Creation and Its Records

CHAPTER VIII.

_FUR­THER DIF­FI­CUL­TIES RE­GARD­ING THE HIS­TO­RY OF MAN_.

There are, how­ev­er, some oth­er mat­ters con­nect­ed with the his­to­ry of man on the globe, un­con­nect­ed with psy­cho­log­ical de­vel­op­ment, but which de­mand no­tice, as mak­ing the ar­gu­ment against an un­de­signed, un­aid­ed de­vel­op­ment of man a cu­mu­la­tive one. It is urged that what­ev­er may be thought of the con­nec­tion of man with the an­imal cre­ation, at any rate the re­ceived Chris­tian be­lief re­gard­ing the ori­gin of man--es­pe­cial­ly his late ap­pear­ance on the scene--is con­trary to known facts, and that we have to mount up to a vast ge­olog­ic an­tiq­ui­ty to ac­count for what is known from ex­humed re­mains in caves and lake dwellings, and the like.

Now no one pre­tends that the his­to­ry of man is free from doubt and dif­fi­cul­ty, but the doubt and dif­fi­cul­ty are not con­fined to the “or­tho­dox.” For the in­fer­ences to be drawn from the ex­humed re­mains are equal­ly doubt­ful what­ev­er views be adopt­ed.

I shall not go in­to great length on this sub­ject, part­ly be­cause some re­cent pop­ular tracts of Canon Rawl­in­son, Mr. R.S. Pat­ti­son, and oth­ers, have al­ready made the or­di­nary read­er fa­mil­iar with the main out­lines of the sub­ject; and still more be­cause, be the views of ar­chae­ol­ogists what they may, it is im­pos­si­ble for any ra­tio­nal per­son to con­tend ei­ther that they can be re­duced to any­thing like uni­ty among them­selves, or that they lead to any con­clu­sion favourable to the be­lief in the self-​caused and un­de­signed evo­lu­tion of man.

It may be re­gard­ed as known, that at the dawn of his­to­ry, mankind was pass­ing through what may be called a Bronze age, in which weapons of bronze were used be­fore tools of iron were in­vent­ed. But this age was pre­ced­ed by one in which even bronze was un­known. Stone im­ple­ments, and some of bone and horn, were alone used. It is al­so well as­cer­tained that there were two _wide­ly di­vid­ed_ stone ages. The lat­ter, dis­tin­guished by the pol­ish­ing of the stones, is de­scribed as the _ne­olith­ic_; the for­mer, in which flint and oth­er hard stone frag­ments were mere­ly chipped or flaked to an edge, is called the _palae­olith­ic_.

It is hard­ly con­tend­ed that the ne­olith­ic age could have been more than four or five thou­sand years ago. There is al­ways the great­est dif­fi­cul­ty in fix­ing any dates be­cause from the na­ture of the case writ­ten records are ab­sent, and the stages of growth in the his­to­ry of peo­ples over­lap so.

We know that sharp flakes of stone were still used for knives in the time of Moses and Joshua. We are not out of the stone age yet, as re­gards some por­tions of the globe; and it is quite pos­si­ble that parts of the earth, not so very re­mote, may have been still in the midst of a stone age when As­syr­ia, Chal­daea, and Egypt were com­par­ative­ly high­ly civ­ilized.

It is al­so fair­ly cer­tain that be­tween the ne­olith­ic or smooth-​stone age, and the palae­olith­ic, cer­tain im­por­tant ge­olog­ical changes took place, though those changes were not such as to have de­mand­ed any very great length of time for their ac­com­plish­ment.

The palae­olith­ic stone im­ple­ments are found in riv­er grav­els and clays, along the high­er lev­els of our own Thames Val­ley, that of the Somme in France, and in oth­er places. They are al­so found at the bot­tom of var­ious nat­ural cav­erns.

No hu­man bones have been found as yet with the im­ple­ments, but the bones of large num­bers of an­imals have. And it seems cer­tain that the men who made the im­ple­ments were con­tem­po­raries of the an­imals, be­cause in the lat­er part of the age, at any rate, they drew or scratched like­ness­es of the an­imals on bone. Among these rep­re­sen­ta­tions are fig­ures of the _mam­moth_ an ex­tinct form well known to the read­er by de­scrip­tion and mu­se­um spec­imens of re­mains.

The an­imals con­tem­po­rary with these primeval men were the mam­moth, species of rhinoceros and hip­popota­mus, the “sabre-​toothed” li­on, the cave-​bear, the rein­deer, be­sides ox­en, hors­es, and oth­er still sur­viv­ing forms.

In his ad­dress to the British As­so­ci­ation in 1881 Sir John Lub­bock called at­ten­tion to the fact that these an­imals ap­pear to in­di­cate both a hot and a cold cli­mate, and he re­ferred to the fact (known to as­tronomers) that the earth pass­es through pe­ri­ods of slow change in the ec­cen­tric­ity of its or­bit, and in the obliq­ui­ty of the eclip­tic. The re­sult of the lat­ter con­di­tion is, to pro­duce pe­ri­ods of about 21,000 years each, dur­ing one-​half of which the North­ern hemi­sphere will be hot­ter, and in the oth­er the South­ern. At present we are in the for­mer phase.

But the obliq­ui­ty of the eclip­tic does not act alone; the ec­cen­tric­ity of the or­bit pro­duces an­oth­er ef­fect, name­ly, that when it is at a min­imum the dif­fer­ence be­tween the tem­per­atures of the two hemi­spheres is small, and as the ec­cen­tric­ity in­creas­es, so does the dif­fer­ence. At the present time the ec­cen­tric­ity is rep­re­sent­ed by the frac­tion .016. But about 300,000 years ago the ec­cen­tric­ity would have been as great as .26 to .57. The re­sult, it is ex­plained, would have been not a uni­form heat or cold, but ex­tremes of both; there would prob­ably have been short but very hot sum­mers, and long and in­tense­ly cold win­ters.

This, Sir John Lub­bock thought, might ac­count for the co-​ex­is­tence of both hot and arc­tic species, like the hip­popota­mus and rhinoceros on the one hand, and the musk-​ox and the rein­deer on the oth­er.

But such con­sid­er­ations re­al­ly help us lit­tle. In the first place, it is on­ly an as­sump­tion that the fos­sil hip­popota­mus _was_ an an­imal of a hot cli­mate--it does not in any way fol­low from the fact that the now ex­ist­ing species is such; nor if we make the as­sump­tion, does it ex­plain how, if the hot sum­mer suf­ficed for the trop­ical hip­popota­mus, it man­aged to sur­vive the long and cold win­ters which suit­ed the arc­tic species.

More­over, no such cal­cu­la­tions can re­al­ly be made with ac­cu­ra­cy: we do not know what oth­er as­tro­nom­ical facts may have to be tak­en in­to con­sid­er­ation, nor can we say when such “pe­ri­ods” as those which are so graph­ical­ly de­scribed, be­gan or end­ed.

In this very in­stance, we know that the mam­moth on­ly be­came ex­tinct in com­par­ative­ly re­cent times, since spec­imens have been found in Siberia, with the hair, skin, and even flesh, en­tire­ly pre­served. Grant­ed that the in­tense cold of the Siberi­an ice ef­fect­ed this, it is im­pos­si­ble to ad­mit more than a lim­it­ed time for the preser­va­tion--not hun­dreds of thou­sands of years. Pro­fes­sor Boyd Dawkins is sure­ly right in stat­ing that the cal­cu­la­tions of as­tron­omy af­ford us no cer­tain aid at present in this in­quiry.

As re­gards the ge­olog­ical in­di­ca­tions of age, the best au­thor­ity seems to point to the first ap­pear­ance of man in the post-​glacial times: that is to say, that the grav­els in which the palae­olith­ic im­ple­ments are found were de­posit­ed by the ac­tion of fresh wa­ter af­ter the great glacial pe­ri­od, when, at any rate, North­ern Eu­rope, a great part of Rus­sia, all Scan­di­navia, and part of North Amer­ica were cov­ered with ice­fields, the great glaciers of which left their mark in the nu­mer­ous scoop­ings out of ravines and lake beds and in the rais­ing of banks and mounds, the de­posit of boul­ders, and the stri­ation of rocks _in situ_, which so many dis­tricts ex­hib­it.

The few in­stances in which at­tempts have been made, in Italy or else­where, to ar­gue for a pliocene man (i.e. in the up­per­most group of the ter­tiary) have end­ed in fail­ure, at least in the minds of most nat­ural­ists com­pe­tent to judge.

One of the most typ­ical in­stances of the po­si­tion of the im­ple­ment age has been dis­cov­ered by Fraas at Shüssen­ried in Suabia; here the re­mains of tools and the bones of an­imals (prob­ably killed for food) were found in holes made in the glacial _débris_.

But here, again, it is im­pos­si­ble to say when this glacial age ter­mi­nat­ed, and whether man might not have been liv­ing in oth­er more favoured parts while it was whol­ly or par­tial­ly con­tin­uing.

In Scan­di­navia no palae­olith­ic stone im­ple­ments have been found, from which it may be in­ferred that the glacial pe­ri­od con­tin­ued there dur­ing the ages when palae­olith­ic man hunt­ed and dwelt in caves in the oth­er coun­tries where his re­mains oc­cur.

The best au­thor­ities do not sup­pose that the men _orig­inat­ed_ in the lo­cal­ities where the tools are found; and there is so lit­tle known about the ge­ol­ogy of Cen­tral Asia (for ex­am­ple) that it is im­pos­si­ble to say whether tribes may not have wan­dered from some oth­er places not af­fect­ed by the glacia­tion we have spo­ken of.

Again, the grav­els and brick earths con­tain­ing the tools are just of the kind which de­fy at­tempts to say how long it took to de­posit and ar­range them.

It may be tak­en as cer­tain, that af­ter the one age ceased and the first men ap­peared, the beds in which their relics oc­cur have been raised vi­olent­ly, and again de­pressed and sub­ject­ed to great flush­es and floods of wa­ter. The caves have been up­heaved, and the grav­els are found chiefly along the val­leys of our present rivers, but at a much high­er lev­el, show­ing that there was both a high­er lev­el of the soil it­self and a much greater vol­ume of wa­ter.

The Straits of Dover were formed dur­ing this pe­ri­od.

But none of these changes re­quired a very long time; and if we can trace back the lat­er stone age, which shows re­mains of pot­tery and oth­er proofs of greater civ­iliza­tion, to the dawn of the his­toric pe­ri­od not more than 4000 or 5000 years ago, there is noth­ing in the na­ture of the changes which, as we have stat­ed, in­ter­vened be­tween the palae­olith­ic and ne­olith­ic pe­ri­ods, that need have oc­cu­pied more than a thou­sand or two of years. Up­heavals of stra­ta and dis­rup­tions may be the work of but a short time, or they may be more grad­ual. And as to the ef­fect of wa­ter, that de­pends on its vol­ume and ve­loc­ity; no cer­tain rule can be giv­en. Our own di­rect ex­pe­ri­ence shows that very great changes may take place in a few hun­dred years.

“The es­tu­ar­ies,” re­marks Mr. Pat­ti­son,[1] “around our south-​east­ern coast, which have been filled up in his­tor­ical times, some with­in the last sev­en hun­dred years to a height of thir­ty feet from their sea-​lev­el, by the grad­ual ac­cu­mu­la­tion of soil, now look like sol­id earth in no way dif­fer­ing from the far old­er land ad­join­ing. The har­bours out of which our Plan­ta­genet kings sailed are now firm, well-​tim­bered land. The sea-​chan­nel through which the Ro­mans sailed on their course to the Thames, at Thanet, is now a puny fresh-​wa­ter ditch, with banks ap­par­ent­ly as old as the hills. In Be­de's days, in the ninth cen­tu­ry, it was a sea-​chan­nel three fur­longs wide.”

[Foot­note 1: “Age and Ori­gin of Man”--Present-​Day Tract Se­ries.]

Thus we are in com­plete un­cer­tain­ty as to the date of the palae­olith­ic man, or as to the time nec­es­sary to ef­fect the changes in the sur­face of the earth which in­ter­vened be­tween it and the lat­er stone ages. But there is noth­ing which con­flicts with the pos­si­bil­ity that the whole may have oc­curred with­in some 8,000 years.

For the sup­po­si­tion of Mons. Gabriel Mor­tillet that man has ex­ist­ed for 230,000 years, there is nei­ther ev­idence nor prob­abil­ity. His the­ory is de­rived from an as­sump­tion that the ge­olog­ic changes al­lud­ed to oc­cu­pied an im­mense time; and the fur­ther as­sump­tion (if pos­si­ble still more un­war­rant­ed) that the old race which used the chipped stone tools re­mained sta­tion­ary for a very long pe­ri­od, and very grad­ual­ly im­proved its tools and ul­ti­mate­ly passed in­to the ne­olith­ic stage when the art of pot­tery be­came known, how­ev­er rude­ly.

But, in point of fact, we are not re­quired by our be­lief in Scrip­ture to find any date for the ori­gin of man, at least not with­in any mod­er­ate lim­its (not ex­tend­ing to scores of thou­sands of years). The Bible was not in­tend­ed to en­able us to con­struct a com­plete sci­ence of ge­ol­ogy or an­thro­pol­ogy, and the ut­most that can be got out of the text is that a date can be _sug­gest­ed_ (not proved) for one par­tic­ular fam­ily (that of Adam) by count­ing up the gen­er­ations al­lud­ed to in Holy Writ be­fore the time of Abra­ham. But these are man­ifest­ly record­ed in a brief and epit­omized form; nor do all the ver­sions agree. We may well be­lieve that a watch­ful Prov­idence has tak­en care of the record of in­spi­ra­tion, but we know it has been done by hu­man and or­di­nary agen­cy. The Bible is God's gift to his Church, and the Church has been made in all ages the keep­er of it. Now in the mat­ter of ear­ly dates and num­bers, an unan­imous ver­sion has not been kept. Ac­cord­ing to the con­struc­tion adopt­ed in the Sep­tu­agint, the cre­ation of Adam would go back 7,517 years, while the Vul­gate gives 6,067 years. Dr. Hale's com­pu­ta­tion makes 7,294 years, and the Ussh­eri­an 5,967;[1] the Samar­itan ver­sion is, I be­lieve, fur­ther dif­fer­ent from ei­ther.

As it is, the facts show noth­ing in­con­sis­tent with an ap­prox­ima­tion to these sev­er­al pe­ri­ods.

As to any ab­so­lute date for the ap­pear­ance of man as a species, no cal­cu­la­tion is pos­si­ble, be­cause of a cer­tain doubt, which no one can pre­tend to re­solve, as to whether the Scrip­tures do as­sert the cre­ation of _all_ mankind at any one pe­ri­od. If, ow­ing to more pos­itive dis­cov­er­ies in the fu­ture com­pelling us to put fur­ther back the date of man's first ap­pear­ance up­on earth, we have to sup­pose a be­gin­ning be­fore the time of Adam, we are re­mind­ed that there is an al­lu­sion in the sixth chap­ter of the book called Gen­esis to “the sons of God” and the “daugh­ters of men.” Now this pas­sage can­not con­ceiv­ably re­fer to an­gels; nor can we ig­nore its ex­is­tence, how­ev­er doubt­ful we may feel as to its mean­ing.[2]

[Foot­note 1: I take these fig­ures from Mr. R.S. Pat­ti­son.]

[Foot­note 2: The text which speaks of God mak­ing “of one blood all na­tions for to dwell on the face of the earth,” would nat­ural­ly ap­ply to the races ex­ist­ing when the speak­er ut­tered the words: it would be as un­rea­son­able to press such a text in­to the ser­vice of _any_ the­ory of the cre­ation of man, as it was ab­surd for the In­qui­si­tion to sup­pose that the Psalmist, when as­sert­ing that God had made the “round world so fast that it could not be moved,” was con­tra­dict­ing the fact of the earth's rev­olu­tion round the sun.]

It can hard­ly be de­nied that such a text opens out the _pos­si­bil­ity_ of an ear­li­er race than that of Adam; in that case the cre­ation of Adam would be de­tailed as the cre­ation of the di­rect pro­gen­itor of Noah, whose three sons still give names (in eth­no­log­ical lan­guage) to the main great races of the earth, with whom ex­clu­sive­ly the Bible his­to­ry is con­cerned, and es­pe­cial­ly as the di­rect pro­gen­itor of that race of whom came the Is­raelites, and in due time the promised seed--the Mes­si­ah. I do not say this _is_ so, nor even that I ac­cept the view for my own part; I on­ly al­lude to the pos­si­bil­ity, with­out ig­nor­ing any of the dif­fi­cul­ties--none of which, how­ev­er, are in­su­per­able--which gath­er round it.

It is cer­tain­ly a very re­mark­able fact that all about this re­gion in which the Semitic race orig­inat­ed, tra­di­tions of Cre­ation some­what re­sem­bling the ac­count in Gen­esis, the in­sti­tu­tion of a week of sev­en days, and a Sab­bath or day of rest from labour, ex­ist­ed from very ear­ly times; and with these tra­di­tions, a be­lief in dis­tinct races, one of which owned a spe­cial con­nec­tion with, or re­la­tion to, the Cre­ator. Here I may ap­peal to the work of Mr. George Smith and his dis­cov­er­ies of tablets from the an­cient li­braries of As­syr­ia. Orig­inal­ly, the coun­try to which I have al­lud­ed con­sist­ed of As­syr­ia in the cen­tre and Baby­lo­nia to the south; while to the east of As­syr­ia was a coun­try part­ly plain and part­ly hill, which formed the “plain of Shi­nar” and the hills be­yond oc­cu­pied by Ac­ca­di­an tribes, from whose chief city, Ur, Abra­ham, the fore­fa­ther of the Jews, em­igrat­ed. The As­syr­ian doc­uments are copies of Baby­lo­ni­an orig­inals, but the Baby­lo­ni­an king­dom it­self was a Semitic one found­ed on the ru­ins of an ear­li­er pop­ula­tion, the in­hab­itants of the plain of Shi­nar and the moun­tains be­yond. Some time be­tween 3000 and 2000 B.C. the Semitic con­querors of Baby­lo­nia took pos­ses­sion of the plains, and some time lat­er con­quered al­so the Ac­ca­di­an moun­taineers. The Baby­lo­ni­ans pos­sessed and trans­lat­ed the old Ac­ca­di­an records: the As­syr­ian tablets are most­ly, but not all, copies, again, of the Baby­lo­ni­an tran­scripts. The cel­ebrat­ed “Cre­ation tablets,” which con­tain an ac­count close­ly cor­re­spond­ing to Gen­esis, are among those which were not copied from Ac­ca­di­an orig­inals; and they do not date fur­ther back than the reign of As­sur-​bani-​pal, the Sar­dana­palus of the Greeks; who reigned in the sev­enth cen­tu­ry B.C. They may there­fore be de­rived from the Bible, not the Bible from them. It would seem from some ear­li­er (Ac­ca­di­an) tablets, that a dif­fer­ent ac­count of the Cre­ation ex­ist­ed among them. But though it is doubt­ful how far the Ac­ca­di­ans had pre­served this ac­count, or at least had oth­ers along with it, _they had a sev­en days week_ and _a Sab­bath_. All this points to _one_ orig­inal tra­di­tion, which spec­ified days of cre­ation and a Sab­bath, though it got al­tered and dis­tort­ed, so that the true ac­count was pre­served as one among many lo­cal vari­ations. This goes to prove the im­mense an­tiq­ui­ty of the sto­ry, which is not af­fect­ed by the fact that the ac­tu­al in­scrip­tion of it which we at present have, dates on­ly about 670 B.C. The point here, how­ev­er, in­ter­est­ing in the leg­ends, is that they con­tained the idea of a spe­cial con­nec­tion of one par­tic­ular race with the Cre­ator, and of oth­er races, or of one oth­er race, be­sides.

As far as the pos­si­bil­ity of bring­ing for­ward the his­to­ry of mankind as any aid to the the­ory of Evo­lu­tion is con­cerned, I might have very well let the sub­ject alone, or even no­ticed it more briefly than I have done. For, in truth, there is no _ev­idence_ what­so­ev­er, and all that the de­nier of cre­ation can re­sort to is a sup­posed anal­ogy and a prob­abil­ity that the pe­cu­liar­ities of man could be ac­count­ed for in this way or in that. But the main pur­pose of my brief al­lu­sion is to in­tro­duce the fact that, as far as any ev­idence to the con­trary goes, we have an ab­so­lute­ly sud­den ap­pear­ance of man on the scene, and no kind of tran­si­tion­al form. Not on­ly so, but there is no trace of any grad­ual de­vel­op­ment of man when he did ap­pear. There was the first palae­olith­ic man; then a con­sid­er­able ge­olog­ic per­tur­ba­tion of the earth's sur­face, re­sult­ing in the up­heaval of the cliffs in which the caves of re­mains oc­cur, and in the al­ter­ation of the grav­el beds in which the hu­man re­mains are found; and then the ne­olith­ic age, with its ev­ident­ly greater civ­iliza­tion (as ev­idenced by pot­tery, &c.) con­nect­ed with ear­ly and tra­di­tion­al, but still with re­cent, his­to­ry; but no trace of any de­vel­op­ment of one race in­to the oth­er.

The ab­sence of all pro­gres­sive change is forcibly in­di­cat­ed by the mea­sure­ments of an­cient skulls, which, though not found along with the flint tools, have been found else­where. It has been ful­ly shown that they dif­fer in no re­spect from the skulls of men at the present day; while the skulls of the apes most near­ly an­thro­poid, or al­lied to the hu­man form, re­main as wide­ly sep­arat­ed in brain-​ca­pac­ity as ev­er.[1]

Thus the fact re­mains, that no in­ter­me­di­ate form be­tween the ape and the low­est man has been dis­cov­ered, and that there is noth­ing like any pro­gres­sive de­vel­op­ment in the races of man. These facts, tak­en to­geth­er with what has been brought for­ward in the last chap­ter, show how com­plete­ly the the­ory of the de­scent of man breaks down; how ut­ter­ly un­proved and un­ten­able is the idea that he should have been evolved by nat­ural caus­es and by slow steps from any low­er form of an­imal life.

[Foot­note 1: The go­ril­la has a brain size of 30.51 cu­bic inch­es; the chim­panzee and ourang-​out­ang (in the males) from 25.45 to 27.34 inch­es. Ac­cord­ing to Dr. J. Barnard Davis the av­er­age of the largest class of Eu­ro­pean skulls is 111.99, that of the Aus­tralian 99.35 cu­bic inch­es.]