The character of races as influenced by physical environment, natural selection and historical development / by Ellsworth Huntington.

  • Huntington, Ellsworth, 1876-1947.
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The character of races as influenced by physical environment, natural selection and historical development / by Ellsworth Huntington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    scanty grasses are found. Thus in the dry area a new species may arise, while on the outskirts the old species persists. If the dry conditions continue long enough and become extreme enough, the old species may be pushed thousands of miles from its original home. Then the climate may moderate once more, but the old species will not necessarily come back into the old home. That region may be so completely occupied by the new and more highly specialized species that there will be no room for the other. Again there comes a dry period. A still more specialized type of horse is developed, perhaps the one-toed type, succeeding the more primitive three-toed form. It pushes out its predecessor and this predecessor pushes the primitive species still farther. The net result is that among mammals the most primitive forms are usually found either as ancient fossils in old strata near the place where the family originated, or as later fossils in modern strata or even as living species in regions far from their original home. The places where the primitive types are most likely to be found still living are areas of refuge such as tropical forests, isolated peninsulas, islands, or other inaccessible regions protected perhaps by mountains. There they are able to persist either be cause they have not been subjected to an extreme environment greatly different from that in which they originated, or because new types have not been able to drive them out. All this applies to man quite as much as to animals. In fact, the growth of man's intelligence seems to be a wonderful exam ple of the way in which evolution centers in regions of physical extremes and is accelerated by climatic variations. The whole of human history falls within an exceptional period in the earth's physical condition. Ever since the time when the apes first came down out of the trees, the continents have been unusually large, the mountains unusually high, the climate unusually severe, and the variations of climate unusually great. It is difficult to dis abuse ourselves of the idea that the conditions with which we are familiar are those which prevail most widely. Most of the readers of this book are doubtless residents of regions where the