he Hyp

he Family formerly comprised other species that have become extinct. Our nearest surviving zoological relatives are the Gorilla, Chimpanzee and Orang, and (at a further remove) the Siamang

ns. That variation was the adoption of a flesh-diet and the habits of a hunter in order to obtain it. Without the adoption of a flesh-diet there could have been no hunting; but a flesh-diet obtained without hunting (supposing it possible) could have done nothing for the evolution of our stock. The adoption of

began at the anthropoid level; because although extant anthropoids are mainly frugivorous, yet they occasionally eat birds'-eggs and young birds; the gorilla has been said to eat small mammals; and other Primates (cebid?, maca

rous, our ancestor (it is assumed) soon preferred to attack mammals, and advanced at a remote date to the killing of the biggest game found in his habitat. Everywhere savage hunters do so now: the little Semang kills the tiger, rhinoceros, ele

hecus) inhabited Central Europe in the Miocene, for his bones have been found; there may have been others; and during that period the climate altered from sub-tropical to temperate, with corresponding changes in fauna and flora. Hence it formerly occurred to me that perhaps the decisive change in the life of our Family happened there and then. It seems, however, that good judges put the probable date of the great differentiation much earlier, in the Oligocene;[2] and since I cannot find that any extensive alteration of climate is known to have happened during that period, it seems necessary to fall back upon "spontaneous" variation (as one must i

he Hypothes

some of them are obvious and can be stated very briefly; others I shall return to in t

me. In contrast with their habits, Man is at home on the ground, with unlimited range over the whole planet from beyond the Arctic Circle to Tasmania and Tierra del Fuego; because on the ground (chiefly) he everywhere finds his food in the other animals whom he hunts and slays. This, then, is the condition of his emancipation from the tropical forest. It is, indeed, conceivable t

origin must explain how and when he became a hunter. There seems to be no reason to put the change of habits (which certainly occurred at

themselves along, could not have served the hunter, especially if he was to leave the forest. We may, indeed, suppose that at first prey was sometimes attacked by leaping upon it from the branch of a tree, as leopards sometimes do; but the less our ancestor in his new career trusted to trees the better for him. Such simple strategy could not make him a dominant animal throughout the world; nothing could do this but the gradual attainment of erect gait adapted to running down his prey. Hence th

stones to the encounter, and after many ages began to alter such means of offence into weapons that might be called artefacts. These simple beginnings probably occupied an immense time, perhaps more than half of the total period down to the present. The utility and consequent selection of hands had been great throughout; but their

en the weight and cumbersomeness of the upper part of the body and to improve his balance and agility. The change may also have been beneficial by affording physiological compensation for the lengthening and strengthening of th

acquired the habit of using stones, clubs, or other weapons, for fighting with their enemies or rivals, they would use their jaws and teeth less

ing, jaws and neck grew less massive, and their muscles no longer needed such solid attachments; (b) because the head was less liable to injury when no longer used as the chief organ in combat. At the same time the skull slowly increased in capacity and became vaulte

ns and even human hunters.[6] Gibbons, again, are social, going in bands to the number of fifty. But the large anthropoids live only in families-the male orang being even of a somewhat solitary habit; three or four families of chimpanzees may for a time associate together. Man, however, is everywhere-with a few doubtful exceptions, probably degenerate-both social and co-operati

arge carnivore, capable of killing its own prey, profits by being solitary; and this may be true where game is scarce: in the Oligocene and Miocene periods game was not scarce. Moreover, when our ape first pursued game, especially big game (not being by ancient adaptation in structure and instinct a carnivore), he may have been, and probably was, incapable of killing enough prey single-handed; and, if so, he will

ngue have not the special adaptation to speech that is found in Man, it should be considered (a) that if such structure had been useful to them it would have been acquired, as at some time it must have been by Man himself; and (b) that even without any change they might have jabbered well enough to convey a good many discriminated, objective meanings if they had needed to do so: for Man must have begun in that way; he cannot have waited for the development of physical structure before trying to talk. Sufficient intelligence is not wanting to chimpanzees; for in captivity they learn to understand a good deal that is said to them. What they wanted was a sufficient motive for persistently trying to communicate, such that those who made any progress in the art had a living advantage over others. Man had such a motive; because co-operation was necessary to him, not (

had to learn by observation, and to remember, and to apply all and more than all that the carnivore knows and does instinctively, or learns by following its mother. He must have learned to discriminate all sorts of animals, many of them new in a strange country; their reactions to himself, manner of flight, or of attack, or defence; the spoor of each and its noises; its habits and haunts, where it reposed or went to drink, where to set snares or lie in wait for it. Advanci

and that the details of their life, with both savage and anthropoid, are just what we cannot appreciate. Still, the anthropoid seems to have a rather lazy time of it: especially, he seems to have hardly any occasion for following out a purpose needing some time for its accomplishment. This powerful stimulus the hunting life applies to carnivores, above all to dogs and wolves; and in the same way it affected our ape: compelling him to combine many activities for a considerable period of time, along with his fellows, and direct them to one end in the actu

ears it is far easier, and a more probable way, to learn the art of making fire than by observing that dried boughs or bamboos driven together by the wind sometimes catch fire; because those processes include the very actions which the art employs: imitation of nature is not called for. It is true that the natives of Nukufetan in the South Seas explain the discovery of fire by their having seen smoke arise from two crossed branches of a tree shaken in the wind;[11] but this, probably, is merely the speculation of some Polynesian philosopher. Volcanoes, too, have been pointed out as a possible source of fire; and, in the myth, Demeter is said to have lit her torches at the crater of ?tna-an action fit for a goddess. But were such an origin of fire conceivable with savages, it would not show how they came to make it themselves. Fire at first must have excited terror. Until uses were known for fire no one could have ventured to fetch it from a volcano, nor to make it by imitating the friction of boughs in the wind. Fires were accidentally lit by man again and again, and much damage done, before he could learn (a) the connection of events, (b) th

nd Secondary

he length of the body, in the gibbon about eight times. Dr. Arthur Keith, in a private communication with which he has favoured me, says that the adult chimpanzee's intestine is slightly longer than the adult man's, but that the measurements are for certain reasons unsatisfactory, and that there have not been enough

growth of prudence, however, or habit of laying up stores can explain the steadier supply of food; since the lower savages have no prudence and no stores. On the whole, the change may be attributed (a) to an omnivorous habit being more steadily gratified than one entirely frugivorous or carnivorous; (b) to our ancestors having wandered in quest of game from country to country in which the seasons varied, so that the original correspondence of birth-time with favourable conditi

nd "would generally choose not merely the handsomest men, according to their standard of taste, but those who were at the same time best able to defend and support them." Hence, if a partial loss of hair was esteemed ornamental by our ape-like progenitors, sexual selection, operating age after age, might result in relative nakedness. "The faces of several species of monkey and large surfaces at the posterior end of the body have been denud

ceased to exist). No facts observed amongst extant savages-the choice exerted by women, or the polygamy of chiefs-throw much light upon that ancient state of affairs. There were then no chiefs: the hunt-leader of pack or clan had no authority but his personal prowess, no tradition of ancestry or religion, nor probably the prestige of magic, to give him command of women. Unless, at that time, relative nakedness was strongly correlated with personal prowess in the male and efficiency in the female, it is difficult to understand how it can have been preserved and increased by sexual selection. Forgive

t magnitude to have led to the denudation of the body through natural selection, may be doubted, since none of the many quadrupeds inhabiting the tropics have, as far as I know, acquired any specialised means of relief."[17] It appears, too, that against the probability of such a result must be set the actual disadvantage of nakedness, as insisted upon by Wallace, who says that savages feel the want of protection and

s with artificial stocks. The advantage of a naked skin being the greater freedom it gives from ticks, lice and other vermin, the advantage is especially great for a domestic animal living in the huts of savages, where, because they are inhabited year after year, vermin are extraordinarily abundant. The naked dog, then, differs from tropical quadrupeds which are adapted from a dateless a

thropoid stock, whence we also are descended: thereby avoiding the accumulation of vermin. Did the hunting life introduce a new habit? In the old frugivorous forest life, the custom was to get up into some tree for the night, and within a short radius there were hundreds equally suitable; and, therefore, there was nothing to check the natural preference for a fresh one. When, however, the hunting pack began to make its lair on the ground, there was no such wide choice amongst caves, rock-shelters, or thickets: one might be better th

wever, incompatible with the action of sexual selection, tending to the same result; nor, again, with the preferential destruction of hairy children if ever infanticide was practised. A further possible ground of deliberate selection may have been the mere ambition of differing from other animals; for a tribe on the Upper Amazons is report

of some other kind of Man; and "some of the human bones had been apparently split open: on that slender basis the Krapina men have been suspected of cannibalism."[21] If the suspicion is valid, the practice existed (say) 50,000 years ago in one species of Man; and perhaps much earlier, if we consider how it was merely an extension of the practice of devouring game to include the slain members of a hostile pack; for as primitive Man, or Lycopithecus, his pre-human forebear, no doubt regarded other a

apted to equatorial Africa; the Asiatic stock ("Mongolian") to Central Asia; the Mediterranean race to the neighbourhood of the sea after which it is named. As to the Nordic sub-race (of the Mediterranean, we may suppose), with its fair hair and skin, it has the appearance of an Arctic beast of prey, like the Polar bear. The snow-leopard of the Himalaya is found at a midway stage of such adaptation. Some geologists and zoologists now believe that, during the Glacial Period, the climate of Northern Europe was not everywhere such as necessarily to destroy the local fauna and flo

he popul

om her frozen

anau; when her

luge on the So

ltar to the L

conjecture that it may be due in some way to mountainous conditions,[23] of which snow might be one; but, if we suppose that the Nordic race extended during the Glacial Period into Western Europe (having already acquired its distinctive charact

uch circumstances unclothed? Whether this was possible physiologists must judge. We see the Fuegians maintain themselves, practically naked, under very inclement conditions. And it is not necessary to assume that the Nordic hunters were entirely naked; since the correlation be

s and conquests, most peoples are of mixed descent; and hence (i) individuals in the same locality sometimes vary greatly, because they inherit the blood of different str

y between leaders and followers, first in the chase and later in war. A good democrat may think it would have been a better plan to make all men equal from the first; and I would it had been so; for then the head of the race would not have had to drag along such an altogether disproportionate tail: a tail so huge and unwieldy that one may doubt whether it can ever be extricated from the morass of barbarism. But in the early days of gregariousness, a pack could not have held together, or have hunted efficiently, if all had been equal and each had exercised the right of private judgment.

y and Co

e change was initiated by some ape that adopted the life of a hunter, it is interesting to consider what the world was like in whi

Europe or Asia; North and South America were separated-perhaps at Panama. In the Miocene, Europe, Asia and Africa became united. These physiographic changes may have affected climate; for during the Eocene tropical conditions prevailed far to the north, and coal-beds were laid down in Alaska; but from the Oligocene onwards there was a gradual fall of temperature, slow at first, but ending (for the present) in the cataclysms of the Glacial Period. There was also a decrease in some regions of atmospheric moisture, which determines the density of vegetation. In its general character the vegetation was similar to that which now prevails in tropical, subtropical and tem

ape's adventures began, nothing precise can be said of his circumstances. Probably it was somewhere in the Old World, and probably it was in Asia. Unfortunately, we know nothing of the zoological antiquities of Asia until the early Miocene, and even then a very small selection of what must have existed, because geologists have hitherto explo

s), all smaller than their modern representatives; chalicotheres, strange beasts something like horses, but instead of hoofs they had claws on their toes-perhaps survived in China into the Pleistocene; small predecessors of the horse with three toes on each foot; titanotheres, hugest animals of their age, extinct in the middle of it-something like the rhinoceros and nearly as big as an elephant (Brontotherium). Of the even-toed group, pig-like animals abounded, and some true pigs appeared; entelodonts, or giant-pigs, were common; anthracotheres, somewhat pig-like in size and shape; ancestral camels ab

hedgehogs, moles and shrews; and in the Upper Miocene, hipparion, true hares, several varieties of hornless giraffe, true deer, and ancestral sheep. True horses and catt

langurs and baboons. Since the orang is now found only in Borneo and Sumatra, and the chimpanzee only in Africa, southern Asia seems to have been the centre from which the anthropoids dispersed; and this seems to be the chief positive ground for believing that the human stock began to be differentiated in that region. Since, again, by the Middle Miocene

re is a presumption that their common ancestor was in stature superior to the gibbons and to the largest monkeys-in fact, a "giant" ape (to borrow a term from Dr. Keith). Dryopithecus "was smaller than the chimpanzee, b

ene, and some of them increase in bulk; but true modern dogs or wolves (Canis) do not appear before the Pliocene. Then, too, first occur true bears (Ursus); hy?nas in the Upper Miocene. "Cats" belong to two sub-families: (i) the true felines, our modern species and their ancestors; and (ii) the mach?rodonts, or sabre-toothed cats. The latter first appear in North America in the Lower Oligocene; the former in Europe in the Middle Oligocene. The sabre-tooths are so called from their thin, curved upper canines; which were so long (3 to 6 inches) that it is not easy to understand how they could open their mouths wide enough to bite with them. That they were effective in some way is proved by the fact that mach?rodonts, first appearing in the Lower Oligocene, increased in numbers and diversity of species for ages, and some of them in bulk. In North America, in the Upper Oligocene, one species was as large as a jaguar, and some of the biggest and most terrifying were contemporary with Man, and only became extinct in the Pleistocene. Their limbs were relatively shorter and thicker than those of the Felin?. These, the true cats, at first progressed more slowly than the Mach?rodontid?; but in the Siwalik deposits (Pliocene) there occur, along with mach?rodonts, forms resembling the leopard and the lynx, with othe

rs ago (their verisimilitude is vouched for by Livingstone),[27] before a gun in the hands of every Kaffir had begun to thin the vast herds that then covered the whole landscape, and in whose numbers the wild hunters and the lions could make no appreciable diminution. The little Bushmen regarded themselves and the lions as joint owners and masters of all the game. The masters fought one another, indeed; but there was no necessity to fight, for there was more than enough for both: lions were then sometimes met in gangs of ten or a dozen. Game throughout the Cainozoic ages was abundant and of all sizes: many small, many middle-sized and some prodigious. Even in the Eocene, some of the Amblypoda (Dinoceras, Am.) and of the Barypoda (Ars

Concl

with little change for ages. But into his life a disturbing factor entered-the impulse to attack, hunt and eat animals, which extensively replaced his former peaceable, frugivorous habit. The cause of this change may have been a failure in the supply of his usual diet, or an "accidental variation" of appetite. Not a great number need have shared in the hunting impulse; it is enough that a few should have felt it, or even one. If advantageous and inheritable, it would spread through his descendants. It was advantageous (a) in enlarging their resources of nutrition

r hands and feet is only an advance upon what you see in the gorilla; as for our ground-life, can the adult male gorilla be fairly called arboreal? Several Primates use unwrought weapons; most of them lead a gregarious life, to which our own is a return; they are co-operative at least in defence; like many other animals, they communicate by gestures and inarticulate vocal cries. Co-operative hunting, indeed, seems to be new in our Order; but since wolves and dogs, or their ancestors, fell in with it some time or other, why s

roduction need not here be considered, as the apparatus is the same in the anthropoids and in ourselves. With many species to avoid being eaten and to mate are the reasons for some secondary characters, such as protective armour or coloration, fleetness with its correlative structures, nuptial plumage, and so forth. But