The Unexpected Universe

by Loren Eiseley

  It was an age in which the earth, over a third of its surface, over millions of square miles of the Northern Hemisphere, wore a mantle of blue ice stolen from the shrinking seas. And as that mantle encased and covered the final strata of earth, so, in the brain of man, a similar superimposed layer of crystalline thought substance superseded the dark, forgetful pathways of the animal brain. Sounds had their origin there, strange sounds that took on meaning in the air, named stones and gods. For the first time in the history of the planet, living men received names. For the first time, also, men wept bitterly over the bodies of their dead.

  There was no longer a single generation, which bred blindly and without question. Time and its agonizing nostalgia would touch the heart each season and be seen in the fall of a leaf. Or, most terrible of all, a loved face would grow old. Kronos and the fates had entered into man’s thinking. Try to escape as he might, he would endure an interior ice age. He would devise and unmake fables and at last, and unwillingly, comprehend an intangible abstraction called space-time and shiver inwardly before the endless abysses of space as he had once shivered unclothed and unlighted before the earthly frost.

  As Thoreau anticipated, man has been matured by winter; he has survived its coming, and has eaten of its marrow. But its cold is in his bones. The child will partake always of the parent, and that parent is the sleeping dragon whose kingdom we hold merely upon sufferance, and whose vagaries we have yet to endure.

  III

  A few days ago I chanced to look into a rain pool on the walk outside my window. For a long time, because I was dreaming of other things, I saw only the occasional spreading ripple from a raindrop or the simultaneous overlapping circles as the rain fell faster. Then, as the beauty and the strange rhythm of the extending and concentric wavelets entered my mind, I saw that I was looking symbolically upon the whole history of life upon our globe. There, in a wide, sweeping circle, ran the early primates from whom we are descended; here, as a later drop within the rim of the greater circle, emerged the first men. I saw the mammoths pass in a long, slow, world-wide surge, but the little drop of man changed into a great hasty wave that swept them under.

  There were sudden little ringlets, like the fauna of isolated islands, that appeared and disappeared with rapidity. Sometimes so slow were the drops that the pool was almost quiet, like the intense, straining silence of a quiescent geological period. Sometimes the rain, like the mutations in animal form, came so fast that the ripples broke, mixed, or kept their shapes with difficulty and did not spread far. Jungles, I read in my mystical water glass, microfaunas changing rapidly but with little spread.

  Watch instead, I thought, for the great tides—it is they that contain the planet’s story. As the rain hastened or dripped slowly, the pictures in the little pool were taken into my mind as though from the globe of a crystal-gazer. How often, if we learn to look, is a spider’s wheel a universe, or a swarm of summer midges a galaxy, or a canyon a backward glance into time. Beneath our feet is the scratched pebble that denotes an ice age, or above us the summer cloud that changes form in one afternoon as an animal might do in ten million windy years.

  All of these perceptive insights that we obtain from the natural world around us depend upon painfully accumulated knowledge. Otherwise, much as to our ancestors, the pebble remains a pebble, the pool but splashing water, the canyon a deep hole in the ground. Increasingly, the truly perceptive man must know that where the human eye stops, and hearing terminates, there still vibrates an inconceivable and spectral world of which we learn only through devised instruments. Through such instruments measuring atomic decay we have learned to probe the depths of time before our coming and to gauge temperatures long vanished.

  Little by little, the orders of life that had characterized the earlier Age of Mammals ebbed away before the oncoming cold of the Pleistocene, interspersed though this cold was by interglacial recessions and the particularly long summer of the second interglacial. There were times when ice accumulated over Britain; in the New World, there were times when it stretched across the whole of Canada and reached southward to the fortieth parallel of latitude, in what today would be Kansas.

  Manhattan Island and New Jersey felt its weight. The giant, long-horned bison of the middle Pleistocene vanished before man had entered America. Other now extinct but less colossal forms followed them. By the closing Pleistocene, it has been estimated, some seventy per cent of the animal life of the Western world had perished. Even in Africa, remote from the ice centers, change was evident. Perhaps the devastation was a partial response to the Pluvials, the great rains that in the tropics seem to have accompanied or succeeded the ice advances in the north.

  The human groups that existed on the Old World land mass were alternately squeezed southward by advancing ice, contracted into pockets, or released once more to find their way northward. Between the alternate tick and tock of ice and sun, man’s very bones were changing. Old species passed slowly away in obscure refuges or fell before the weapons devised by sharper minds under more desperate circumstances. Perhaps, since the rise of mammals, life had been subjected to no more drastic harassment, no more cutting selective edge, no greater isolation and then renewed genetic commingling. Yet we know that something approximating man was on the ground before the ice commenced and that naked man is tropical in origin. What, then, has ice to do with his story?

  It has, in fact, everything. The oncoming chill caught him early in his career; its forces converged upon him even in the tropics; its influence can be seen in the successive human waves that edge farther and ever farther north until at last they spill across the high latitudes at Bering Strait and descend the length of the two Americas. Only then did the last southwestern mammoths perish in the shallow mud of declining lakes, the last mastodons drop their tired bones in the New Jersey bogs on the receding drift.

  The story can best be seen from the map, as time, ice, and the sorcerer’s gift of fire run like the concentric ripples of the falling rain across the zones of temperature. The tale is not confined to ice alone. As one glaciologist, J. K. Charlesworth, has written: “The Pleistocene . . . witnessed earth-movements on a considerable, even catastrophic scale. There is evidence that it created mountains and ocean deeps of a size previously unequalled. . . . The Pleistocene represents one of the crescendi in the earth’s tectonic history.”

  I have spoken of the fact that, save for violent glacial episodes, the world’s climate has been genial. The planet has been warmer than today—“acryogenic,” as the specialists would say. Both earlier and later, warm faunas reached within the Arctic Circle, and a much higher percentage of that fauna represented forest forms. Then in the ice phases, world temperature dipped, even in the tropics; the mountain snowlines crept downward. In the north, summers were “short and false,” periods of “dry cold”—again to quote the specialists. Snow blanketed the high ground in winter, and that winter covered half the year and was extremely harsh.

  With our short memory, we accept the present climate as normal. It is as though a man with a huge volume of a thousand pages before him—in reality, the pages of earth time—should read the final sentence on the last page and pronounce it history. The ice has receded, it is true, but world climate has not completely rebounded. We are still on the steep edge of winter or early spring. Temperature has reached mid-point. Like refugees, we have been dozing memoryless for a few scant millennia before the windbreak of a sun-warmed rock. In the European Lapland winter that once obtained as far south as Britain, the temperature lay eighteen degrees Fahrenheit lower than today.

  On a world-wide scale this cold did not arrive unheralded. Somewhere in the highlands of Africa and Asia the long Tertiary descent of temperature began. It was, in retrospect, the prelude to the ice. One can trace its presence in the spread of grasslands and the disappearance over many areas of the old forest browsers. The continents were rising. We know that by Pliocene time, in which the trail of man ebbs away into the grass, man’s history is
more complicated than the simple late descent, as our Victorian forerunners sometimes assumed, of a chimpanzee from a tree. The story is one whose complications we have yet to unravel.

  Avoiding complexities and adhering as we can to our rain-pool analogy, man, subman, protoman, the euhominid, as we variously denote him, was already walking upright on the African grasslands more than two million years ago. He appears smaller than modern man, pygmoid and light of limb. Giantism comes late in the history of a type and sometimes foretells extinction. Man is now a giant primate and, where food is plentiful, growing larger, but he is a unique creature whose end is not yet foreseeable.

  Three facts can be discerned as we examine the earliest bipedal man-apes known to us. First, they suggest, in their varied dentition and skull structure, a physical diversity implying, as Alfred Russel Wallace theorized long ago, an approach to that vanished era in which protoman was still being molded by natural selective processes unmediated by the softening effect of cultural defenses. He was, in other words, scant in numbers and still responding genetically to more than one ecological niche. Heat and cold were direct realities; hunger drove him, and, on the open savanna into which he had descended, vigilance was the price of life. The teeth of the great carnivores lay in wait for the old, the young, and the unwary.

  Second, at the time we encounter man, the long descent of the world’s climate toward the oncoming Pleistocene cold had already begun. It is not without interest that all man’s most primitive surviving relatives—living fossils, we would call them—are tree dwellers hidden in the tropical rain forests of Africa, Madagascar, and the islands of southeastern Asia. They are the survivors of an older and a warmer world—the incubation time that was finally to produce, in some unknown fashion, the world-encircling coils of the ice dragon.

  In the last of Tertiary time, grasslands and high country were spreading even in the tropics. Savanna parkland interspersed with trees clothed the uplands of East Africa; North China grew colder and more arid. Steppe- and plains-loving animals became predominant. Even the seas grew colder, and the tropical zone narrowed. Africa was to remain the least glaciated of the continents, but even here the lowering of temperature drew on, and the mountain glaciations finally began to descend into their valleys. As for Asia, the slow, giant upthrust of the Himalayas had brought with it the disappearance of jungles harboring the old-fashioned tree climbers.

  Of the known regions of late-Tertiary primate development, whether African or Asian, both present the spectacle of increasing grasslands and diminishing forest. The latter, as in southeastern Asia, offered a refuge for the arboreal conservatives, such as the gibbon and orang, but the Miocene-Pliocene parklands and savannas must have proved an increasing temptation to an intelligent anthropoid sufficiently unspecialized and agile to venture out upon the grass. Our evidence from Africa is more complete at present, but fragmentary remains that may prove to be those of equally bipedal creatures are known from pre-Pleistocene and less explored regions below the Himalayas.

  Third, and last of the points to be touched on here, the man-apes, in venturing out erect upon the grass, were leaving forever the safety of little fruit-filled niches in the forest. They were entering the open sunlight of a one-dimensional world, but they were bringing to that adventure a freed forelimb at the conscious command of the brain, and an eye skillfully adjusted for depth perception. Increasingly they would feed on the rich proteins provided by the game of the grasslands; by voice and primitive projectile weapon, man would eventually become a space leaper more deadly than the giant cats.

  In the long, chill breath that presaged the stirring of the world dragon, the submen drifted naked through an autumnal haze. They were, in body, partly the slumbering product of the earth’s long summer. The tropical heat had warmed their bones. Thin-furred and hungry, old-fashioned descendants from the forest attic, they clung to the tropical savannas. Unlike the light gazelle, they could neither bound from enemies nor graze on the harsh siliceous grasses. With a minimum of fragmentary chips and stones, and through an intensified group co-operation, they survived.

  The first human wave, however, was a little wave, threatening to vanish. A patch in Africa, a hint in the Siwalik beds below the Himalayas—little more. Tremendous bodily adjustments were in process, and, in the low skull vault, a dream animal was in the process of development, a user of invisible symbols. In its beginnings, and ever more desperately, such a being walks the knife-edge of extinction. For a creature who dreams outside of nature, but is at the same time imprisoned within reality, has acquired, in the words of the psychiatrist Leonard Sillman, “one of the cruelest and most generous endowments ever given to a species of life by a mysterious providence.”

  On that one most recent page of life from which we can still read, it is plain that the second wave of man ran onward into the coming of the ice. In China a pithecanthropine creature with a cranial capacity of some 780 cubic centimeters has been recently retrieved from deposits suggesting a warm grassland fauna of the lower Pleistocene, perhaps over 700,000 years remote from the present. The site lies in Shensi province in about thirty degrees north latitude. Man is moving northward. His brain has grown, but he appears still to lack fire.

  IV

  In the legendary cycles of the Blackfoot Indians there is an account of the early people, who were poor and naked and did not know how to live. Old Man, their maker, said: “Go to sleep and get power. Whatever animals appear in your dream, pray and listen.” “And,” the story concludes, “that was how the first people got through the world, by the power of their dreams.”

  Man was not alone young and ignorant in the morning of his world; he also died young. Much of what he grasped of the world around him he learned like a child from what he imagined, or was gleaned from his own childlike parents. The remarks of Old Man, though clothed in myth, have an elemental ring. They tell the story of an orphan—man—bereft of instinctive instruction and dependent upon dream, upon, in the end, his own interpretation of the world. He had to seek animal helpers because they alone remembered what was to be done.

  And so the cold gathered and man huddled, dreaming, in the lightless dark. Lightning struck, the living fire ran from volcanoes in the fury of earth’s changes, and still man slumbered. Twice the ice ground southward and once withdrew, but no fire glimmered at a cave mouth. Humanly flaked flints were heavier and better-made. Behind that simple observation lies the unknown history of drifting generations, the children of the dreamtime.

  At about the forty-fifth parallel of latitude, in the cave vaults at Choukoutien, near Peking, a heavy-browed, paleoanthropic form of man with a cranial capacity as low, in some instances, as 860 cubic centimeters, gnawed marrow bones and chipped stone implements. The time lies 500,000 years remote; the hour is late within the second cold, the place northward and more bleak than Shensi.

  One thing strikes us immediately. This creature, with scarcely two-thirds of modern man’s cranial capacity, was a fire user. Of what it meant to him beyond warmth and shelter we know nothing; with what rites, ghastly or benighted, it was struck or maintained, no word remains. We know only that fire opened to man the final conquest of the earth.

  I do not include language here, in spite of its tremendous significance to humanity, because the potentiality of language is dependent upon the germ plasm. Its nature, not its cultural expression, is written into the motor centers of the brain, into high auditory discrimination and equally rapid neuromuscular response in tongue, lips, and palate. We are biologically adapted for the symbols of speech. We have determined its forms, but its potential is not of our conscious creation. Its mechanisms are written in our brain, a simple gift from the dark powers behind nature. Speech has made us, but it is a human endowment not entirely of our conscious devising.

  By contrast, the first fires flickering at a cave mouth are our own discovery, our own triumph, our grasp upon invisible chemical power. Fire contained, in that place of brutal darkness and leaping shadows, the cruc
ible and the chemical retort, steam and industry. It contained the entire human future.

  Across the width of the Old World land mass near what is now Swanscombe, England, a better-brained creature of almost similar dating is also suspected of using fire, though the evidence, being from the open, is not so clear. But at last the sorcerer-priest, the stealer from the gods, the unknown benefactor remembered in a myriad legends around the earth, had done his work. He had supplied man with an overmastering magic. It would stand against the darkness and the cold.

  In the frontal and temporal lobes, anatomy informs us, lie areas involved with abstract thought. In modern man the temporal lobes in particular are “hazardously supplied with blood through tenuous arteries. They are protected by a thin skull and crowded against a shelf of bone. They are more commonly injured than any other higher centers.” The neurologist Frederick Gibbs goes on to observe that these lobes are attached to the brain like dormer windows, jammed on as an afterthought of nature. In the massive armored cranium of Peking man those lobes had already lit the fires that would knit family ties closer, promote the more rapid assimilation of wild food, and increase the foresight that goes into the tending of fires always. Fire is the only natural force on the planet that can both feed and travel. It is strangely like an animal; that is, it has to be tended and fed. Moreover, it can also rage out of control.