The Recent Origin of Man, as illustrated by geology and the modern science of prehistoric archaeology

Front matter

THE RECENT ORIGIN OF MAN REINDEER ENGRAVED ON BONE, FROM THE GROTTO OF TAYN GEN (SWITZERLAND). (TAKEN FROM "MATERIAUX POUR L' HISTOIRE DE L'HOMME? 1874). (Frontispiece). THE RECENT ORIGIN OF MAN, AS ILLUSTRATED BY GEOLOGY AND THE MODERN SCIENCE OF PRE- HISTORIC ARCHÆOLOGY. BY JAMES C SOUTHALL ILL OS TR A TED. PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., LONDON: TRUBNER & CO. »8 75- Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875. by JAMES C. SOUTHALL, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.

Preface

. I do not flatter myself that I have avoided all errors li the following pages. That, in a volume like the present, containing such a vast multitude of statements of fact, was nearly impossible. I have been admonished by some of my friends against the retention of certain expressions which occur with regard to Science and scientific men, as well as against the theological temper of some of the early chapters. With respect to the first, I do not believe that any candid person will suspect me of an unfriendly feeling towards Science, or of any want of appreciation of its great achievements and the lofty position which it so justly occupies. A scientific fact is as much a part of the Truth as a verse of Scripture, and every rightly-constituted mind must welcome the discoveries of scientific men as the Biblical student would welcome a corrected text of the Books of Chronicles or the recovery of the original Ignatian epistles.

It is not Science, but scientific theories hastily formed and inconsiderately promulged, that I venture to rebuke ; speculation, it appears to me, is hardly within the sphere of Science, and when the theologian or the scientist undertakes to go one step beyond the Record, in the one case and in the other we have the right to call him back. In the past the Theologians have PREFA CE. 10 had it all their own way, and they uttered a cry of indig nation when they were rudely checked up by Science ; in the present day the Scientists appear to have it very much their way, and some of them, accordingly, fall into that overweening dogmatism and those indiscretions which characterized the reign of the Theologians. With regard to the references to Christianity and the Bible in some of the earlier chapters, I thought them per tinent to any discussion of the origin of man, involving, as the Bible does, not only a professed revelation on the subject, but also historical statements of great antiquity.

There is a certain want of ingenuousness among many literary and scientific men with regard to the historical books of the Hebrew Scriptures which is reprehensible, and for which I have little respect. They studiously avoid all mention of these documents, when if they had been discovered in the valley of the Euphrates or the Nile they would receive great attention. I do not recollect that the "Antiquity of Man" ever recognizes that the book of Genesis is in existence ; and yet every one is perfectly conscious that the author has it in mind, and is writing at it all the time. It is not considered dignified, nor exactly in good taste, to make such allusions. I venture to violate this canon of letters. I have said in a plain way whatever seemed to me to bear on my subject, — treating Moses as I would treat Herodotus.

It is impossible in this question of the antiquity of man to ignore, or be indifferent to, the statements of the Pen tateuch; and Englishmen and Americans do not in fact forget them. Affectation in a scientific work is specially PRE FA CE. 11 out of place ; such a work should be characterized by the most thorough candor and by no suppressed prejudices. If I have succeeded in establishing the very recent origin of the human race, the effect of the evidence reaches farther than the position of pre-historic archæol ogy : it bears upon Mr. Darwin's views ; for, if, as I con tend, primeval man commenced his career six or eight thousand years ago in a civilized condition in the temperate regions of the East, and there are no human traces behind these, the doctrine of evolution, so far as man is concerned, is at once negatived.

Even the man of Solutre, in Eastern France, the cotemporary of the mammoth, and who, as I have attempted to show, occupied that station only a few thousand years ago, had apparently domesticated the horse, and, in the words of M. Pruner- Bey, " est constitue homme dans toute la force du terme," — with regard to whom " rien dans son physique n'indique un rapprochement avec les Simiens." Behind this hunter tribe who have left their remains in the sepultures and refuse-heaps of this palæolithic village, we find — nothing ; in other words, Palæolithic Man in Western Europe — though not civilized — was an intelligent savage like our Esquimaux or Red Indians ; and neither Archæology nor Geology has detected any earlier human form. Such a man — civilized in Egypt — uncivilized, but employing horses, making pottery, executing such drawings as that represented in our frontispiece, in Europe — appeared abruptly on the scene a few thousand years ago, — ten, if you choose.

As the facts stand, I think Mr. Darwin will find it a difficult matter to procure from the quaternary and tertiary deposits a sufficient number of earlier human PREFA CE. 12 types and pithecoid types, to connect the man of the Pyramids and the French River-Gravels with the brute creation. I wish, in conclusion, to express the great obligations I have been under in the preparation of this volume to Prof. Edmund Andrews of the University of Chicago. He was kind enough in the beginning to read my manuscript, and to encourage me in its publication, and he has read the proof-sheets and corresponded with me as the work has been passing through the press. To him I am in debted for many important hints and much valuable information, which I have sometimes, but not always, recognized. My thanks are also due to Professors Schele de Vere and Holmes of the University of Virginia, and to W. H. Ruffner, Esq., Superintendent of Public Instruction in Virginia, for their kind help in assisting me to read the proof-sheets. JAMES C. SOUTHALL. Richmond, Va., March, CONTENTS.

Chapter I. The First Glimpses Of The Human Race

The Thread of History. — Results of Modern Research. — Chronology. — Probable Date of the Beginnings of Monumental History. — The Antiquity of Civilization. — Egypt, Babylon, and Nineveh in the Earliest Known Ages. — The Deluge. — Was there a Stone Age? — The Abrupt Beginnings of Civilization. — America ; Early Discovery of. — The Biblical Account of the Beginning of History. — Similar to that of the Monuments. — M. Oppert on the Tower of Babel. — Account of the Confusion of Tongues by Berosus. — Egyptian Art. — Babylonian Astronomy. — What has become of the Palæolithic Races of Egypt and Mesopotamia? — The Negro Race.— Early Manifestation of Race-Marks. — Language. — The Cave-Men of Western Europe. — No Older than the Oriental Races. If we trace back the thread of human history, we have Modern Europe; the Middle Ages; the Goths, Vandals, Huns; Rome.

We can follow the Roman history back to seven hundred and fifty years before Christ. And before the Romans were the Greeks. We can trace them back through Demosthenes, Thucydides, Herodotus, Homer. Solon was about 600 B.C. ; Lycurgus, a kind of mythical form, about 900 B.C. Back of that we place the Trojan war (about 1200 B.C.), the Lycians, the Lydians, the Carians, etc. ; and there, excluding certain confused ideas of Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Etruscan, and Phœnician history, our thread was lost, — always excepting, of course, the earlier Hebrew chronicles, written about 1500 B.C. But modern research has laid bare the Egyptian and Mesopotamian annals, and we know now more, perhaps, of the daily life of the old Memphian and Theban monarchies than we do of that of the Romans before the Punic wars.

Champollion and Young, followed by Layard, Rawlinson, Oppert, Brugsch, De Rouge, Lepsius, Mariette, have found the key to the mysterious characters that were stamped on the Babylonian bricks or traced on the walls of the Egyptian tombs. The long-sealed records of ancient India, of Phœnicia, of Palestine, Persia, Moab, have also been more or less illustrated by archæological inquiry. We find ourselves face to face with the builders of the Pyramids and the Tower of Babel, with the hoary antiquity of the Vedas, and those primeval rovers of the sea whose traces, it is supposed, have been found even in America. We can almost lay our hands upon Mizraim and Asshur and Nimrod, as they stand between the Ark and the opening drama of human history. Egyptian and Authorities differ as to the precise chronology; but 2700 Babylonian b.c for Egypt, and the same date for Babylon, is, perhaps, chronology. nQt for from the mar]j A fgW hundred years earlier or later will not affect the main fact : that human history commences about four thousand five hundred or five thousand years ago.

The Chinese and the Hindoos (like the Egyptians and the Babylonians) claim a much greater antiquity; but by general consent it is now allowed that the Egyptian annals go back as far as any others, if not farther. There is, however, no very great difference between the antiquity of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Arabians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Scythians (Turyas), the Phœnicians, the Chinese, and the Indians. They all go back some two thousand or three thousand years before the Christian era.* Zoroaster is placed by Pliny in the year 2500 B.C., which corresponds with the tradition of Berosus and the calculation of M. Oppert. Primeval man We find all of these primeval people suddenly appearing civilized. on t[ie scene together, and with a full-fledged civilization. That was about four thousand six hundred years ago.

The Egyptians of Manetho's Fourth Dynasty, the builders of the oldest Pyramids, assigned by Mr. Stuart Poole to about B.C. 2400-2200, are acquainted with all the arts of civilized life; they not only write, but the characters have assumed the cursive form; agriculture is in a state of considerable * Even Lepsius places Menes at 3892 B.C. With regard to China, in the seventh century before the Christian era it embraced only five out ofthe present eighteen districts ; and there are no historical documents earlier than the sixth century B.C. No writings of any description, prior to those ascribed to Confucius, exist in China. This philosopher compiled a history of China in a book called the Shoo king. Subsequent to this, one of the Chinese emperors, Che-wang-tse by name, under the idea of commencing a new set of annals with his own reign, caused all the records of the empire to be destroyed.

Sixty years afterwards, his successor attempted to repair the mis chief which had been perpetrated, and offered large rewards for the recovery of any of the lost annals. The Shoo-king is said to have been recovered from an old man who had com mitted it to memory. Such is Chinese history prior to this date. But, such as it is, it does not claim to go back farther than 2637 B.C. With regard to India, the annals of this country do not go back farther than the epoch of Alexander the Great. The Rig-veda, for which an antiquity of three thousand years before our era is claimed, belongs probably to the twelfth century B.C., while the Laws of Menu are five hundred years later. The rock-cut temples of India have also been deemed of im mense antiquity; but it is now ascertained, from inscriptions and other data, that none of them are older than the second century B.C. The natives will tell you that they were erected by the Pandus 3101 B.C., while others tell us that they belong to " an ante-Sanskrit race."

THE FIRST GLIMPSES OF THE HUMAN RA CE. 19 advancement; they have their science and their literature; the women are dressed in "brilliant scarlet," and adorned with " necklaces, bracelets, and anklets of blue and white glass beads;" the "government" is engaged in mining for copper and turquoise in the Sinaitic peninsula ; "in short, the civilization represented is in every respect as high as that of any later period of the Egyptian monarchy, and the art is even higher." Well may M. Renan exclaim, " When we think of this civilization that it had known no infancy ; that this art, of which there remain innumerable monuments, had no archaic epoch ; that the Egypt of Cheops and Cephren is superior, in a sense, to all that followed, on estpris de vertige." It was pretty much the same at Babylon and Nineveh.

In two rooms of the palace of Asshur-bani-pal at Nineveh, Mr. Layard discovered a mass of Assyrian grammatical literature. One of these documents proves to be a vast Cyclopedia of Assyrio-Babylonian Grammar. In the same "Chamber of Records" he found an exceedingly rich collection of mathematical and astronomical works. The Phœnicians, it is at least probable, crossed the Atlantic, and left their colonies in North and South America.* * Since this was written, we have met with the following in the columns of the New York Evening Post : " PHŒNICIAN INSCRIPTIONS IN BRAZIL. " Readers of the Evening Post will recall a recent allusion in these columns to the dis covery of inscriptions in Brazil, which upon examination proved to be Phœnician, and to record the presence there, five centuries B.C., of a Phœnician colony.

The circumstances of the discovery are given as follows : " ' Visconde de Sapercahy, a member of the Emperor's Council of State, received, three months ago, a letter from Parahyba, inclosing a drawing of the inscription upon a stone which the writer's slaves had come upon during their agricultural labors on his farm, and which drawing had been taken by the writer's son, a young man who could draw a little. This copy was turned over to the Historical Society of Rio, and by it to Sefior [sic] Ladislao Netto, Director of the Rio Museum, for an examination. On examining it he found the letters to be pure Phœnician. " ' The inscription is of a commemorate stone, — a rough monument erected by some Phœ nicians of Sidonia, apparently exiles or refugees from their native land, between the ninth and tenth years of the reign of a king named Hiram.

These rash or unfortunate Canaan ites — the patronymic which they have used to denominate themselves — left the port of Aziongaber (now Akaba), a port upon the Red Sea, and sailed for twelve novilunes (lunar months) along the land of Egypt — that is, Africa. The number of vessels they had and the number o"f males and females composing the adventurous expedition are all set forth in a concise and seemingly elegant style, these particulars being placed intermediate between the invocation, some at the beginning and the others at the end of the inscription of the Alonim Valonuth, — that is, gods and goddesses, or superos superasque, as is the Latin translation of those well-known Phœnician words. The inscription is in eight lines of most beautiful Phœnician letters, but without separation of the words, without the vowel-points, and without quiescent letters, — three great obstacles to the interpretation, to overcome which a mere knowledge of Biblical Hebrew is insufficient.

" ' Writing to the finder on the subject, Sefior Netto expresses the opinion that the voyage The records of all these nations go back, we say, to B.C. 2000 or 2700,— we there come to a dead halt,— we cannot go any farther. If we examine their religion, their language, their architecture, we find that they are related. If we question them of their origin, most of them tell us of a Deluge, some of them of an Ark and Eight Persons. Such being the facts, we may ask such a one as Sir John Lubbock what he means by his Stone Age, and his Bronze Age, and his Iron No stone Age in Age. The Egyptians certainly had no Stone Age ; they Egypt. were born civilized. Stone implements occur in Egypt, but there is no evidence that they are older than the metal implements which we know were employed to construct the Pyramids.

And so in Babylonia we find traces of iron and bronze from the very first, and, associated with them, implements of stone. There is not a particle of evidence that man in his earliest seats in the East was a savage. It is certain that the Egyptians, the Arabians, the Babylonians, the Aryans of India, set out as civilized races. The remark is, perhaps, true of the Chinese, and of the Scythians. In the beginning, among some of them, certain tribes may have followed a pastoral life ; in the main the arts and the building of cities appear at once. There is nothing back of this civilization, no graduated process from the savage state. Did they pass from the lacustrine or the cave state in a day? Did the Pyramids and the Chaldæan Astronomy emerge from the Danish kjokken-moddings abruptly and instantaneously ?

If not, — and of course not, — where did the Pyramid-builders and the Phœ nician navigators come from? We can go back to the Circus Maximus and the Aqueducts ; but we can go behind them. Rome had her infancy, — the guilds of Numa Pompilius and the she-wolf. We can go back to Pericles and Phidias and Plato, but we have the gradual development of the Grecian drama before these figures fill the scenes. The Parthenon did not emerge from the primeval night. Giorgione did not commence painting in Venice without some preliminary stages of art. We go back to Ghirlandajo, Angelico da Fiesole, Andrea Orcagna, Giotto, Cimabue, and the Byzantine School. But if we turn to the history of the primitive races, as preserved in their monuments, and in the pages of Manetho and Berosus, we are at the very was made during the reign of the second Hiram, who succeeded Solomon's ally on the throne of Phœnicia.

He explains their crossing, of which they themselves appeared to be unaware, by resort to Maury's observations on oceanic currents. Like Cabral, in fleeing from the storms reigning from the Cape of Good Hope up to near Senegambia, they ste'ft-ed in to the high sea, and, seized by the famous equatorial current, which sometimes flows with extraordinary swiftness, they unexpectedly came upon the Brazilian shores. Sefior Netto writes to Ernest Renan and to Father Barges, giving them some words of his version, and asking their advice how to make his efforts of the most service to science.' '' We know nothing of this, and merely give it for what it is worth. threshold confronted by the colossal Sphinx, the Pyramids, and the Lake of Mœris ; or by the Birs-Nimrud and the ruins of Calah, Asshur, and Resen.

If we come to North and South America, there is nothing to in dicate an older civilization than that of Asia and Africa and American civil- Italy. The islands of the Pacific Ocean, and the American ization. continents, there is little doubt, were settled by the Malays, the Tatar or Scythian (Turanian) race, and perhaps the Hamitic (?) Phœnicians. Even the Negroes from south of Ethiopia and Madagascar are found in the Fiji Islands and in "Central America." It is fashionable now to claim long dates;* but the Phœnician annals do not go up higher than 1500 or 2000 B.C., and yet (as it would seem) the ships of Tyre visited America. Sir John Lubbock says, "We are quite justified in concluding that between B.C. 1500 and B.C. 1200 the Phœnicians were already acquainted with the mineral fields of Spain and Britain," and he thinks it quite probable "they pushed their explorations still farther."

M. Morlot thinks he "found traces of the Phœnicians even in America." Pharaoh Necho, b.c 600, had two great fleets of triremes manned by Phœnician sailors, one upon the Mediterranean and the other upon the Indian Ocean, a detachment of the latter having circumnavigated Africa during his reign. Diodorus Siculus speaks of "a country over against Africa, many days' sail from Libya westward," discovered by the Phœnicians. Humboldt quotes from Plutarch a passage about " a great continent be yond the ocean, called 'the Saturnian continent.' " Claudius Ælianus speaks of a similar continent beyond the Atlantic, "larger than Asia, Europe, and Libya together." Bernard de Sahagun, the leading Spanish authority at the time of the conquest of America, mentions a universal tradition among the natives of New Spain "of a foreign Atlantic colony arriving before the Christian era on the shores of Florida;" all of which is rendered the more probable by the evidence that, prior to the voyage of Columbus, America had been visited by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Irish, the Welsh, and the Northmen, if not by the Basques.

We still ask, Where did these races come from ? Did they have their Iron Age, and their Bronze Age, and their Neolithic, and their Palæolithic * M. Bunsen, for example, treats us to the following delicious nonsense : " After five thousand years from B.C. 19,752, the earliest polarization of religious conscious ness issued in that formation of pure agglutinative speech which was the Eastern polarization of Sinism." Again, he tells us that man was frozen out ofhis Paradise bya convulsion of nature in tltb eleven-thousandth year ofhis existence. This was the Flood, — which did not extend to Egypt, which had been peopled a thousand years before directly from Eden, — yet with Osirian idolaters. From 9086 B.C. to 7231 B.C. it enjoyed a dynasty of sacerdotal kings, followed by elective, and then hereditary princes, down to 3643 B.C., when Menes ascended the throne.

The Exodus took place in the year 1322 B.C., after a sojourn of one thousand four hundred and thirty-four years in Egypt." Age? Did they live in caves, and "bee-hives," and on sea-beaches, feeding on fish, and mussels, and marrow, and human flesh ? Scientific men call us to the record, and refuse to speculate, holding us exclusively to facts. Historical criticism and archæology take us back to the Fourth Dynasty of Manetho and the Third of Berosus, and the East is in a blaze of light ; these are the facts, and the date is certainly not more than 4000 b.c, — in our opinion, not more than 2700 B.C. Neither science nor secular history has any account of what preceded this state of things. It is remarkable that the Book of Genesis, which alone prime™, ml t undertakes to speak, gives just this representation of the the Book of Genbeginning of human history.

We find nothing there about a stone age, or a bone age, or gaunt prehistoric savages cracking the long bones and vertebræ to get at the marrow. We find, before the flood, Cain building a city; in the eighth generation, Jubal, the "father of all such as handle the harp and organ," and his brother, Tubal-Cain, "an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron;" while, after the flood, we find Nimrod, the great-grandson of Noah, "the beginning of whose kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh ;" and Abraham, four hundred years after the flood, going down to Egypt, where he finds an established government and a great kingdom, with all the paraphernalia of a busy and vigorous civil ization. We read, on the other hand, of the Tower of Babel, and of Cherdorlaomer, King of Elam, and his allied kings, making war (in the days of Abraham) with the King of Sodom and the King of Gomorrah.

The ruins of Erech and Calneh, two ofthe cities of Nimrod, are found at the modern Warka and Niffar, the Huruk and Nipur of the Baby lonian inscriptions ; while the Tower of Babel itself seems to have been identified at Birs-Nimrud, by the great French archæologist M. Oppert, who has found an inscription which he describes as Nebuchadnezzar's own account ofthe building ofthe temple of Bel-Merodach, which was founded on the ruins of the citadel of Nimrod. Nebuchadnezzar gives a particular description of his great temple, "ofthe Seven Lights ofthe Earth," and says, "We say for the other, that is, this edifice, the House of the Seven Lights of the Earth, the most ancient monument of Bor sippa; a former king built it (they reckon forty-two ages), but he did not complete its head. Since a remote time people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words."* Abydenus, who is said to have drawn his narrative directly from Berosus, the Babylonian historian, notices the same event: "At that time the men of antiquity are said to have been so puffed up with strength and haughtiness, that they de spised even the gods, and undertook to build that lofty obelisk, which * See Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, art.

Confusion of Tongues. is now called Babylon. And when they had already built it up into the heavens, almost as high as the gods, the gods, by the help of the wind, smote the well-contrived but futile work, and prostrated it to the ground. And that rubbish took the name of Babel. For up to that time men relied upon the use of one language ; but then a various and discordant confusion of tongues was sent by the gods upon those who had hereto fore used but one language." See Muller's Fragm. Hist. Gr., vol. iv. p. 282, F. 26. The Book of Genesis, we remark, gives precisely this representation of the beginnings of human history, which is thus so remarkably cor roborated even in the details. It represents Egypt, and Babylon, and Assyria, and Ethiopia (Southern Arabia and Abyssinia) as established kingdoms from the very first ; it affirms a knowledge of the arts of civilized life ; it quietly draws a most improbable picture.

The trouble with the Biblical account is to understand how the human race could have multiplied so rapidly and made such progress in a few centuries. But even so it seems to have been. The only explanation of this wonderful knowledge on the part of these primeval races is the suggestion that Noah and his sons inherited the same from the antediluvian world, and that the patriarchs were also, by natural endowment and by virtue of the experience acquired in a life of from four to six hundred years, very remarkable men. However this may be (and it is no doubt the fact), the Mosaic history and the Egyptian and Babylonian records tell precisely the same story. Speaking of Egypt, an intelligent historian remarks, "In the formative arts she has had no superior except her pupil, Greece, and in majestic grandeur no rival ; there is even a delicate beauty in her best colossi, partly con cealed by their vast size and their attitudes of repose ; and it has been said by no mean judge, ' Give motion to these rocks, and Greek art would be surpassed.' " This art was at its highest point of excellence about 2250 B.C. In one respect it was a Stone Age: architecture and sculpture afforded among the grandest forms the world has ever seen.

Of the Babylonian astronomy we are told that "it reached the highest perfection attainable without the aid of optical instruments." The Chaldæans were acquainted with the synodic period of the moon, th*e equinoctial and solstitial points, the true length of the year, as de pendent on the annual course ofthe sun, and even the precession ofthe equinoxes. They calculated eclipses (which implies a knowledge ofthe "golden cycle" of two hundred and twenty-three lunations); their observations of the apparent motions of the sun, moon, arid planets imply a careful identification of the fixed stars ; and there is little doubt that they invented the system of constellations, of which mention is made in the Book of Job. It is true that there is no positive evidence that the astronomy of the Babylonians reaches back to the earliest ages.

But it is also true that we find among the ruins at Abu-Shahrein on the Euphrates the remains of a "temple-tower," apparently belonging to the earliest period, the platform of which is cased with a stone wall, in some places twenty feet thick, while the stairs leading up to the first story are made of blocks of polished marble, fastened by copper bolts above the steps of sun-dried bricks. This is merely a single example. The most ancient tombs contain vessels and lamps of pottery, chains, nails, fish-hooks of bronze, leaden pipes and jars, armlets, bracelets, and finger-rings of iron, along with knives, arrow-heads, hatchets, and other implements oi flint. The clay tablets contain bas-reliefs, and there are curious cylindrical seals or signets made of serpentine, chalcedony, jasper, etc. The art of writing, as in Egypt, goes back also to the most ancient period.

On the bricks of the oldest cities we find letters in use, and that not in their first stage ; that is, not hieroglyphic. If, then, man existed a million or a quarter of a million of years ago, as Sir Tohn Lubbock and Sir Charles Lyell affirm, where Modern Archæ- J oiogy cannot exare their monuments and their records? Is it probable that plain the absence different tribes in different parts of the earth, lived on from of records and monuments prior the Pliocene and the Miocene ages, through the Glacial to the Pyramids peri0d, and for several hundred thousand years after the and the Babylo- . , nian Temple- Glacial period, and left no footprints except a few uncouth towers. fl;nt implements, and then suddenly blazed up into the Pyramids and the abounding remains of the Mesopotamian Valley ?