§ 2 The Original Stock and the Conditions of Differentiation
To the original mentality of man we can only seek a clue in the higher Primates, and especially in the extant anthropoids. No doubt, during the long millennia that have elapsed since the separation of our own stock from those of other genera and species, they also have undergone some evolution, but probably much less change than we have. Unfortunately, our knowledge of their habits and abilities is still deplorably limited. It seems certain, however, that their intelligence is much greater than that of any other kind of animal. They must have extensive knowledge of their habitat, of all the forest can yield for food or shelter, and of its other denizens dangerous or otherwise. They construct for themselves some sort of sleeping-place, not much inferior to the Australians’ “lean-to,” by piling branches together in the trees. Toward men, anthropoids seem to be unaggressive, and usually retreat from them; but, when attacked, defend themselves with fury. From other animals the male gorilla has nothing to fear, and he defends his family against leopards; the chimpanzee is said to fight leopards with varying success; and, as for the orang, Dyak chiefs told Wallace that no animals dare attack him, except crocodiles and pythons, and that he kills both of them.29 The food of these apes is chiefly fruit and the tender shoots of trees and bamboos; but they sometimes eat eggs and young birds; and the gorilla is said to eat small mammals: in confinement they all take cooked flesh freely. Socially, they hardly get beyond family life. Orangs male and female are even seen alone, and young ones together without parents; gorillas are seen in family parties; chimpanzees in families, and occasionally three or four families in company. It is said that gorillas and chimpanzees have been seen together in a large band. I have met with no report of these animals fighting amongst themselves, except that male gorillas sometimes fight for a wife. Gorillas have also been said, upon very slight evidence, to be polygamous; chimpanzees and orangs seem to be monogamous.30 Their family life is probably, as amongst all the other Primates, affectionate: the long youth of their children implies much parental care. Whilst the smaller anthropoids—siamang and gibbon—go in troops, as also do the baboons and most monkeys of both hemispheres, the less sociability of the great anthropoids may be understood to result (a) from the limited supply of the right sort of food for them, even in the tropical forest to which they are confined—since animals of their bulk must consume a great deal; and (b) from their having no need of combining for the purpose of defence.
From the type thus outlined the mentality of the human race has departed so widely that some even of those who believe that our bodies have been derived from some simian stock (e. g. Wallace) hesitate to admit that our minds can have had a similar history. But as everywhere else in the animal kingdom mind and body constitute one organism, it is reasonable to consider whether the differentiation of the mind of man may not be understood to have taken place under the same conditions as those which determined the transformation of his body. What were these conditions?
(a) In the foregoing chapter I have collected a number of facts and arguments pointing to the probability that the chief cause of the evolution of the human Family was the adoption by some anthropoid (or allied form) of the life of the hunter in order to obtain animal food. That the change from a frugivorous to a carnivorous diet may itself have had some effect upon our temperament and activity is possible; but I lay no stress upon that. Most monkeys are almost exclusively frugivorous; the only Primate, except man, that depends a good deal upon animal food is, I believe, the crab-eating macaque (Macacus cynomolgus), of the Burmese and Malay littoral; yet monkeys are the most alert and active of animals; some of them are amongst the most courageous; anthropoids are amongst the most powerful. A carnivorous diet alone would not explain any changes in the shape and proportions of our trunk and limbs, nor the upright gait, nor the gregarious habit, nor the development of the brain, nor the invention of weapons, nor the use of fire, nor any of the mental and emotional characteristics that distinguish man from the other Primates; but all these things readily follow from our remote ancestor’s adoption of the life of the hunter.
Sociologists, surveying extant peoples, have usually distinguished four stages of culture, the hunting, pastoral, agricultural and manufacturing; and some have indicated what they suppose to have been a still earlier stage, the “collecting,” such as may be seen, e. g., amongst the Fuegians. But the collecting state is plainly degenerate, the resource of tribes fallen into distress; it cannot have been the first stage, because it implies no conditions that tend in any way to develop body or mind or society. That hunting came first is a true intuition: and, to understand the development of human nature, we need only refer the hunting-life back to the very origin of the human stock.31
(b) The great anthropoids are all confined to the equatorial forests; and it is obvious that, with their diet, it is impossible to pass out of tropical or (at furthest) sub-tropical regions. But the adoption of a flesh diet enabled the human stock to extend the range of its hunting (allowing for gradual adaptation to climate or accommodation by clothing) to any country that supplied the requisite prey; and, accordingly, in course of time, it wandered to every part of the world. The settling of various off-shoots of the original stock in certain regions long enough for them to undergo adaptation to local conditions is (as we have seen) the simplest explanation of existing races.
(c) Whilst none of the great anthropoids has advanced socially beyond family life, man is everywhere (with few and doubtful exceptions) gregarious—living at the lowest grade in tribes or bands of about fifty; and the gregarious life is one of the most important conditions of his peculiar development. Possibly, he may originally have been more gregarious than any extant anthropoid, in spite of his not needing society for defence, and of its seeming to be for so large a frugivorous animal inconvenient in relation to nutrition. Moreover, if the great anthropoids and our own ancestors were descended from some stock of the lower monkeys, such as always go in troops, the gregarious instinct may have remained with them as a latent character. Still, it is my conjecture that man became gregarious, or recovered the social habit, because of the utility of co-operative hunting; so that he became at first a sort of wolf-ape. This will be discussed in the next section. I observe here, however, that the hypothesis helps us to understand why man is still imperfectly sociable; the purpose of the hunting-pack, each wolf-ape seeking prey, was unfavourable to social life in other relations. That in human life group-consciousness preceded self-consciousness is a groundless and fantastic notion: all known savages are fully self-conscious, as their sentiments and behaviour imply; and even the higher brutes are (in my judgment) self-conscious in their relations with others. Current speculations about fashion, imitation, tradition, crowd-psychology, are in danger of exaggeration, and overlook the patent facts of individualism, as shown by the hypocrite, the criminal, the vagrant, the contra-suggestible, the hermit, the sceptic, the saint. Some people—without being in any way morbid—find that a good deal of solitude is necessary to the complete life: by nature the student and the pioneer escape from the crowd.
(d) The later stages of human development have been considerably modified by certain imaginary conditions peculiar to Man; for he—we know not at what date—invented them. These may be summed up under the names of Magic and Animism; and in subsequent chapters they will be discussed, with their astonishing vagaries and still more astonishing reactions upon human life.
The chief conditions, then, to which man has been adapted, and thereby differentiated in body and mind from the anthropoid stock, I take to be four: the hunting life; geographical circumstances; social life; and his own imaginations.