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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    tibie in the life of any individual. Perhaps it was never rapid enough so that even if modern man had been there he would have been conscious of it except on the basis of records kept from one generation to another. But ultimately the change cul minated in one of the most perturbed periods the world has ever seen, the Pleistocene glacial period. During at least four epochs, and perhaps in several earlier epochs whose record is lost or not yet known, there were great climatic pulsations which culmi nated in vast continental ice-sheets. To-day we are still living in an unusual period—the last part of an ice age. It is by no means usual for Greenland to be shrouded in ice or for the whole Ant arctic continent to be covered with an ice-sheet. Our great extremes of temperature from summer to winter, as well as our cold oceans, are quite different from the conditions which have ordinarily prevailed. Thus from the standpoint of environment one of the outstanding facts in organic evolution is that during the period of strictly human development the physical environ ment has been unusual; the greatest advances appear to have been made when the environment has been most extreme. The last step in the development of the mental capacities in which man now rejoices was taken during the last ice age, whose wan ing power is still seen in the glaciers not only of Greenland and Antarctica, but even of Norway and the Alps. The preceding outline of biological and geological principles prepares the way for a study of the kind of events that must have happened to early man during the various ice ages. Here, as in the last chapter, our story must consist largely of inferences rather than of historical facts. Only at long intervals have we even the faintest trace of man at this time. In the whole vast continent of Asia there has not yet been found a single authentic trace of man before the last glacial epoch. Nevertheless, on the basis of certain generally accepted principles of ecology and paleontology we can sketch a rough outline of certain steps in man's upward progress. The sketch is like some of the stories of the Bible whose main object is to illustrate broad principles rather than supply an exact account of what actually happened.