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Abstract
Table of Contents
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
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Part III: Establishing a Paleolithic
I.Q.
Epilogue
TO MANY PEOPLE
who have read this essay, there may be a number of confusing
issues. It is well, therefore, to state very briefly what we
do know with reasonable certainty about Early Man. In the first
place, from the Christian view of history, there were strictly
speaking "no prehistoric times." Within Adam's lifetime,
men multiplied until there was sufficient population to support
specialized industries, metallurgy, tent-making, music, agriculture,
and indeed city life -- for Adam's son built a city. There is
no doubt that the word "city" in this context means
merely a small cohesive body of people living in a confined area
with some measure of community life and a shared culture. Cities
in those days often occupied only a few acres of land. This is
one fact.
A second virtual certainty is that
the same situation repeated itself after the Flood when the population
had once again been reduced to a single family. Only, this time,
every member of this family already had a certain cultural heritage
which must have been quite advanced in nature.
A third assumption is that as this
second start in populating the world was made, individuals, families,
and splinter groups would break away from the central nucleus
and begin the pioneering of the world. There is no reason to
suppose that people were essentially different in this respect
than they are today. There are always those who move out, who
have the urge to explore, who seek to be free and alone. In spite
of the hostile nature of the environment, an Eskimo young man
will take his wife and head for open country and establish himself,
perhaps hundreds of miles from any other fixed settlement. It
is even more certain that men would do the same where the environment
was temperate and pleasant, and offered every possibility of
survival, just as it was inviting to those pioneers in the New
World who felt the call of the wide open spaces. It is said that
Daniel Boone, when he observed one morning smoke of a fire on
the dim, distant horizon, said to his wife, "We're moving
on; it's getting crowded." And, as
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I have indicated, there
is no reason to suppose that human nature has changed in this
respect very much.
Thus, as the population at the
centre gradually grew, individuals and families would undoubtedly
move further and further out, seeking freedom from crowding or
interference until both Europe and the Far East, and even the
New World, would begin to receive its first-comers. As Kenneth
Macgowan has pointed out, (75) a man could easily make the trip from China, across
the Bering Sea, and well down into the New World in a period
of twenty years.
But pioneers like this would inevitably
be forced to surrender many elements of their cultural heritage.
The circumstances are such, as we visualize it, that they would
not only, in the very nature of the case, tend to lose those
elements of culture which they had once shared at the centre
but which no longer contributed directly towards their survival.
But they would retain those elements which did contribute
to their survival. And the basic character of these retained
elements would naturally, at least at the beginning, show many
similarities wherever men settled, for initially they sprang
from the same pool of resources. This is precisely what is found:
namely, that the shape and conception of many basic tools, weapons,
and artifacts is remarkably similar in areas of the world as
widely separated as Central Europe and South America. This has
sometimes been attributed to the fact that the same tasks had
to be performed by people of like ways of thinking, using materials
which were everywhere the same. However, there are a very large
number of parallelisms in structural form and embellishment which
are not easily accounted for on this basis.
Now to my mind, for the most part
it is with these early pioneering and adventurous individuals
that we have to do when we are discussing Paleolithic Man. I
realize only too well that this runs very much counter to the
whole modern conception of what Paleolithic Man represents in
terms of evolution and prehistoric processes generally. But I
think it is easier in many respects to view the fossil remains
of all individuals who are now generally classed as genuinely
human as what might be called waifs and strays, fragments of
a completely human population thriving at the centre and increasingly
thinned out and reduced in cultural stature towards the periphery.
(76)
One thing seems to me quite certain,
and this is that it is impossible on the basis of the head shape
or size, or on the basis of
75. Macgowan, Kenneth, Early Man in the
New World, Macmillan, 1950, p.3 and map on p.4.
76. "A Study of the Names in Genesis 10," Part II in
Noah's Three Sons, vol.1 in The Doorway papers Series..
pg.2
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cultural remains however
simple they may be, to say with any assurance that this is evidence
of man in the making. It is just as likely to be, indeed more
likely to be, man in the breaking. Certainly if we allow the
present to speak with respect to the past, this is easy to substantiate,
as this essay has shown. History provides us with no solid evidence
that a human being or even a small family of human beings as
reduced in circumstances as fossil man seems to have been, has
ever by a natural process of evolution evolved into a highly
cultured society. Yet there is no evidence, either, that people
so reduced are potentially any less completely human than ourselves.
The simplest proof of this last
observation is the testimony of missionaries over the past century
or so, and this testimony serves also to provide us with a useful
definition of what constitutes true humanness.
When Darwin visited the tip of
South America, he found there groups of people living in an environment
and under conditions so inimical, so restricting, and so full
of discomfort that he found it difficult to understand why human
beings, if they were truly human beings, would stay there,
or indeed could survive. The Tierra del Fuegians were forced
by circumstance to spend the larger part of their lives in open
canoes in which the children grew up, the adults slept and cooked
and spent their daily lives, and the aged died. These people,
as a consequence, grew up deformed and with an extraordinarily
limited experience. They seldom congregated in groups beyond
the size of a family and their artifacts were simple in the extreme.
Darwin himself being, of course, well-bred in the ways of the
cultured European, was unable to see in these people the human
qualities and the social "attainments" which later
revealed themselves to a more perceptive student like Bridges.
(77)
And since at that time, descriptions
of the weird and wonderful ways of primitives from other parts
of the world were much in vogue and were eagerly read by many
people who felt vastly superior by the reading of them, there
was a tendency to exaggerate a little bit and to present the
picture of such people in the worst (or best -- depending on
how you look at it) possible light. Sir John Lubbock said of
the Tierra del Fuegians: (78)
These poor wretches were stunted in
their growth, their hideous
77. The Rev. Thomas Bridges, a Scottish missionary,
arrived among these people in 1863 and spent the rest of a long
vigorous life caring for them. Some of his perceptive writing
on these people will be found in C. S. Coon A General Reader
in Anthropology, Holt, New York, 1948, pp.84-116.
78. Lubbock, Sir John, Prehistoric Times, New Science
Library, Hill and Co., New York, 1904, p.301.
pg.3
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faces daubed with white paint, their
skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant,
their gestures violent and without dignity. Viewing such men,
one can hardly make oneself believe they are fellow creatures
and inhabitants of the same world.
Sir John Lubbock
was, of course, expressing a secondhand view which allowed him
a certain amount of liberty, but this was not true of Charles
Darwin. In his Journal of Researches he wrote:
(79)
It was without exception the
most curious and interesting spectacle I ever beheld. I could
not have believed how wide was the difference between savage
and civilized man. Their very attitudes were abject. . . .
The language of these people, according
to our notions, scarcely deserves to be called articulate. Captain
Cook has compared it to a man clearing his throat!
We know now
that such opinions were misrepresentations and resulted from
a quite insufficient understanding of the true nature and character
of these people and their language. Better acquaintance showed
that these people were not at all inarticulate, their language
containing probably as many words as Shakespeare was able to
command. (80) And,
of course, they were in full possession of one art which Coon
believes to be the only absolutely open and shut mark of distinction
between man and the animals, namely, fire. (81) Nevertheless, while we have today a much higher opinion
of the intelligence of these primitive people, though they are
very nearly extinct, yet it must be admitted that they remain
among the most primitive people in the world.
It was not long before the challenge
of such a community presented itself to Christian people, and
a mission was organized. When Darwin heard of it, he must have
smiled to himself for he was confident that such a mission was
a fool's errand; it could not possibly succeed. The story of
what was achieved by the first missionaries is, in some respects,
a little difficult to sort out precisely, because the events
which followed have been presented to the public in two rather
different, and in some respects, contradictory ways. We are told
by anthropologists of how the pattern of living which these people
had developed and by which they had found the way to survive
was so disrupted that the whole moral fabric of the society was
undermined. Those who had at first been received with open arms
and whose ministry had led to a number of conversions were viciously
turned
79. Darwin, Sir Charles, Journal of Researches,
Ward, Lock and Co., New York, 1845, p.206.
80. Bridges (see ref.77) composed a dictionary of some 30,000
Tierra del Fuegian words.
81. Coon, C. S., Story of Man, Knopf., New York, 1962,
p.63.
pg.4
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upon and destroyed. According
to some versions they were actually eaten by the natives.
However, if we allow Darwin to
speak, it would appear that in the comparatively brief interval
between the first coming of the missionaries and the final influx
of the White Man's pagan civilization, some remarkable changes
for the good were effected among these people. Some years later,
Darwin wrote to Admiral Sir James Sullivan who was greatly interested
in the Tierra del Fuegian Mission: (82)
I had never heard a word about
the success of the Tierra del Fuego Mission. It is most wonderful
and shames me, as I had always prophesied utter failure. It is
a grand success. I shall feel proud if your Committee think fit
to elect me an honourary member of your Society.
With all good wishes, and affectionate
remembrances from ancient days,
Believe me, my dear Sullivan,
your sincere friend,
Charles Darwin.
The missionary
efforts undertaken by Bishop Stirling are enthrallingly set forth
in a book by his son, A. M. W. Stirling, entitled Life's Little
Day. Here is revealed how impossible Darwin felt it would
be to humanize these natives but Stirling records the fact, which
we have already noted, that subsequently Darwin became an annual
subscriber to the orphanage of the South American Society. (83) The true humanness of
these lowest and most primitive of people is proved beyond doubt
by the fact that they could respond to the claims of Jesus Christ,
the only perfect Human Being we have knowledge of. When Captain
Cook visited one particular island, he named it Savage Island
because the people were so fierce that it was impossible for
him to land among them. Later a John Williams tried to evangelize
them but was driven off. But in due time, a converted Samoan
made a journey of three hundred miles to try to win them for
Christ. Within twelve years, out of the 5,000 inhabitants of
the island, only eight remained actively heathen. The people
as a whole became transformed into a proverbially kind and hospitable
community and, according to accounts, they sent every year the
sum of £400 (over $1000 ) to the London Missionary Society.
When a ship was required for a New Guinea Mission, costing £500,
they voluntarily undertook to raise the whole amount. When a
Home Missionary Group sent £50 to them to meet some extra
expenses, the islanders sent it back with thanks, preferring
to complete the work themselves. By that
82. This letter is from the biography
of Darwin written by his son, Sir Francis.
83. C. W. H. Amos, D.D., in a letter to the Editor, The English
Churchman and St. James' Chronicle, Jan. 16, 1959, p.9.
pg.5
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time thirty married teachers
had gone out from that island to New Guinea. (84) Once again, the transforming power of the gospel
was proved among people who must have seemed otherwise lacking
in humanness and utterly savage.
Here, then, we have the basis for
a definition of man. Man is the one creature on earth who can
respond to the love of God in Christ and be redeemed, knowingly,
effectively, transformingly, and gloriously. Man is the only
creature capable of sainthood, the only creature in whom the
perfect Man, Christ Jesus, can appropriately re-incarnate Himself
in a measure. This is the answer to the question, What is Man?
It makes no difference how ugly, how deformed, how ignorant,
how progressive, how backward, how anything, a creature is. If
he is redeemable, he is man. And man's identity as man and his
true potential does not depend upon his I.Q., the nobility of
his countenance, the complexity of his culture, or the period
of world history in which he was born, but on whether the Lord
Jesus Christ, the only Perfect Man, can, with dignity and propriety,
take up residence in his heart. All other standards of judgment
are hopelessly inadequate. Until we know, which we cannot yet,
whether Paleolithic Man was redeemable, we cannot know whether
he was truly man. This is the simple truth of the matter and
every effort to establish the status of fossil man by any other
terms of reference will suffer from uncertainty until the Day
of Judgment. But in the meantime, we should be very careful not
to misjudge by using standards which it can be shown are quite
inadequate.
84. Orr, James, God's Image in Man, Eerdmans,
Grand Rapids, 1948, p.164.
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Copyright © 1988 Evelyn White. All rights
reserved
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