The Immense Journey

by Loren Eiseley

  Although there is still much that we do not understand, it is likely that the selective forces working upon the humanization of man lay essentially in the nature of the socio-cultural world itself. Man, in other words, once he had “crossed over” into this new invisible environment, was being as rigorously selected for survival within it as the first fish that waddled up the shore on its fins. I have said that this new world was “invisible.” I do so advisedly. It lay, not so much in his surroundings as in man’s brain, in his way of looking at the world around him and at the social environment he was beginning to create in his tiny human groupings.

  He was becoming something the world had never seen before—a dream animal—living at least partially within a secret universe of his own creation and sharing that secret universe in his head with other, similar heads. Symbolic communication had begun. Man had escaped out of the eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and future. The unseen gods, the powers behind the world of phenomenal appearance, began to stalk through his dreams.

  Nature, one might say, through the powers of this mind, grossly superstitious though it might be in its naïve examination of wind and water, was beginning to reach out into the dark behind itself. Nature was beginning to evade its own limitations in the shape of this strange, dreaming and observant brain. It was a weird multiheaded universe, going on, unseen and immaterial save as its thoughts smoldered in the eyes of hunters huddled by night fires, or were translated into pictures upon cave walls, or were expressed in the trappings of myth or ritual. The Eden of the eternal present that the animal world had known for ages was shattered at last. Through the human mind, time and darkness, good and evil, would enter and possess the world.

  The Victorian biologists, intent upon the nature of the animal struggle for existence, in some degree misread human society and the kind of social selection toward brain enhancement which would be the product of unceasing struggle, not by ax and spear in the war of nature, but in that world of streaming shadows forever hidden behind the forehead of man. It was a struggle for symbolic communication, for in this new societal world communication meant life. The world of instinct was passing. This emergent creature was not whole, was not made truly human until, in infancy, the dreams of the group, the social constellation amidst which his own orbit was cast, had been implanted in the waiting, receptive substance of his brain.

  How did this brain first come? How fast did it come? Probing among rocks and battered skulls, scientists find that the answers are few. There are many living members of the primate order—that order which includes man—who live in groups, but show no signs of becoming men. Their brains bear a family resemblance to our own, but they are not the brains of men. They contain, instead, only the shrewd, wild thoughts that serve to remind us of the solitary door which began to open for us once, and once only, long ago, as the earth swung in some tilted, sunlit orbit far backward on the roads of space.

  If one attempts to read the complexities of the story, one is not surprised that man is alone on the planet. Rather, one is amazed and humbled that man was achieved at all. For four things had to happen, and if they had not happened simultaneously, or at least kept pace with each other, the bones of man would lie abortive and forgotten in the sandstones of the past:

  1. His brain had almost to treble in size.

  2. This had to be effected, not in the womb, but rapidly, after birth.

  3. Childhood had to be lengthened to allow this brain, divested of most of its precise instinctive responses, to receive, store, and learn to utilize what it received from others.

  4. The family bonds had to survive seasonal mating and become permanent, if this odd new creature was to be prepared for his adult role.

  Each one of these major points demanded a multitude of minor biological adjustments, yet all of this—change of growth rate, lengthened age, increased blood supply to the head, moved apparently with rapidity. It is a dizzying spectacle with which we have nothing to compare. The event is complex, it is many-sided, and what touched it off is hidden under the leaf mold of forgotten centuries.

  Somewhere in the glacial mists that shroud the past, Nature found a way of speeding the proliferation of brain cells and did it by the ruthless elimination of everything not needed to that end. We lost our hairy covering, our jaws and teeth were reduced in size, our sex life was postponed, our infancy became among the most helpless of any of the animals because everything had to wait upon the development of that fast-growing mushroom which had sprung up in our heads.

  Now in man, above all creatures, brain is the really important specialization. As Gavin de Beer, Director of the British Museum of Natural History, has suggested, it appears that if infancy is lengthened, there is a correspondingly lengthier retention of embryonic tissues capable of undergoing change.2 Here, apparently, is a possible means of stepping up brain growth. The anthropoid ape, because of its shorter life cycle and slow brain growth, does not make use of nearly the amount of primitive neuroblasts—the embryonic and migrating nerve cells—possible in the lengthier, and at the same time paradoxically accelerated development of the human child The clock in the body, in other words, has placed a limit upon the pace at which the ape brain grows—a limit which, as we have seen, the human ancestors in some manner escaped. This is a simplification of a complicated problem, but it hints at the answer to Wallace’s question of long ago as to why man shows such a strange, rich mental life, many of whose artistic aspects can have had little direct value measured in the old utilitarian terms of the selection of all qualities in the struggle for existence.

  When these released potentialities for brain growth began, they carried man into a new world where the old laws no longer totally held. With every advance in language, in symbolic thought, the brain paths multiplied. Significantly enough, those which are most heavily involved in the life processes, and are most ancient, mature first. The most recently acquired and less specialized regions of the brain, the “silent areas,” mature last. Some neurologists, not without reason, suspect that here may lie other potentialities which only the future of the race may reveal.

  Even now, however, the brain of man, with all its individual never-to-be-abandoned richness, is becoming merely a unit in the vast social brain which is potentially immortal, and whose memory is the heaped wisdom of the world’s great thinkers. The scientist Haldane, brooding upon the future, has speculated that we will even further prolong our childhood and retard maturity if brain advance continues.

  It is unlikely, however, in our present comfortable circumstances, that the pace of human change will ever again speed at the accelerated rate it knew when man strove against extinction. The story of Eden is a greater allegory than man has ever guessed. For it was truly man who, walking memoryless through bars of sunlight and shade in the morning of the world, sat down and passed a wondering hand across his heavy forehead. Time and darkness, knowledge of good and evil, have walked with him ever since. It is the destiny struck by the clock in the body in that brief space between the beginning of the first ice and that of the second. In just that interval a new world of terror and loneliness appears to have been created in the soul of man.

  For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the chill waters, that he had before him an immense journey. Perhaps that same foreboding still troubles the hearts of those who walk out of a crowded room and stare with relief into the abyss of space so long as there is a star to be seen twinkling across those miles of emptiness.

  1 “Note on Absolute Chronology of Human Evolution,” Science 123 (1956), pp. 924–26.

  2 Embryos and Ancestors, rev. ed. (New York, Oxford, 1951), p. 93.

  MAN OF THE FUTURE

  There are days when I may find myself unduly pessimistic about the future of man. Indeed, I will confess that there have been occasions when I sw
ore I would never again make the study of time a profession. My walls are lined with books expounding its mysteries, my hands have been split and raw with grubbing into the quicklime of its waste bins and hidden crevices. I have stared so much at death that I can recognize the lingering personalities in the faces of skulls and feel accompanying affinities and repulsions.

  One such skull lies in the lockers of a great metropolitan museum. It is labeled simply: Strandlooper, South Africa. I have never looked longer into any human face than I have upon the features of that skull. I come there often, drawn in spite of myself. It is a face that would lend reality to the fantastic tales of our childhood. There is a hint of Wells’s Time Machine folk in it—those pathetic, childlike people whom Wells pictures as haunting earth’s autumnal cities in the far future of the dying planet.

  Yet this skull has not been spirited back to us through future eras by a time machine. It is a thing, instead, of the millennial past. It is a caricature of modern man, not by reason of its primitiveness but, startlingly, because of a modernity outreaching his own. It constitutes, in fact, a mysterious prophecy and warning. For at the very moment in which students of humanity have been sketching their concept of the man of the future, that being has already come, and lived, and passed away.

  We men of today are insatiably curious about ourselves and desperately in need of reassurance. Beneath our boisterous self-confidence is fear—a growing fear of the future we are in the process of creating. In such a mood we turn the pages of our favorite magazine and, like as not, come straight upon a description of the man of the future.

  The descriptions are never pessimistic; they always, with sublime confidence, involve just one variety of mankind—our own—and they are always subtly flattering. In fact, a distinguished colleague of mine who was adept at this kind of prophecy once allowed a somewhat etherealized version of his own lofty brow to be used as an illustration of what the man of the future was to look like. Even the bald spot didn’t matter—all the men of the future were to be bald, anyway.

  Occasionally I show this picture to students. They find it highly comforting. Somebody with a lot of brains will save humanity at the proper moment. “It’s all right,” they say, looking at my friend’s picture labeled “Man of the Future.” “It’s O.K. Somebody’s keeping an eye on things. Our heads are getting bigger and our teeth are getting smaller. Look!”

  Their voices ring with youthful confidence, the confidence engendered by my persuasive colleagues and myself. At times I glow a little with their reflected enthusiasm. I should like to regain that confidence, that warmth. I should like to but …

  There’s just one thing we haven’t quite dared to mention. It’s this, and you won’t believe it. It’s all happened already. Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth.

  Where did it get him? Nowhere. Maybe there isn’t any future. Or, if there is, maybe it’s only what you can find in a little heap of bones on a certain South African beach.

  Many of you who read this belong to the white race. We like to think about this man of the future as being white. It flatters our ego. But the man of the future in the past I’m talking about was not white. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child’s face. He was the end evolutionary product in a direction quite similar to the one anthropologists tell us is the road down which we are traveling.

  In the minds of many scholars, a process of “foetalization” is one of the chief mechanisms by which man of today has sloughed off his ferocious appearance of a million years ago, prolonged his childhood, and increased the size of his brain. “Foetalization” or “pedomorphism,” as it is termed, means simply the retention, into adult life, of bodily characters which at some earlier stage of evolutionary history were actually only infantile. Such traits were rapidly lost as the animal attained maturity.

  If we examine the life history of one of the existing great apes and compare its development with that of man, we observe that the infantile stages of both man and ape are far more similar than the two will be in maturity. At birth, as we have seen, the brain of the gorilla is close to the size of that of the human infant. Both newborn gorilla and human child are much more alike, facially, than they will ever be in adult life because the gorilla infant will, in the course of time, develop an enormously powerful and protrusive muzzle. The sutures of his skull will close early; his brain will grow very little more.

  By contrast, human brain growth will first spurt and then grow steadily over an extended youth. Cranial sutures will remain open into adult life. Teeth will be later in their eruption. Furthermore, the great armored skull and the fighting characters of the anthropoid male will be held in abeyance.

  Instead, the human child, through a more extended infancy, will approach a maturity marked by the retention of the smooth-browed skull of childhood. His jaws will be tucked inconspicuously under a forehead lacking the huge, muscle-bearing ridges of the ape. In some unknown manner, the ductless glands which stimulate or inhibit growth have, in the course of human evolution, stepped down the pace of development and increased the life span. Our helpless but well-cared-for childhood allows a longer time for brain growth and, as an indirect consequence, human development has slowly been steered away from the ape-like adulthood of our big-jawed forebears.

  Modern man retains something of his youthful gaiety and nimble mental habits far into adult life. The great male anthropoids, by contrast, lose the playful friendliness of youth. In the end the massive skull houses a small, savage, and often morose brain. It is doubtful whether our thick-skulled forerunners viewed life very pleasantly in their advancing years.

  We of today, then, are pedomorphs—the childlike, yet mature products of a simian line whose years have lengthened and whose adolescence has become long drawn out. We are, for our day and time, civilized. We eat soft food, and an Eskimo child can outbite us. We show signs, in our shortening jaws, of losing our wisdom teeth. Our brain has risen over our eyes and few, even of our professional fighters, show enough trace of a brow ridge to impress a half-grown gorilla. The signs point steadily onward toward a further lightening of the skull box and to additional compression of the jaws.

  Imagine this trend continuing in modern man. Imagine our general average cranial capacity rising by two hundred cubic centimeters while the face continued to reduce proportionately. Obviously we would possess a much higher ratio of brain size to face size than now exists. We would, paradoxically, resemble somewhat our children of today. Children acquire facial prominence late in growth under the endocrine stimulus of maturity. Until that stimulus occurs, their faces bear a smaller ratio to the size of the brain case. It was so with these early South Africans.

  But no, you may object, this whole process is in some way dependent upon civilization and grows out of it. Man’s body and his culture mutually control each other. To that extent we are masters of our physical destiny. This mysterious change that is happening to our bodies is epitomized at just one point today, the point of the highest achieved civilization upon earth—our own.

  I believed this statement once, believed it wholeheartedly. Sometimes it is so very logical I believe it still as my colleague’s ascetic, earnest, and ennobled face gazes out at me from the screen. It carries the lineaments of my own kind, the race to which I belong. But it is not, I know now, the most foetalized race nor the largest brained. That game had already been played out before written history began—played out in an obscure backwater of the world where sails never came and where the human horde chipped flint as our ancestors had chipped it northward in Europe when the vast ice lay heavy on the land.

  These people were not civilized; they were not white. But they meet in every major aspect the physical description of the man of tomorrow. They achieved that status on the raw and primitive diet of a savage. Their delicate and gracefully reduced teeth and fragile jaws are striking testimony to some strang
e inward hastening of change. Nothing about their environment in the least explains them. They were tomorrow’s children surely, born by error into a lion country of spears and sand.

  Africa is not a black man’s continent in the way we are inclined to think. Like other great land areas it has its uneasy amalgams, its genetically strange variants, its racial deviants whose blood stream is no longer traceable. We know only that the first true men who disturbed the screaming sea birds over Table Bay were a folk that humanity has never looked upon again save as their type has wavered into brief emergence in an occasional mixed descendant. They are related in some dim manner to the modern Kalahari Bushman, but he is dwarfed in brain and body and hastening fast toward eventual extinction. The Bushman’s forerunners, by contrast, might have stepped with Weena out of the future eras of the Time Machine.

  Widespread along the South African coast, in the lowest strata of ancient cliff shelters, as well as inland in Ice Age gravel and other primeval deposits, lie the bones of these unique people. So remote are they from us in time that the first archaeologists who probed their caves and seashore middens had expected to reveal some distant and primitive human forerunner such as Neanderthal man. Instead their spades uncovered an unknown branch of humanity which, in the words of Sir Arthur Keith, the great English anatomist, “outrivals in brain volume any people of Europe, ancient or modern …”

  But that is not all. Dr. Drennan of the University of Capetown comments upon one such specimen in anatomical wonder: “It appears ultramodern in many of its features, surpassing the European in almost every direction. That is to say, it is less simian than any modern skull.” This ultramodernity Dr. Drennan attributes to the curious foetalization of which I have spoken.

  More fascinating than big brain capacity in itself, however, is the relation of the cranium to the base of the skull and to the face. The skull base, that is, the part from the root of the nose to the spinal opening, is buckled and shortened in a way characteristic of the child’s skull before the base expands to aid in the creation of the adult face. Thus, on this permanently shortened cranial base, the great brain expands, bulging the forehead heavily above the eyes and leaving the face neatly retracted beneath the brow. There is nothing in this face to suggest the protrusive facial angle of the true Negro. It is, as Dr. Drennan says, “ultramodern,” even by Caucasian standards. The bottom of the skull grew, apparently, at a slow and childlike tempo while the pace-setting brain lengthened and broadened to a huge maturity.