A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
9.MONKEYS, APES AND SUB-MEN
Naturalists divide the class _Mammalia_ into a number of orders. At the head of these is the order _Primates_, which includes the lemurs, the monkeys, apes and man. Their classification was based originally upon anatomical resemblances and took no account of any mental qualities.
Now the past history of the Primates is one very difficult to decipher
in the geological record. They are for the most part animals which
live in forests like the lemurs and monkeys or in bare rocky places
like the baboons. They are rarely drowned and covered up by sediment,
nor are most of them very numerous species, and so they do not figure
so largely among the fossils as the ancestors of the horses, camels and
so forth do. But we know that quite early in the Cainozoic period,
that is to say some forty million years ago or so, primitive monkeys
and lemuroid creatures had appeared, poorer in brain and not so
specialized as their later successors.
The great world summer of the middle Cainozoic period drew at last to
an end. It was to follow those other two great summers in the history
of life, the summer of the Coal Swamps and the vast summer of the Age
of Reptiles. Once more the earth spun towards an ice age. The world
chilled, grew milder for a time and chilled again. In the warm past
hippopotami had wallowed through a lush sub-tropical vegetation, and a
tremendous tiger with fangs like sabres, the sabre-toothed tiger, had
hunted its prey where now the journalists of Fleet Street go to and
fro. Now came a bleaker age and still bleaker ages. A great weeding
and extinction of species occurred. A woolly rhinoceros, adapted to a
cold climate, and the mammoth, a big woolly cousin of the elephants,
the Arctic musk ox and the reindeer passed across the scene. Then
century by century the Arctic ice cap, the wintry death of the great
Ice Age, crept southward. In England it came almost down to the
Thames, in America it reached Ohio. There would be warmer spells of a
few thousand years and relapses towards a bitterer cold.
Geologists talk of these wintry phases as the First, Second, Third and
Fourth Glacial Ages, and of the interludes as Interglacial periods. We
live to-day in a world that is still impoverished and scarred by that
terrible winter. The First Glacial Age was coming on 600,000 years
ago; the Fourth Glacial Age reached its bitterest some fifty thousand
years ago. And it was amidst the snows of this long universal winter
that the first man-like beings lived upon our planet.
By the middle Cainozoic period there have appeared various apes with
many quasi-human attributes of the jaws and leg bones, but it is only
as we approach these Glacial Ages that we find traces of creatures that
we can speak of as “almost human.” These traces are not bones but
implements. In Europe, in deposits of this period, between half a
million and a million years old, we find flints and stones that have
evidently been chipped intentionally by some handy creature desirous of
hammering, scraping or fighting with the sharpened edge. These things
have been called “Eoliths” (dawn stones). In Europe there are no bones
nor other remains of the creature which made these objects, simply the
objects themselves. For all the certainty we have it may have been
some entirely un-human but intelligent monkey. But at Trinil in Java,
in accumulations of this age, a piece of a skull and various teeth and
bones have been found of a sort of ape man, with a brain case bigger
than that of any living apes, which seems to have walked erect. This
creature is now called _Pithecanthropus erectus_, the walking ape man,
and the little trayful of its bones is the only help our imaginations
have as yet in figuring to, ourselves the makers of the Eoliths.
It is not until we come to sands that are almost a quarter of a million
years old that we find any other particle of a sub- human being. But
there are plenty of implements, and they are steadily improving in
quality as we read on through the record. They are no longer clumsy
Eoliths; they are now shapely instruments made with considerable skill.
_And they are much bigger than the similar implements afterwards made
by true man._ Then, in a sandpit at Heidelberg, appears a single
quasi-human jaw-bone, a clumsy jaw-bone, absolutely chinless, far
heavier than a true human jaw-bone and narrower, so that it is
improbable the creature’s tongue could have moved about for articulate
speech. On the strength of this jaw-bone, scientific men suppose this
creature to have been a heavy, almost human monster, possibly with huge
limbs and hands, possibly with a thick felt of hair, and they call it
the Heidelberg Man.
This jaw-bone is, I think, one of the most tormenting objects in the
world to our human curiosity. To see it is like looking through a
defective glass into the past and catching just one blurred and
tantalizing glimpse of this Thing, shambling through the bleak
wilderness, clambering to avoid the sabre- toothed tiger, watching the
woolly rhinoceros in the woods. Then before we can scrutinize the
monster, he vanishes. Yet the soil is littered abundantly with the
indestructible implements he chipped out for his uses.
The Heidelberg Man, as modelled under the supervision of Prof. Rutot
Still more fascinatingly enigmatical are the remains of a creature
found at Piltdown in Sussex in a deposit that may indicate an age
between a hundred and a hundred and fifty thousand years ago, though
some authorities would put these particular remains back in time to
before the Heidelberg jaw- bone. Here there are the remains of a thick
sub-human skull much larger than any existing ape’s, and a
chimpanzee-like jaw-bone which may or may not belong to it, and, in
addition, a bat-shaped piece of elephant bone evidently carefully
manufactured, through which a hole had apparently been bored. There is
also the thigh-bone of a deer with cuts upon it like a tally. That is
all.
What sort of beast was this creature which sat and bored holes in
bones?
Scientific men have named him Eoanthropus, the Dawn Man. He stands
apart from his kindred; a very different being either from the
Heidelberg creature or from any living ape. No other vestige like him
is known. But the gravels and deposits of from one hundred thousand
years onward are increasingly rich in implements of flint and similar
stone. And these implements are no longer rude “Eoliths.” The
archæologists are presently able to distinguish scrapers, borers,
knives, darts, throwing stones and hand axes ....
We are drawing very near to man. In our next section we shall have to
describe the strangest of all these precursors of humanity, the
Neanderthalers, the men who were almost, but not quite, true men.
But it may be well perhaps to state quite clearly here that no
scientific man supposes either of these creatures, the Heidelberg Man
or _Eoanthropus_, to be direct ancestors of the men of to-day. These
are, at the closest, related forms.