Читать книгу The Conquest of the American Continent - Grant Madison - Страница 6

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Man is an immensely ancient animal. Over a million years have elapsed since he first made fire and more millions since he became a bipedal prehuman. He left the forests, at the latest, at the end of the Miocene, not less than seven million years ago and ventured out into the plains of Central Asia as a savage, powerful, clever biped, hunting in packs, or by sheer wit securing his prey single handed by pitfalls and other devices, the invention of which marks the development of growing intelligence.

Man's initial differentiation from his simian ancestry probably began when he came down from the trees and began to walk erect. The hand was then liberated from its use as an instrument of locomotion and was devoted primarily to defense, attack, discovery, and invention. It is by means of the opportunities afforded by the hand that the human brain has evolved into man's most important factor in racial survival.

Clear evidence of man's remote arboreal ancestry is offered by his stereoscopic or double-eyed vision. The great majority of ground animals, especially those living in the forest, have eyes on the sides of their heads; but in man's arboreal ancestors, by the recession of the intervening nasal and facial bones, the eyes were brought around to the front of the face. The resulting stereoptic vision enabled him to judge distance far more accurately than most mammals. Such power of determining distance is of course vital to an arboreal animal. Failure to judge accurately the length of a leap from branch to branch would be fatal.

One often hears it stated that man has lost his sense of smell; but this sense was probably never better developed within the human period than it is now. In the trees a sense of smell is not of much value. The monkey can sit on a branch and jabber with impunity at the leopard on the ground below. To forest animals, like the deer or boar, however, the sense of smell is the surest protection against attack and is much more highly developed than the sense of sight, which latter is often quite feeble. In fact, in the thick jungle it is almost useless (and at "black night" completely so).

Eurasia, where it is probable that mankind originated, was the greatest land mass on the globe in Tertiary times. Modern Europe and North Africa formed relatively small peninsulas in the extreme west of this Tertiary land mass. It is probably from Eurasia that man spread out to the uttermost parts of the habitable globe, carrying with him his language and such cultural features as had developed at the time of each successive migration. No race or language or cultural invention seems to have entered Eurasia from adjoining land areas. All went out. None came in. While the original center of dispersal of the Hominidæ or human family was probably Eurasia, it was at a later date also the center of the evolution of the higher types of man.

To the northeast of Eurasia lay the ancient land connection with North America via Alaska, over which various species of animals passed back and forth, some of them having their origin in Asia and others in western North America. It was undoubtedly over this land connection that man first entered America at a relatively recent period and probably he came in successive waves. The American Indians appear to have been derived from the Mongoloid tribes of northeastern Asia before the latter had developed some of those extreme specializations which characterize the typical Mongols of Central Asia and China proper today. Judging from the culture which these American Indians brought with them, this migration began before 10,000 B.C.

The existing races of mankind, and those either entirely extinct or now absorbed in other races, had their distinctive areas of differentiation and periods of radiation from Eurasia over the habitable globe. The most primitive types are now found farthest from this original centre of distribution in countries where through isolation they escaped competition with the higher types which evolved later.

The weight of evidence appears to show that Africa, or Ethiopia, lying far to the southwest of Eurasia, was peopled in earliest times, by way of Arabia, by a most primitive negroid type of mankind. While north of the Sahara migrations from Asia have continued until recent times, the south was left for a vast period in possession of the Negro. Even today, aside from the recent infiltration of Whites and Browns, Africa south of the Sahara belongs to three negroid groups; the Negroes proper, the Pigmies or Negrillos, and the Bushmen and Hottentots. These three human types are characterized by very dark or yellow skin, tightly curled hair, very scanty body hair, flaring nostrils, flattened noses and an absence of supraorbital ridges.

Again, Australia, Tasmania, and some of the adjoining islands are, or recently were, inhabited by what used to be considered one of the great divisions of mankind, the Australoids. These people have the black skin and certain features of the Negro; but differ from him in the possession of abundant body hair and of marked supraorbital ridges. Also the Australoid head hair is wavy, and not closely curled, a most important characteristic. The profound cleavage between the Negroes and the Australoids is now questioned in some quarters.

The differentiation of the human species into types so distinctly contrasted as Whites and Blacks and the problems of the evolution of higher types of man from original stocks bring us to a new classification of the genus Homo. Some anthropologists still maintain that all human beings are included in the species Homo sapiens; but this is an old-fashioned grouping. Sooner or later a new system must be formulated based on the same fundamental rules that are applied to the classification of other mammals. For instance, the physical differences between the Nordics and the Negroes, the Australoids and the Mongols, if found among the lower mammals, would be much more than sufficient to constitute not only separate species, but even subgenera, and they are now so regarded by some anthropologists.

Race is hard to define. It consists in the presence of a collection of hereditary characters common to the great majority of individuals in a given group. It lies in the preponderance of such characters as color of skin, hair, and eyes, facial and nasal contour, shape of skull, and even mental characteristics, which are more difficult to classify, but which are distinctly typical of specific human groups. Many individuals possess all the hereditary characters of a given race. But man is so ancient a being and intermixture has been so widespread that nearly every race shows signs of blending with others. This is especially true in Europe, where the intermingling of peoples has been extensive during the past twenty centuries.

Just as the classification of man according to race needs revision in the light of recent discoveries, so the definition of race must be understood anew in the light of genetics. Thirty years ago we talked glibly about the Aryan or Indo-European race, or the Caucasian or Germanic race. All these terms must be discarded. Aryan, Indo-European, and Germanic are only linguistic terms and Caucasian has no meaning except as used in America to distinguish between whites and colored.

Language or culture may spread quickly and widely among the peoples of the earth irrespective of race. For example, the bow and arrow may have originated with some specific race of mankind, yet we find this invention in use all over the globe and in the hands of the most diverse peoples. The use of firearms and of horses by the American Indians indicates nothing more than their contact with the Whites. It is unsafe to attribute the inception of any cultural feature to a given race.

Civilization itself, that is, agriculture and the domestication of animals, probably arose in West Central Asia, spreading east, south, southwest, and west. Although the earliest remains of the dog, the first animal tamed, are found in the Maglemose in Denmark approximately 8000 B.C., it may have been domesticated far earlier in Asia.

There were two centers of the development of civilization—two foci. The first was in southwestern Eurasia: the Valley of the Syr-Daria; Mesopotamia and its city states; Chaldea, Babylonia, Assyria; then Egypt, Crete, Greece, Rome, and modern Europe. There is the possibility, or even the probability, of finding in the unexplored portions of southern Arabia, connecting links of early culture between the Valley of the Euphrates and the Valley of the Nile. Recent discoveries indicate a very early civilization in the Valley of the Indus, which apparently had been brought down from the north. All these regions formed a single group and were the first center.

The second focus was an independent, but similar and parallel expansion of civilization in southeastern Asia, now China. There was apparently little intercourse until modern times between the Far East and the Far West of Eurasia, except by caravan routes across Central Asia. The Romans knew the silk of China and there was a certain amount of trade in jewels, precious metals, and spices down through the Middle Ages, but the extraordinary fact that these two cultures developed independently with slight mutual influence of the one on the other is little appreciated. Both cultures seem, as said, to have had their origin in West Central Asia and to have radiated southwest, south, and east.

One of the periodic cycles of drought desiccated the central area, and separated the Western and Eastern worlds by an almost impassable series of deserts, like the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. In the west, even as late as the time of Alexander the Great, Bactria and Sogdiana, northwest of India, were populous and flourishing states. Here it is that future exploration may uncover the first beginnings of agriculture and the domestication of animals—perhaps, also, the first written language.

Language, like culture, is not identical or co-extensive with race to any great degree. Witness the neighboring islands in the West Indies where Negroes speak Spanish in one, French in another, and English in a third. The language of a given group at a given time, however, being possibly a much more recent acquirement than its cultural inventions, does show either that it was originated by those who speak it or that it was imposed upon them by another race long in contact with them.

Since we are to deal principally with the racial groups of Europe, namely the Nordic, Mediterranean, and Alpine, we might glance for a moment in more detail at this distinction between race and language. The Mediterraneans of Arabia speak a Semitic language, while the Berbers of North Africa, also a people of Mediterranean stock, speak a Hamitic language. This same Hamitic tongue was probably spoken all around the coast of the inland sea and up the west coast of Europe to the British Islands before Aryan speech was brought there by Nordic invaders from the north and east. Meanwhile the Alpines spoke languages related to Turki, a Ural-Altaic language—of course, non-Aryan—as they still do in Turkestan, Hungary, and Finland.

As to the Nordics, it would appear that this race originated the so-called Aryan or Indo-European group of languages. The Aryan tongue was probably developed in South Russia before the long isolation from Asia had been broken. At a period in the third millennium B.C. the Aryan language split into two groups: one, the Western or Centum group, which pushed west and north; the other, the Eastern or Satem group which pushed south and east. The Centum group included the Greek, Latin, Celtic, and Germanic languages. Curiously enough, an outlying member of this group, the Tokarian, was spoken in Turkestan as late as the seventh century A.D. The Satem group, sometimes called Iranian, included the Lithuanian, all the Slavic languages and those of ancient and modern Persia and the various forms of Sanscrit spoken in India and Burma.

Light-skinned invaders from the northwest appear to have entered India in successive waves and to have introduced the Aryan language known as Sanscrit. They were probably the Sacae or Scythians from South Russia. These Nordics in India can properly be called "Aryans." As used otherwise, however, the term Aryan is purely linguistic. Originally all the tribes who spoke the languages of the Centum and Satem groups were members of the Nordic race.

According to recent discoveries in the Valley of the Indus, a very elaborate civilization flourished at least five thousand years ago at Mohenjo-Daro, four hundred miles north of the mouth of the river. This civilization was as elaborate as the corresponding culture of Mesopotamia or of Egypt. The racial characters found in the bodies in the burials indicate that the mass of the population was then, as now, of Mediterranean race, but that the ruling class was long-headed and long-faced, and of a tall stature and sturdy build—a type clearly Nordic. In the earliest graves of Ur, in Mesopotamia, the skulls are very clearly of a race akin to those on the Indus. All this would tend to throw back the date of the invasion of men from the north by another thousand years or more. The same appears to be true of the invasions into Greece of the Achæans and of the Osco-Umbrians into Italy.

The wide distribution of the Satem or Iranian group to the south and west of Asia shows that the Nordics in great numbers conquered the aboriginal inhabitants of these countries and imposed on them the Aryan speech. They invented the caste system to maintain the purity of their blood. In fact, the Hindu word "varna" means both color and caste. In spite of all their efforts, however, the conquering invaders died out almost completely in India and Persia—leaving behind them only their language, and, in some cases, their religion.

With this brief review of the essential difference between race and language or culture, we may return to a consideration of humanity in terms of essentially racial characters.

The world as a whole can be roughly mapped racially according to the most obvious human differentiation—namely, color: white, yellow, red, black, and brown. The white race at the present day dominates Europe, northern Asia in part, Australia, and North America as far south as Mexico, with outposts scattered all over the globe. Eastern Asia is yellow. Southern Asia and northern Africa are brown. Africa south of the Sahara Desert is black, and there is a black tinge across southern Asia, as we shall see. The red men, or Amerinds, with but a small remnant in the United States and Canada, inhabit Latin America, where in some cases their blood is mixed with that of the descendants of Negro slaves, and, of course, to a still larger extent with that of South Europeans.

Color, however, is not the only character upon which a racial map of the world could be based. Perhaps a more satisfactory division could be made according to the cross section of human hair. However, in dealing with the racial groupings of Eurasia, we find different types of humanity arranged in definite zones according to certain outstanding physical characters.

Farthest south on the great land area of Eurasia lies a belt of Negroids, extending from Ethiopia with intervals through Arabia to the South Seas. The principal racial characteristics of these people are very dark or black skin, dark eyes, tightly curled black hair, and long, i.e., dolichocephalic skulls. In southern Persia the population shows a Negro admixture, and a distinctly Negroid type is numerous among the Pre-Dravidians of India. The Hindus themselves are very dark brown with wavy black hair.

A few decades ago there was much talk of the English officer and the Hindu in the ranks being of the same Aryan blood, because they both spoke widely diverse forms of the great group of Aryan languages. This, of course, did not imply the slightest trace of blood relationship—the Aryan speech of the Hindu had been imposed upon him by his conquerors from the north. Such fallacies were common a generation ago.

To the eastward we find remnants of Negro types in the Malay Peninsula and in the large islands to the east as far as the Philippines. This Negroid type extends also eastward through Melanesia. From this discontinuous distribution it would appear that the Negroes and Negritos were the original population of southern Eurasia. It is probable that from this region the true Negroes migrated westward into Ethiopia.

At a date far earlier than this hypothetical migration westward, an earlier type of Negroid pushed southeast to Tasmania, which was thereafter cut off from the land mass of Australia. In Australia itself these Tasmanians were absorbed or exterminated by the later coming Australoids from whom they differed materially.

The racial tangle in Australia, Papua, and the islands of Melanesia presents great difficulties in classification, but the basic element appears to be Negro with a large admixture of later Mongoloids coming from Asia.

The next zone of human population, superimposed in many cases upon the Negroids, but south of the great central mountain ranges of Eurasia, is constituted by the Mediterranean race. This race is characterized by black, wavy hair, very dark eyes, oval face with fairly regular features, dark olive skin, relatively short stature, and a somewhat slight skeletal and muscular structure. This last character is in sharp contrast with the powerful and sturdy build of the next two races to be considered, the Alpine and the Nordic. The principal character of the Mediterranean race, however, is its long (dolichocephalic) skull. The Negroes, as we have said, have long skulls, but of quite a different type.

The range of the Mediterraneans extends from the western part of the British Isles, through Spain and along both coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, down the east coast of Africa to Somaliland. In Asia it embraces the Arabs, South Persians, most of the Hindus, with an eastward extension. In Northeast Africa and India it is strongly mixed with Negro.

Spreading everywhere throughout Europe north of the territory dominated by the Mediterranean race, and often mixed with it, we find the Alpines. This race is characterized by a somewhat short, stocky build much sturdier than the Mediterranean, abundant dark, but not straight, head and body hair, dark eyes and round (brachycephalic) skull.

The center of origin of the Alpines was somewhere in Central Asia west of the true Mongols, north of the Mediterraneans, and east of the Nordics—possibly in Turkestan. The Alpines and Mongols are both characterized by a round skull but, as in the case of the long-skulled Mediterraneans and the long-skulled Negroes, the type of skull differs appreciably.

The Mongols and Alpines have been in close contact for ages. The Mongols have issued again and again from East and Central Asia and submerged the Alpines, driving them westward into Central Europe. There has been a great deal of intermixture and the Slavic Alpine population of eastern Europe frequently shows distinctive Mongol traits. However, the two races, while perhaps remotely connected, differ widely. The Alpines, like the Australoids and to a less extent like the Nordics, have abundant body hair and copious beard, while the Mongols (like their derivatives, the American Indians) are beardless and without body hair. Alpine hair is wavy, that of the Mongols and Mongoloids straight. Alpine features are rather coarse, often with a large prominent nose, while true Mongols have an exceedingly flat face, depressed nose, and a broad space between the eyes. This depressed nose, in adult Mongols, is the retention of an infantile character, as babies of all races are born with bridgeless noses. As to stature, most Alpines are of moderate height, although those from the Tyrol to Albania, the so-called Dinaric race, are decidedly tall.

It was a branch of tall Mongols, with a slight admixture of Alpines, that crossed into America from Asia and became the ancestors of the American Indians, who are of substantial height, often with prominent, almost hawklike noses and high cheek bones.

We might mention here the Malays, who are essentially Mongols and who pushed down into Indo-China and throughout the Malay Peninsula. There are many traces of their blood in Polynesia. This expansion was relatively recent and in those localities there are everywhere indications of earlier races, especially of the very ancient Negroid types known as Negritos. These Malays extended through the Philippines as far north as Japan, where they met and mingled with a stream of northern Mongoloid immigrants from Korea.

The Alpine domain at the present time extends from the center of France eastward in an ever widening wedge as far as the Himalayas. It includes the bulk of the population of Central France, North Italy, South Germany, Switzerland, the provinces of the recent Austrian Empire, and extends through the Balkan states, Russia, Asia Minor, and far into Asia. This race penetrated into and overran Central Europe during relatively recent times, probably at about the beginning of the Bronze Age, approximately 1800 B.C.

East and north of the Carpathians, about 400 A.D., the Alpines had a period of great expansion, chiefly at the expense of the Nordic race, whose distribution we shall discuss presently.

As the Nordic tribes moved into the Roman provinces, the lands they vacated were occupied by Alpine Slavs. All these movements may have been caused by the pressure from the east of Asiatic Mongols, who, like the Huns, were beginning their drive toward Europe. Our word slave coming from Slav reveals the social relation of these Alpines to West Europeans.

The westernmost of the Alpine Slavs were called Wends. In Charlemagne's time they occupied what is now Germany as far west as the Elbe. In its easternmost range these Alpines were called Turanians and were confused with the Mongols of Central Asia, who had again and again conquered them. The remnant of Wends in East Germany, the Bohemians, most Poles and South Slavs are all Alpines. The great mass of Russians are of this type, as well as the ancient Avars, Hunagars, Magyars, Cumans, and the Bulgars, all more or less mixed with Mongols. The Armenians are Alpines of an especially pronounced type and are probably descended from the ancient Hittites. The East European Alpines are saturated everywhere with Mongol blood, dating for the most part from their conquest by the Tatars during the thirteenth century.

The fact that Asia, north of the main mountain ranges, is pre-eminently the home of round skulls is very significant and suggests remote relationship between Alpine and Mongol.

The Alpine skull reaches a most extreme form among the Armenians, who have a very high skull, greatly flattened behind and somewhat like a sugar loaf in shape.

The division of the races of mankind based on long and round skulls is extremely ancient. We find both types among the fossil and semi-fossil skulls at the end of the Paleolithic.

The first definite appearance of round skulls mixed with long skulls is found in the burials at Offnet in Bavaria in the Azilian period at the very end of the Paleolithic, some twelve thousand years ago.

From that day to this in France, Bavaria, and elsewhere in western Europe as well as in eastern Europe the round skulls have expanded their range. This steady increase of round-skull Alpines everywhere in Central Europe in recent centuries is one of the most ominous racial facts that confront us.

The great French anthropologist, deLapouge, stated in a recent letter to the author that in France the cranial index has risen two points a century since the Middle Ages, so that France is no longer a Nordic land. This transformation is due, in the opinion of some observers, to a mixture of race in which round-headedness is dominant over long-headedness. In the opinion of the writer, however, it is due to the replacement of one race, the Nordic, by another, the Alpine. The Nordics not only incur disproportionate loss in war, but are also highly nomadic in habit, while the Alpines, on the other hand, stick close to the land and breed persistently.

Of the European races, there remains to be considered the Nordics, a people greatly specialized, who have developed a fair skin, light-colored eyes, tall stature of sturdy build, and long, i.e., dolichocephalic skulls, and definite mental traits. The slow but long-continued physical development of the Nordics has culminated in a powerful skeleton and musculature in sharp contrast to that of the Mediterranean race, to which the Nordic is more closely related than to any other. In fact, the mixture of Nordic and Mediterranean in the British Islands may possibly be one of the few advantageous racial crossings.

As to the homeland of the original Nordic race, we have as yet only guesswork on the part of the anthropologist. When we shall know more about the condition of Central Eurasia during the glacial period and immediately thereafter, we may get nearer to an answer to the question of where and how this race originated and developed. It is certain, however, that the Nordics were originally located west of the Alpines and Mongols and north of the Mediterraneans.

We have fossil records of five or six extinct species or genera of man and more are constantly coming to light in Asia and outlying regions of the Old World. The impulse that forced the ancestors of man to develop his high energy and intelligence probably arose from the onset of the Pleistocene glaciation a million or more years ago. Mankind was then forced apart into widely separated areas where specific characters developed in isolation. The Nordics were most likely cut off from Asia by the Caspian and Aral Seas, which extended far to the north, where they met the oncoming ice. It was west of this barrier that the Nordic race developed its peculiar characters.

Later, when the ice retreated and this watery barrier disappeared, the Nordics were inundated again and again by floods of Asiatics, first Alpines and then Mongols. Sometimes the Nordics became the aggressors and expanded eastward in turn, conquering Persia, India, and Burma. Blond invaders of East Asia, called "the green-eyed devils," attacked the Great Wall of China as late as 200 B.C. They were also called "Wusuns," a Tatar word meaning "the tall ones." In the long run, however, the Nordics were forced westward.

When the retreating glaciers left habitable land in Scandinavia, it was into this region that the first westward migration of the Nordics found its way. This was probably as early as 8000 B.C. There it was, through the fogs and long winters of the north, that they developed in complete isolation their great stature and musculature, their fair or flaxen hair, and their blue eyes. The continental Nordics, however, who moved westward to settle around the Baltic and North Seas, retained the more generalized characters of brown hair of various shades, and eyes which tend to either brown, gray, or, to a less extent, blue. The light eyes of the Nordics include light brown or hazel, and may be of any and all shades of gray and green to the deepest violet blue.

The racial characters which most noticeably distinguish the Nordics are the colors of the skin, hair, and eyes. As sharply contrasted with the skin of the Mediterranean peoples, the color of the blood shows through the fair Nordic skin except when tanned by exposure to the sun. The light-colored hair is almost always blond in youth, turning darker with age, although in many individuals extreme blondness is retained through life. The brown hair, characteristic of the Nordics of the British Isles and America, runs from light to very dark brown; but blue-black hair, so rare in England and among native Americans, is never Nordic. The blond hair may tend towards golden red. In fact, in classic times, red hair seems to have been more common than now and may be more characteristic of the Celtic Nordics than of the Teutonic Nordics. In race mixtures between blond and black-haired peoples, the blondness tends to be lost.

On the other hand, light-colored eyes are much more persistent, and this sign of Nordic admixture is found about ten times more frequently than is blond hair among such peoples as the Albanians, where all other Nordic characters except stature seem to have been lost.

For thousands of years, Europe has been an arena of racial mixtures. Over great territories, as we shall see, the Nordic race has been dominant for the past thirty centuries, so that the majority of Alpine and Mediterranean types shows the impress of Nordic characters. For example, in Bavaria are found short, stocky, round-skulled Alpines with extremely blond hair and blue eyes. The French, who are today preponderantly Alpine, show outcroppings of profound Nordic characters throughout the population. Thus, while pure types exist everywhere in sufficient numbers to enable us to define race, nevertheless there has been so much intermixture in the past that it is hard sometimes to assign a given individual to a specific race. The definition of race, in fact, cannot be based on any one character, but on a preponderance of many racial characters which make up the resultant type.

We have now considered the main races of mankind, but should devote space to the Mongols and their derivatives. The Mongol is undoubtedly a very ancient and major subdivision of the Hominidæ, but appears to be intrusive in much of its present range. In Southeast Asia and in the Malay countries and islands it arrived later than the ancient Negroids.

The Mongoloids, as stated above, are characterized by a short, stocky build and generally a round skull, very straight black hair with a round cross section, a broad flat face with projecting malar bones, and a slanting eye often marked by the Mongol fold. The last characters distinguish them from the Alpine race, but are sometimes to be found in such members of that race as have a Mongoloid admixture.

These Mongolian characters occur often in Bohemia, in Moravia, and especially in Galicia, in which last province they probably date from the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. Such traits, however, are not found among the Alpines of southern Germany or France.

In the American Indians, Mongoloid blood undoubtedly predominates but the high-bridged nose of some of the tribes and their high stature undoubtedly point to admixture with other races.

The Mongol is not inferior to the Nordic in intelligence, as is the Negro, but represents such a divergent type that the mixture between Nordics and Chinese or Japanese is not a good one. The overflow of these Asiatics into our Pacific Coast might have Mongolized the States there, had not the American laboring man taken alarm and secured legislation forbidding their immigration.

With the foregoing as a simple and generalized description of the primitive races of mankind as we know them today, and with special emphasis on the three principal European variants of the "white" race, we shall proceed to consider the distribution and racial influence of the Nordics in western Europe.