by Brian Switek
Through the Looking Glass
“Whereas in truth Man is part a Brute, part an Angel; and is that Link in the Creation, that joyns them both together.”
—EDWARD TYSON, The Anatomy of a Pygmy, 1699
“In the first place it should always be borne in mind what sort of intermediate forms must, on my theory, have formerly existed. I have found it difficult, when looking at any two species, to avoid picturing to myself, forms directly intermediate between them. But this is a wholly false view; we should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor; and the progenitor will generally have differed in some respects from all its modified descendants.”
—CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1859
In 1655, the French Calvinist Isaac La Peyrère gained the dubious distinction of publishing a book that was scorned by almost all who read it. Titled Prae-Adamitae (“Pre-Adamites”), it was a heretical tome in which Peyrère dared to suggest that Adam and Eve were not the first and only people created by God. Instead there had been an early, lawless world inhabited by Gentiles into which Adam, founder of the Jewish people, had later been placed. Theologians and other scholars were horrified. The Paris Parliament ordered the book burned, and while Peyrère was traveling elsewhere on the European continent he was tossed into jail for six months. The shocked public and clergy demanded a recantation to quell their outrage. To atone for this sin, Peyrère visited Pope Alexander VII in Rome, and blamed his Calvinist upbringing for his wicked thoughts, though he held on to his belief in pre-Adamites privately.
Peyrère’s book was only a more fully formulated explanation of an idea that had been raised many times before. It was therefore an easy target for attack, and numerous books were written to refute it. Yet Peyrère had no intention of undermining Scripture; he was seeking to assist the spread of Christianity.
Peyrère was led to his conclusions about the pre-Adamites by his reading of the Bible and the study of other cultures, in which he had found creation stories that differed from the two accounts presented in Genesis, and wondered whether they might indicate the existence of people—the pre-Adamites—prior to the ancestors of the Jews. This would explain some long-standing enigmas within Genesis. Who did Cain fear after being exiled for murdering his brother Abel? Where did Cain find his wife? Who peopled the city Cain built? Peyrère further supported his case for the pre-Adamites with a handful of verses from Paul’s Letter to the Romans.
Many were unhappy with Peyrère’s attempt to bridge this historical gap, but there was another void in nature that required an explanation. There could be no doubt that God was fond of a full creation, and therefore every organism could be ranked according to a Great Chain of Being. Frustratingly, there were some missing links in this scheme, and perhaps the most significant was the one between our kind and the rest of the animal creation.
For a time the “monstrous” races filled this role. Among the plethora of frightful, humanoid creatures thought to inhabit the far reaches of the globe were the Cynocephali, creatures with human bodies and doglike heads, and the Blemmyae, headless beings that wore their faces on their chests. These rude, half-human monsters lacked the one true hallmark of humanity, the soul.
By the time of Peyrère’s heresy, however, physical proof of the monstrous races had failed to turn up. Monkeys, which had become more familiar to Europeans, were still the closest animal approximation to humans. As disturbingly humanlike as they could be (they were seen as walking warnings of the dangers of sin and vice), though, they were far too “low” to represent the step just below our kind.
In 1698, a sick, humanlike creature was brought to England. It had fallen ill from an infected wound sustained in transit from Angola, and soon after it arrived in London it perished. Such a rare specimen would not go to waste. The physician Edward Tyson, who had observed the animal shortly before its death, was awarded the precious and macabre opportunity of dissecting the “wild man.” He undertook the task with great care, and the conclusions of his anatomical investigation were published the following year in his monograph Orang-Outang, sive Homo sylvestris: or the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man.
FIGURE 86 - Tyson’s “pygmie,” most likely a juvenile chimpanzee. While Tyson thought it was a step below humanity in the created order, he gave it a walking stick as he believed the sick individual he observed would normally stand upright.
Tyson called his subject an “Orang-Outang” on the basis of observations made more than five decades earlier by the Dutch physician Nicolaes Tulp. While Tulp was strolling through the menagerie of the Duke of Orange in 1641 he had spotted a hairy humanoid creature that seemed to fit the description of a creature rumored to live in Indonesia called the “Orang-Outang.” Similar accounts of “wild men” had come from the region in which Tyson’s “pygmie” was found. While held captive in Angola around the turn of the seventeenth century, the Englishman Andrew Battell reported that the local people were afraid of two humanlike creatures: the Engeco and the Pongo. Based upon folklore, Battell described the latter in vivid detail, painting the Pongoes as “hollow eyed” giants that slept in the trees and could even “build shelters from the raine.” Even though they only ate fruit, their strength and ferocity were widely known, and the local people would not dare venture out alone if it was suspected that the Pongoes were about.
The animal Tyson expertly flayed on his dissection table was a poor fit for a Pongo, but he speculated that the tales of satyrs, monstrous beings, and “wild men of the woods” told of encounters with creatures like his “pygmie.” Tyson concluded that “Our Pygmie is no man, nor yet the common ape; but a sort of animal between both.”
Just a few decades after Tyson published his study on the “Pygmie,” the eighteenth-century naturalist Carolus Linnaeus undertook the task of scientifically illuminating the divine pattern in nature. His classification system for organisms was first explicated in the 1735 book Systema naturae, but Linnaeus continued to produce new editions as he learned more. (The thirteenth and last edition was published in 1770.) Of prime importance, of course, was our position in relation to the rest of nature, and in the definitive tenth edition published in 1758 Linnaeus christened our species Homo sapiens and situated us among the “Orang-Outang,” monkeys, and bats within the group Primates, which he regarded as the highest ranking of all organisms.72 There was no question that we were the crowning glory of creation.
Critics reminded Linnaeus that our species was the only one created in the imago Dei, the image of God, and our possession of a soul cleaved us from the beasts. In 1747, he responded to such criticism from the German naturalist Johan Georg Gmelin:It matters little to me what names we use; but I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character, one that is according to generally accepted principles of classification, by which to distinguish between man and ape ... I myself most assuredly know of none. I wish somebody would indicate one to me. But, if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I should have fallen under the ban of all the ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so.
This was the most controversial part of Linnaeus’s work. He had provided naturalists with a better method for naming organisms by giving each distinct kind of organism a genus and species name, but the proper hierarchical arrangement of those species was highly contested. Indeed, the proper place of Homo sapiens was made even more complicated by debates over whether different races of people were truly different species and how they might be ranked within the Great Chain of Being. Many European scholars considered the Greeks and Romans of classical antiquity to represent the pinnacle of the human type, and the racist culture of the time led them to suggest that the dark-skinned people of the tropics, who lived in the same geographic range as the apes, were closer to apes than people.
By the early nineteenth century, however, the Great Chain had nearly rusted through. Na
ture was not only full, but overflowing with a variety of forms that were impossible to rank without resorting to subjective criteria. How could the diversity of the stunning Indonesian birds of paradise be ranked from higher to lower? How could the varieties of dogs be graded from superior to inferior?
Naturalists were also beginning to question nature’s immutability at this time. Did God have such a fondness for beetles that he handcrafted each and every species, or was there some kind of natural law to control the beetle manufacturing process without further divine intervention? Evolution was still treated as a heretical idea, but the science of physics had made it acceptable to think that God had ordained natural laws to govern the workings of the universe.73
Perhaps the production of new species was regulated by such a law, but even as proto-evolutionists toyed with this idea many stolidly affirmed that humans were a special case. To think that we had evolved from some “lower” creature, as Lamarck suggested, was revolting. Humanity clearly contained the spark of the divine, and this position was tenaciously defended by Richard Owen. In 1857 he placed our species, and our species alone, in a new subclass of mammals he called the “Archencephala.” Our upright posture and our “extraordinarily developed brain” justified this move, Owen argued, but more important was the position at the head of nature given to us by God. “It is He that hath made us; not we ourselves,” Owen reminded his audience, and he admonished his listeners that “This [human] frame is a temporary trust, for the uses of which we are responsible to the Maker.”
As Linnaeus had pointed out in the previous century, however, any division between human and ape would have to be based on solid science. Appeals to aesthetics and special pleading were inadmissible. If cherished characteristics such as speech, thought, and spirituality truly made us distinct, their anatomical correlates would have to be identified. Owen believed he had found these in several minute features of the brain, including part of the temporal lobe called the hippocampus minor. Apes did not have these features, thus explaining why they were silent. Despite there being no anatomical reason that apes could not speak, Owen announced that chimpanzees, the “Ourang-Outangs” of Tulp and Tyson, had no language because they were cerebrally deficient. 74 Science had finally drawn a bright line between human and ape.
Charles Darwin balked at Owen’s assertions. In a letter to a friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, Darwin remarked, “Owen’s is a grand Paper; but I cannot swallow Man making a division as distinct from a Chimpanzee, as an ornithorhynchus [duck-billed platypus] from a Horse: I wonder what a Chimpanzee wd. say to this?” Yet Darwin refrained from speaking on behalf of chimpanzees. His evolutionary mechanism was controversial enough without emphasizing our ape ancestry, but this did not fool anyone. The implications of the Darwin- Wallace mechanism were clear: not only had we evolved, but living apes approximated what our own ancestors might have looked like.
Owen remained steadfast in his conclusions. To him humans had been specially set apart from all other creatures, and he continued to insert that we were separated from apes by the hippocampus minor. Some intellectual allies of Darwin mobilized to combat the claim, and leading the counterattack was T. H. Huxley. In the January 1861 issue of the Natural History Review, Huxley demonstrated that the brain structures Owen claimed to be uniquely human were also present in apes, and the anatomists John Marshall and William Henry Flower came to the same conclusion in their research. But Owen refused to back down. While such structures were present in apes, Owen argued, they were not exactly the same as their homologous parts in our brains and therefore did not merit the same anatomical name. Owen was arguing over the definition of these parts, while Huxley and his allies were primarily concerned with their presence, making the academic conflict intractable.
This debate over a bit of brain matter was of high importance. Questions about our place in nature after Darwin’s evolutionary mechanism was unleashed often relied on determining had makes us different from our vulgar ape ancestors. Even though Darwin and other naturalists made it clear that we did not evolve from any living species of ape, the known array of orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees were the only available window into our ancient past. Paleontologists had found a handful of fossil apes, such as the gibbonlike Dryopithecus from France, but no transitional “ape-men” had been found. In fact, in 1859 scientists had only just begun to understand how far back our ancestry could be drawn.
Until the mid-1800s it had been believed that our species had been in existence scarcely longer than the span of recorded history. This was despite the fact that evidence of our antiquity had long been available. Stone “thunderbolts,” or ceraunia, had been found in Europe for centuries. They were often considered to be mineralogical curiosities, like fossils or rocks shaped like human body parts, and were ascribed supernatural powers. The sixteenth-century Italian scholar Michael Mercati disagreed:Most men believe that ceraunia are produced by lightning. Those who study history consider that they have been broken off from very hard flints by a violent blow, in the days before iron was employed for the follies of war. For the earliest men had only splinters of flint for knives.
This complemented the logic of the Roman philosopher Lucretius, who over 1,500 years earlier supposed that warfare had begun with stone weapons. Just how old these implements were, however, was open to interpretation. In 1679, an English pharmacist named John Conyers found stone tools near the skeleton of an elephant. The presence of the elephant was as mysterious as the tools, and when the find was announced after Conyers’s death the collector of antiquities John Bagford proposed that it had been brought to England by the Roman emperor Claudius in the first century AD. The tools must have been of the same age, and the fact that native peoples in North America and elsewhere made similar implements showed that they must have been made during the span of recorded history.
When John Frere discovered similar artifacts in Suffolk in 1797 he came to a different conclusion. He thought that the tools could have represented the work of people from “a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of the present world.” His peers in the Society of Antiquaries were skeptical, however, perhaps because much other evidence of “fossil humans” did not stand up to scrutiny. The French anatomist Georges Cuvier, for instance, had been presented with elephant bones, giant salamander skeletons, and other miscellaneous fossils as bona fide human remains by amateur naturalists. Even when a true human skeleton said to be of great age was presented to Cuvier in 1823 he found no conclusive sign to that effect.
That same year William Buckland delivered a lecture on a partial human skeleton he had excavated from Goat Hole on the Welsh Coast nicknamed the “Red Lady of Paviland.” At first Buckland thought that the bones were of a man who had been attacked by smugglers, but he soon changed his mind. The skeleton was stained red with ochre and found among shells and carved artifacts, which Buckland thought to be the hallmarks of a witch (though he did not state this interpretation publicly). He reasoned that she had lived in the cave around the time of the Roman occupation of England. After his lecture on the “Red Lady” he found a scrap of paper on the classroom floor with a poem written on it:Have ye heard of the woman so long underground?
Have ye heard of the woman that Buckland has found,
With her bones of empyreal hue?
O fair ones of modern days, hang down your heads,
The antediluvians rouge‘d when dead,
Only granted in lifetime to you
Buckland was amused by the verses, but he could not agree that the Red Lady was “antediluvian.” Even though the skeleton was found alongside the fossils of extinct mammals, at the time Buckland thought that the mammal bones had been washed into the cave during the global flood. The Red Lady did not occupy the cave until much later, sometime after the repopulation of the world.75
Still, the Bible was clear that antediluvian humans were a historical reality. Where were their remains? Buckland supposed that they had lived in Asia, a land that had been prep
ared by God for human habitation. Europe, by contrast, would have been inhospitable to humans, as it had been home to big cats, elephants, hippos, rhinoceros, and hyenas while devoid of domestic animals that would have been useful to humans. This point was later articulated by Richard Owen in his 1846 book A History of British Fossil Mammals, and Birds:When we are informed that, in some districts of India, entire villages have been depopulated by the destructive incursions of a single species of large Feline animal, the Tiger, it is hardly conceivable that Man, in an early and rude condition of society, could have resisted the attacks of the more formidable Tiger, Bear, and Machairodus [saber-toothed cat] of the cave epoch. And this consideration may lead us the more readily to receive the negative evidence of the absence of well-authenticated human fossil remains, and to conclude that Man did not exist in the land which was ravaged simultaneously by three such formidable Carnivora, aided in their work of destruction by troops of savage Hyaenas.
The complexities of cave geology threw further doubt on the proposition that these animals and humans had been coeval. Unraveling the order in which cave strata were deposited was a difficult task, and it was often simpler to assume that stone tools and human bones were recent contaminants that had become mixed with older fossils. The activities of amateur geologists further confounded efforts to understand the confusing conglomerations of bones. While the sciences of archaeology, geology, and paleontology were born from the inquisitiveness of amateurs, by the 1840s these sciences were becoming professionalized. When amateurs plucked tools and human bones from the ground without taking copious notes on the excavation it was all the easier for professionals to dismiss discoveries and insist that the sudden appearance of humans marked a new, distinct geological age.
