The Epic of Man [antikvár]

THE HUMAN PLAINS Indian tales often begin with the set formula: "Once there was a poor orphan." Perhaps the phrase does in truth reflect man's eternal vision of himself. He yearns for the lost safety of the old instinctive world he has abandoned. Perhaps, in moments of reflection and nostalgia, there is also evident in the phrase the iron determination of the orphan to win-by magic, by all means that come to hand-his Eden of contentment, his Utopia, the place of peace so long dreamt of by his great visionary teachers. Yet, alas, no more restless and unruly pupil ever sat before great masters than our own human species of today. "It doth not yet appear," said St. John in the New Testament, "what we shall be." The Epic of Man is the account of a still uncompleted but tremendous journey-the journey of man out of darkness into the light of civilization, out of mindless ignorance into a shuddering knowledge of himself and the inescapable fact that the power he has learned to draw from nature has given him, as yet, no comparable mastery over himself. A rich and enriching chronicle, The Epic of Man traces the human story through the long reaches of prehistory to the borders of recorded history. Section I, The Emergence of Man, gives an account of man's earliest years on earth as the anthropologists have so far been able to reconstruct them. In Section II, The Coming of Civilization, the story of ten of the world's first great civilizations is unfolded. Section III, Living Societies of the Past, presents isolated groups of people-the primitive Aborigines of Australia, the Caribou Eskimos of Canada, the Berbers of the Dades River Valley in Morocco, the Newars of Nepal-which have survived in the modern world little changed from that earlier world of prehistoric man and early civilization which forms the central subject of the book. The cultures of these people, who now face the challenge of modern technological civilization, are reminders of how far the journey of man has carried him. The history of man's evolution on this planet is a short history by geological standards, yet it covers approximately 15 million years of time. Five thousand years of intermittent written records cover man's known history, then trail off into the silence of the Stone Age hunter's world. For the rest of the 15 million years of human evolution, during which our bodies and our brains were drastically altered, we have today only a few handfuls of broken teeth, a few battered skulls, the magical carvings and paintings of dead hunters, and a paucity of rude tools to tell the story of the way we crawled upward from the jungle darkness, and of the way our bodies were transformed in the course of that long journey. The science which has revealed this story, insofar as we have been able to piece it together, is a recent science. Because it has been based upon the study of human remains that are infrequently discovered, and often in remote, uncivilized areas, progress has not been rapid, nor are we in a position at the present time to recount fully every aspect of the emergence of man from the animal world about him. Because we are men, because we are curious, and because we are enormously aware of time and its relation to man in the universe, we have learned to search consciously for the shaped flint, and out of hard-gained anatomical knowledge, to restore the features of beings (I hesitate even to use the word men) whose like will never be seen upon the earth again. And we have learned to reconstruct the complex features of lost civilizations from the buried fragments that have survived their ruin. The restoration of those vanished faces, of those forgotten cultures, the ability to get from them significant aspects of the human adventure depends first upon the use of archaeology as a kind of detective science. The painstaking findings of archaeologists and paleontologists have been incorporated in the paintings in The Epic of Man, which reconstruct scenes in the lives of fossil men and ancient civilizations. The photographs that accompany these paintings provide a visual record of the actual discoveries made by the archaeologists. TO lend coherency to the archaeological record, to what would otherwise be a collection of mere unrelated facts, a guiding principle is required. This guiding principle is, of course, evolution. By its demonstration of the community of descent of all living forms, the theory enables us to recognize across the gulf of time the altered faces of precursors which would otherwise remain meaningless and unrecognizable. And just as our bodies may be read as a projection from the mysterious past, so human cultures are seen to be subject, also, to certain rules of development, reflecting their origin from the even more mysterious interplay of unique, individual minds. Some cultures may dream millennia away in small and simple circumstances close to the earth, as is true of certain remote peoples today. Again, a twist of technology, the force of a religious drive, may create a gigantic growth which after centuries of creative effort freezes into a hardened mold of custom or collapses in ways which seem quite unpredictable. The story of man, as can be seen from the pages that follow, may be read from many diverse angles. It may be seen as the consequence of an unspecialized forelimb, no longer used for walking and thus left free to explore and meddle with the surrounding universe. It may be read as the result of the transmission, by the symbol-using brain, of the social consciousness through time; or as a succession of economic stages, allowing for the increasing division and specialization of labor. Or the germ of the story may be found in that curious potential which seems to allow the brain of Homo sapiens to grasp any principle, any intuition which enables him to modify and transform either his exterior environment or his interior world of dreams. Man is, in fact, a dream animal, and this book is an account of some of the more important of his dreams-dreams of power, whether spiritual or temporal; dreams of the creative artist who has