The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from Natural Selection

...only affect the mental organization of man. His brain alone would have increased in size and complexity, and his skull cranium would have undergone corresponding changes in form, while the entire physical structure of lower animals was being changed. This allows us to understand how the fossil skulls from Denise and Engis referring to early fossil discovery sites in France and Belgium agree so closely with existing human forms, even though they undoubtedly existed alongside large mammals that are now extinct. The Neanderthal skull may be a specimen from one of the lowest races existing at that time, just as the Australians are considered the lowest of our modern era. We have no reason to suppose that modifications of the mind, brain, and skull could happen faster than those of other parts of the body. Therefore, we must look very far into the past to find man in that early condition where his mind was not yet developed enough to protect his body from the modifying influence of external conditions and the cumulative action of "natural selection."

I believe, therefore, that there is no theoretical original: "a priori" reason why we should not find the remains of man or his tools in the middle or later Tertiary the geological period from approximately 66 million to 2.6 million years ago deposits. The absence of such remains in European layers of this age carries little weight. As we go further back in time, it is natural to suppose that man's distribution across the earth's surface was less widespread than it is today. Besides, Europe was largely submerged during the Tertiary epoch. Although its scattered islands may have been uninhabited by man, it by no means follows that he did not exist at the same time in warm or tropical continents.

If geologists can identify the largest landmasses in the warmer regions of the earth that have not been submerged since the Eocene or Miocene subdivisions of the Tertiary period eras, it is there that we may expect to find some traces of the very early ancestors progenitors of man. In those places, we might trace back the gradually decreasing brain size of former races until we reach a time when the body also begins to differ significantly. At that point, we will have reached the starting point of the human family. Before that period, man did not have enough mental capacity to preserve his body from change; he would, therefore, have been subject to the same relatively rapid modifications of form as other mammals.

If the views I have tried to support here have any foundation, they provide a new argument for placing man apart—not only as the head and peak of the grand series of organic nature, but as, in some sense, a new and distinct order of being. From those infinitely remote ages when the first beginnings rudiments of organic life appeared on earth, every plant and every animal has been subject to one great law of physical change. As the earth has passed through its grand cycles of geological, climatic, and organic progress, every form of life has been subject to its irresistible action. Life has been continually but imperceptibly molded into new shapes to preserve harmony with the ever-changing universe. No living thing could escape this law of its being; none could remain unchanged and live amid the universal change surrounding it.

At length, however, a being came into existence in whom that subtle force we call mind became more important than his mere bodily structure. Though he possessed a naked and unprotected...