The pedigree of the human race / by Harris Hawthorne Wilder.

  • Harris Hawthorne Wilder
Date:
[1926?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The pedigree of the human race / by Harris Hawthorne Wilder. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and the highest ape, with but a few vocal sounds, and with his clumsy grasp and uncertain use of sticks and other rough objects. Only by the study of the remains of past epochs, the data for which are becoming every year more complete, can this gap be satisfactorily bridged over, and the slow and gradual steps of this process of man-making be determined. Investigated by means of such data, and passing back- wards far beyond the bounds of recorded history, we see Man gradually losing the cloak of civilization which he has formed about him, equipped with fewer and cruder imple- ments, and living in ruder shelters. Iron weapons give place to those of bronze or copper; these to still cruder ones of stone; and as we go ever further into the past, even the art of shaping these becomes gradually lost, until we find man employing the chance forms which a single rude blow may have produced. And accompanying this gradual backward view of the external surroundings of the creature we are studying there come changes in his bodily form and pro- portions. In close correspondence with the gradual inferior- ity of the implements, as we trace the history backwards, comes an equally gradual loss of the finer adjustments of the hands and fingers; the shape of the head becomes more bestial, the brow low and overhanging, the jaw heavy and chinless, the legs curved and the back bowed. The deft hand of modern Alan, and the brain that controls it, have both been gained by age upon age of work and experiment, at first in the crudest sort of way with the crudest of tools. The being with the man-making possibilities has gained his present position step by step, and his isolation from the rest of the brute creation is now due to the extinction of the intermediate stages. Thus Man, in spite of his vast progress, a progress which seems to advance with a continually increasing rapidity, may still be viewed as an animal species, and as such has a definite relationship to certain other forms. This history, of which the portion just outlined forms but a very small
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