THE RISE OF MAN AND MODERN RESEARCH 



By James H. Bbeasted 



[With 7 plates] 



There are few if any men of science to-day who would reject the 

 conclusion that physical man is a product of evolution from lower 

 forms of life. As we look at the subsequent career of early man we 

 find that we know very little about his rise until he enters the His- 

 toric Age, commonly regarded as beginning with European history. 

 Between the emergence of physical man on the one hand and on the 

 other the beginning of the historical period commonly identified with 

 European history, there lies an enormous period of at least a million 

 years, which is to a large extent a gap in our knowledge. Consider 

 that gap for a moment. On the other side of it the bestial savage, 

 Caliban on Setebos, the merely physical man — on the nearer side 

 civilized Europe ! In the tremendous chasm that lies between, falls 

 the entire development of the mind of man, from his emergence as 

 the first implement-making creature, and thence upward through 

 the conquest of civilization to the dawn of European history. In 

 brief, the whole story of man's emergence from the deeps of merely 

 physical existence, the story of the Rise of Man, must be found in 

 the great gap. There lies the triumphant development of the human 

 mind beginning with physical man as a mere mammal struggling 

 for survival among all the other mammals and eventually gaining 

 complete supremacy over them all as he achieved the conquest of 

 civilization. We thus have before us three great periods or processes : 

 First, the rise of life on the earth, culminating in the evolution of 

 physical man; second, the great period which I am calling the Rise 

 of Man, still so vague and obscure in the darkness of our ignorance ; 

 and third, European history, or the history of western man. Since 

 the days of Locke the philosophers have more or less fully recog- 

 nized the fact not only that man arose out of nature but also that 

 man and nature are one. The conclusion was essentially philosoph- 

 ical. Our second period, the Rise of Man, is now yielding the 

 evidence which demonstrates historically that man, with all his men- 

 tal endowment, has arisen out of nature. 



1 Address delivered at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, Wash- 

 ington, D. C, Apr. 27, 1931, and since then edited and brought down to date. 



411 



