture to the north.
At any rate, when the Germans of Tacitus emerge into the light of
history, they are not mere foresters, but rather woodlanders, men of
the glades, with many sides to their life; including an acquaintance
with the sea and its ways, surpassing by far that of those early
beachcombers whose miserable kitchen-middens are to be found along
the coast of Denmark.

Of the tundra it is enough to say that all depends on the reindeer.
This animal is the be-all and end-all of Lapp existence. When Nansen,
after crossing Greenland, sailed home with his two Lapps, he called
their attention to the crowds of people assembled to welcome them at
the harbour. "Ah," said the elder and more thoughtful of the pair,
"if they were only reindeer!" When domesticated, the reindeer yields
milk as well as food, though large numbers are needed to keep the
community in comfort. Otherwise hunting and fishing must serve to eke
out the larder. Miserable indeed are the tribes or rather remnants
of tribes along the Siberian tundra who have no reindeer. On the other
hand, if there are plenty of wild reindeer, as amongst the Koryaks
and some of the Chukchis, hunting by itself suffices.

* * * * *

Let us now pass on from the Eurasian northland to what is, zoologically,
almost its annexe, North America; its tundra, for example, where the
Eskimo live, being strictly continuous with the Asiatic zone. Though
having a very different fauna and flora, South America presumably forms
part of the same geographical province so far as man is concerned,
though there is evidence for thinking that he reached it very early.
Until, however, more data are available for the pre-history of the
American Indian, the great moulding forces, geographical or other,
must be merely guessed at. Much turns on the period assigned to the
first appearance of man in this region; for that he is indigenous is
highly improbable, if only because no anthropoid apes are found here.
The racial type, which, with the exception of the Eskimo, and possibly
of the salmon-fishing tribes along the north-west coast, is one for
the whole continent, has a rather distant resemblance to that of the
Asiatic Mongols. Nor is there any difficulty in finding the immigrants
a means of transit from northern Asia. Even if it be held that the
land-bridge by way of what are now the Aleutian Islands was closed
at too early a date for man to profit by it, there is always the passage
over the ice by way of Behring Straits; which, if it bore the mammoth,
as is proved by its remains in Alaska, could certainly bear man.

Once man was across, what was the manner of his distribution? On this
point geography can at present tell us little. M. Demolins, it is true,
describes three routes, one along the Rockies, the next down the
central zone of prairies, and the third and most easterly by way of
the great lakes. But this is pure hypothesis. No facts are adduced.
Indeed, evidence bearing on distribution is very hard to obtain in
this area, since the physical type is so uniform throughout. The best
available criterion is the somewhat poor one of the distribution of
the very various languages. Some curious lines of migration are
indicated by the occurrence of the same type of language in widely
separated regions, the most striking example being the appearance of
one linguistic stock, the so-called Athapascan, away up in the
north-west by the Alaska boundary; at one or two points in
south-western Oregon and north-western California, where an absolute
medley of languages prevails; and again in the southern highlands along
the line of Colorado and Utah to the other side of the Mexican frontier.
Does it follow from this distribution that the Apaches, at the southern
end of the range, have come down from Alaska, by way of the Rockies
and the Pacific slope, to their present habitat? It might be so in
this particular case; but there are also those who think that the signs
in general point to a northward dispersal of tribes, who before had
been driven south by a period of glaciation. Thus the first thing to
be settled is the antiquity of the American type of man.

A glance at South America must suffice. Geographically it consists
of three regions. Westwards we have the Pacific line of bracing
highlands, running down from Mexico as far as Chile, the home of two
or more cultures of a rather high order. Then to the east there is
the steaming equatorial forest, first covering a fan of rivers, then
rising up into healthier hill-country, the whole in its wild state
hampering to human enterprise. And below it occurs the grassland of
the pampas, only needing the horse to bring out the powers of its native
occupants.

Before leaving this subject of the domesticated horse, of which so
much use has already been made in order to illustrate how geographic
opportunity and human contrivance must help each other out, it is worth
noticing how an invention can quickly revolutionize even that cultural
life of the ruder races which is usually supposed to be quite hide-bound
by immemorial custom. When the Europeans first broke in upon the
redskins of North America, they found them a people of hunters and
fishers, it is true, but with agriculture as a second string everywhere
east of the Mississippi as well as to the south, and on the whole
sedentary, with villages scattered far apart; so that in pre-Conquest
days they would seem to have been enjoying a large measure of security
and peace. The coming of the whites soon crowded them back upon
themselves, disarranging the old boundaries. At the same time the horse
and the gun were introduced. With extraordinary rapidity the Indian
adapted himself to a new mode of existence, a grassland life,
complicated by the fact that the relentless pressure of the invaders
gave it a predatory turn which it might otherwise have lacked.
Something very similar, though neither conditions nor consequences
were quite the same, occurred in the pampas of South America, where
horse-Indians like the Patagonians, who seem at first sight the
indigenous outcrop of the very soil, are really the recent by-product
of an intrusive culture.

* * * * *

And now let us hark back to southern Asia with its two reservoirs of
life, India and China, and between them a jutting promontory pointing
the way to the Indonesian archipelago, and thence onward farther still
to the wide-flung Austral region with its myriad lands ranging in size
from a continent to a coral-atoll. Here we have a nursery of seamen
on a vaster scale than in the Mediterranean; for remember that from
this point man spread, by way of the sea, from Easter Island in the
Eastern Pacific right away to Madagascar, where we find Javanese
immigrants, and negroes who are probably Papuan, whilst the language
is of a Malayo-Polynesian type.

India and China each well-nigh deserve the status of geographical
provinces on their own account. Each is an area of settlement; and,
once there is settlement, there is a cultural influence which
co-operates with the environment to weed out immigrant forms; as we
see, for example, in Egypt, where a characteristic physical type, or
rather pair of types, a coarser and a finer, has apparently persisted,
despite the constant influx of other races, from the dawn of its long
history. India, however, and China have both suffered so much invasion
from the Eurasian northland, and at the same time are of such great
extent and comprise such diverse physical conditions, that they have,
in the course of the long years, sent forth very various broods of
men to seek their fortunes in the south-east.

Nor must we ignore the possibility of an earlier movement in the
opposite direction. In Indonesia, the home of the orang-utan and gibbon,
not to speak of Pithecanthropus, many authorities would place the
original home of the human race. It will be wise to touch lightly on
matters involving considerations of palaeo-geography, that most
kaleidoscopic of studies. The submerged continents which it calls from
the vasty deep have a habit of crumbling away again. Let us therefore
refrain from providing man with land-bridges (draw-bridges, they might
almost be called), whether between the Indonesian islands; or between
New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania; or between Indonesia and Africa
by way of the Indian Ocean. Let the curious facts about the present
distribution of the racial types speak for themselves, the
difficulties about identifying a racial type being in the meantime
ever borne in mind.

Most striking of all is the diffusion of the Negro stocks with black
skin and woolly hair. Their range is certainly suggestive of a
breeding-ground somewhere about Indonesia. To the extreme west are
the negroes of Africa, to the extreme east the Papuasians (Papuans
and Melanesians) extending from New Guinea through the oceanic islands
as far as Fiji. A series of connecting links is afforded by the small
negroes of the pygmy type, the so-called Negritos. It is not known
how far they represent a distinct and perhaps earlier experiment in
negro-making, though this is the prevailing view; or whether the negro
type, with its tendency to infantile characters due to the early
closing of the cranial sutures, is apt to throw off dwarfed forms in
an occasional way. At any rate, in Africa there are several groups
of pygmies in the Congo region, as well as the Bushmen and allied stocks
in South Africa. Then the Andaman Islanders, the Semang of the Malay
Peninsula, the Aket of eastern Sumatra, the now extinct Kalangs of
Java, said to have been in some respects the most ape-like of human
beings, the Aetas of the Philippines, and the dwarfs, with a
surprisingly high culture, recently reported from Dutch New Guinea,
are like so many scattered pieces of human wreckage. Finally, if we
turn our gaze southward, we find that Negritos until the other day
inhabited Tasmania; whilst in Australia a strain of Negrito, or Negro
(Papuan), blood is likewise to be detected.

Are we here on the track of the original dispersal of man? It is
impossible to say. It is not even certain, though highly probable,
that man originated in one spot. If he did, he must have been
hereditarily endowed, almost from the outset, with an adaptability
to different climates quite unique in its way. The tiger is able to
range from the hot Indian jungle to the freezing Siberian tundra; but
man is the cosmopolitan animal beyond all others. Somehow, on this
theory of a single origin, he made his way to every quarter of the
globe; and when he got there, though needing time, perhaps, to acquire
the local colour, managed in the end to be at home. It looks as if
both race and a dash of culture had a good deal to do with his
exploitation of geographical opportunity. How did the Australians and
their Negrito forerunners invade their Austral world, at some period
which, we cannot but suspect, was immensely remote in time? Certain
at least it is that they crossed a formidable barrier. What is known
as Wallace's line corresponds with the deep channel running between
the islands of Bali and Lombok and continuing northwards to the west
of Celebes. On the eastern side the fauna are non-Asiatic. Yet somehow
into Australia with its queer monotremes and marsupials entered
triumphant man--man and the dog with him. Haeckel has suggested that
man followed the dog, playing as it were the jackal to him. But this
sounds rather absurd. It looks as if man had already acquired enough
seamanship to ferry himself across the zoological divide, and to take
his faithful dog with him on board his raft or dug-out. Until we have
facts whereon to build, however, it would be as unpardonable to lay
down the law on these matters as it is permissible to fill up the blank
by guesswork.

It remains to round off our original survey by a word or two more about
the farther extremities, west, south, and east, of this vast southern
world, to which south-eastern Asia furnishes a natural approach. The
negroes did not have Africa, that is, Africa south of the Sahara, all
to themselves. In and near the equatorial forest-region of the west
the pure type prevails, displaying agricultural pursuits such as the
cultivation of the banana, and, farther north, of millet, that must
have been acquired before the race was driven out of the more open
country. Elsewhere occur mixtures of every kind with intrusive
pastoral peoples of the Mediterranean type, the negro blood, however,
tending to predominate; and thus we get the Fulahs and similar stocks
to the west along the grassland bordering on the desert; the Nilotic
folk amongst the swamps of the Upper Nile; and throughout the eastern
and southern parkland the vigorous Bantu peoples, who have swept the
Bushmen and the kindred Hottentots before them down into the desert
country in the extreme south-west. It may be added that Africa has
a rich fauna and flora, much mineral wealth, and a physical
configuration that, in respect to its interior, though not to its
coasts, is highly diversified; so that it may be doubted whether the
natives have reached as high a pitch of indigenous culture as the
resources of the environment, considered by itself, might seem to
warrant. If the use of iron was invented in Africa, as some believe,
it would only be another proof that opportunity is nothing apart from
the capacity to grasp it.

Of the Australian aborigines something has been said already. Apart
from the Negrito or Negro strain in their blood, they are usually held
to belong to that pre-Dravidian stock represented by various jungle
tribes in southern India and by the Veddas of Ceylon, connecting links
between the two areas being the Sakai of the Malay Peninsula and East
Sumatra, and the Toala of Celebes. It may be worth observing, also,
that pre-historic skulls of the Neanderthal type find their nearest
parallels in modern Australia. We are here in the presence of some
very ancient dispersal, from what centre and in what direction it is
hard to imagine. In Australia these early colonists found pleasant,
if somewhat lightly furnished, lodgings. In particular there were no
dangerous beasts; so that hunting was hardly calculated to put a man
on his mettle, as in more exacting climes. Isolation, and the
consequent absence of pressure from human intruders, is another fact
in the situation. Whatever the causes, the net result was that, despite
a very fair environment, away from the desert regions of the interior,
man on the whole stagnated. In regard to material comforts and
conveniences, the rudeness of their life seems to us appalling. On
the other hand, now that we are coming to know something of the inner
life and mental history of the Australians, a somewhat different
complexion is put upon the state of their culture. With very plain
living went something that approached to high thinking; and we must
recognize in this case, as in others, what might be termed a
differential evolution of culture, according to which some elements
may advance, whilst others stand still, or even decay.

To another and a very different people, namely, the Polynesians, the
same notion of a differential evolution may be profitably applied.
They were in the stone-age when first discovered, and had no bows and
arrows. On the other hand, with coco-nut, bananas and bread-fruit,
they had abundant means of sustenance, and were thoroughly at home
in their magnificent canoes. Thus their island-life was rich in ease
and variety; and, whilst rude in certain respects, they were almost
civilized in others. Their racial affinities are somewhat complex.
What is almost certain is that they only occupied the Eastern Pacific
during the course of the last 1500 years or so. They probably came
from Indonesia, mixing to a slight extent with Melanesians on their
way. How the proto-Polynesians came into existence in Indonesia is
more problematic. Possibly they were the result of a mixture between
long-headed immigrants from eastern India, and round-headed Mongols
from Indo-China and the rest of south-eastern Asia, from whom the
present Malays are derived.

* * * * *

We have completed our very rapid regional survey of the world; and
what do we find? By no means is it case after case of one region
corresponding to one type of man and to one type of culture. It might
be that, given persistent physical conditions of a uniform kind, and
complete isolation, human life would in the end conform to these
conditions, or in other words stagnate. No one can tell, and no one
wants to know, because as a matter of fact no such environmental
conditions occur in this world of ours. Human history reveals itself
as a bewildering series of interpenetrations. What excites these
movements? Geographical causes, say the theorists of one idea. No doubt
man moves forward partly because nature kicks him behind. But in the
first place some types of animal life go forward under pressure from
nature, whilst others lie down and die. In the second place man has
an accumulative faculty, a social memory, whereby he is able to carry
on to the conquest of a new environment whatever has served him in
the old. But this is as it were to compound environments--a process
that ends by making the environment coextensive with the world.
Intelligent assimilation of the new by means of the old breaks down
the provincial barriers one by one, until man, the cosmopolitan animal
by reason of his hereditary constitution, develops a cosmopolitan
culture; at first almost unconsciously, but later on with
self-conscious intent, because he is no longer content to live, but
insists on living well.

As a sequel to this brief examination of the geographic control
considered by itself it would be interesting, if space allowed, to
append a study of the distribution of the arts and crafts of a more
obviously economic and utilitarian type. If the physical environment
were all in all, we ought to find the same conditions evoking the same
industrial appliances everywhere, without the aid of suggestions from
other quarters. Indeed, so little do we know about the conditions
attending the discovery of the arts of life that gave humanity its
all-important start--the making of fire, the taming of animals, the
sowing of plants, and so on--that it is only too easy to misread our
map. We know almost nothing of those movements of peoples, in the course
of which a given art was brought from one part of the world to another.
Hence, when we find the art duly installed in a particular place, and
utilizing the local product, the bamboo in the south, let us say, or
the birch in the north, as it naturally does, we easily slip into the
error of supposing that the local products of themselves called the
art into existence. Similar needs, we say, have generated similar
expedients. No doubt there is some truth in this principle; but I doubt
if, on the whole, history tends to repeat itself in the case of the
great useful inventions. We are all of us born imitators, but inventive
genius is rare.

Take the case of the early palaeoliths of the drift type. From Egypt,
Somaliland, and many other distant lands come examples which Sir John
Evans finds "so identical in form and character with British specimens
that they might have been manufactured by the same hands." And
throughout the palaeolithic age in Europe the very limited number and
regular succession of forms testifies to the innate conservatism of
man, and the slow progress of invention. And yet, as some American
writers have argued--who do not find that the distinction between
chipped palaeoliths and polished neoliths of an altogether later age
applies equally well to the New World--it was just as easy to have
got an edge by rubbing as by flaking. The fact remains that in the
Old World human inventiveness moved along one channel rather than
another, and for an immense lapse of time no one was found to strike
out a new line. There was plenty of sand and water for polishing, but
it did not occur to their minds to use it.

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