Asia, The Cradle of Humanity 



287 



tific evidence alread)^ written in entire 

 •^^olumes ; and when interpreted in the 

 light of known human development, it 

 is in significant harmony with the 

 world's oldest lore and earliest litera- 

 ture — for it marks the quarter of the 

 earth glorified as the place of creation 

 in the traditions of the Far East, in the 

 Sacred Books of the East, in Hellenic 

 mythology, in the more mystical por- 

 tions of the Koran, as well as in our own 

 Classic of the Ages, and in the belief of 

 most of humanity. The prevailing faith 

 of mankind is not, indeed, of a kind 

 with the testimony of rocks and fossils; 

 yet the dusty evidence is enlivened b}^ 

 its harmony with the essence of know- 

 ledge summed in the coincident tradi- 

 tions of many peoples. 



COURSE OF HUMAN PROGRESS 



In tracing the obscure trails of early 

 human development, it were well to 

 avoid a notion instinctive to all man- 

 kind, fostered by hero-w^orship and hon- 

 orable regard for worthy grandsires, 

 kept alive by the unassailable doctrines 

 of biology, and adopted by every an- 

 thropologist at the outset of his career 

 (and dropped only by part of them as 

 their studies progress) — i. e., the no- 

 tion that the human genus necessarily 

 sprang from a single parentage, neces- 

 sarily arose in a single place. The fact 

 that the genealogic tree of the biologist 

 is the antithesis, or reverse, of that of 

 the genealogist, receives too little atten- 

 tion : the one begins with a known or 

 assumed primordial form, and divari- 

 cates and diverges forward in time to a 

 diversified progeny ; while the other be- 

 gins with a certain descendant, and bi- 

 furcates and expands backward in time 

 to a diversified ancestry. Now the 

 dominant fact of anthropology — the fact 

 attested by every experience and denied 

 by no observation — is well illustrated 

 by the tree of human genealogy; it is the 



constant co7ivergence of developmental 

 lines, whereby families are united in 

 clans, clans blent into tribes, tribes 

 joined in confederacies, racial lines ob- 

 literated, cities assimilated in states, and 

 states combined in nations. The great 

 fact brought out by the Science of Man 

 is that human stocks, whether of blood 

 or belief, language or industries, are not 

 originating, have not originated since 

 history began, and are steadily blend- 

 ing, running together into that great 

 magma of humanity already encircling 

 the globe and surely pushing into the 

 most distant corners of the remotest 

 lands. How many w^ere the original 

 races no man maj^ say; Keane estimates 

 four primary race-stocks, but this num- 

 ber might be multiplied, probably many 

 times, without violence to any known 

 fact or direct generalization in the en- 

 tire domain of the Science of Man. 

 The Gordian entanglement of innate 

 notion, biologic doctrine, and anthro- 

 pologic observation may not readily be 

 undone; it suffices to sound a warning 

 against the besetting hj^pothesis of mo- 

 nogenesis, and note the greater proba- 

 bility that, just as the inhabitants of 

 India are not a people but many peo- 

 ples, so the ancestry of human Asia is 

 to be traced not so much to. yuan prim- 

 eval as to many men primeval scattered 

 in separate colonies along her fertile and 

 fruitful southern shores during the geo- 

 logicallj' near, but historically remote, 

 period of the later Pliocene. 



Beginning with the Pithecanthropus 

 colony and a dozen or a score others, and 

 assuming that the habits of the proto- 

 t5^pe stood midway between those of the 

 higher anthropoids and surviving sav- 

 ages, various glimpses of the inevitable 

 lines of development may be caught. 

 At first the colonies were clans or en- 

 larged families, something like those of 

 the gorilla, more like those of the Aus- 

 tralian Blackfellow and the American 

 Red man , each antagonistic to all others ; 



