BOO
The History of Man
BY GLYN DANIEL THIS* is a most remarkable work of synthesis and popularisation by a distinguished American scholar whose professional expert knowledge lies in the fields °f prehistoric archeology and of anthropology. He is quite frank in declaring his aim to see the whole history of man from the special viewpoint of archeologist and anthropolo- gist; and he is extremely well equipped to do this. Carleton S. Coon is now Professor of Anthropology at Philadelphia; he Was formerly Professor at Harvard;. his work in North Africa, In Ethiopia, in Somaliland and in Albania, as well as his Masterly The Races of Europe (1939), established him as one of our foremost physical anthropologists; the Principles of 'anthropology, which he wrote in 1942 with Eliot Dismore Chap*, presented a new and invigorating approach to the Whole subject of anthropology; his excavations in North Africa and the Near East have provided new results of great value to the study of the beginnings of agriculture in the Old World.
It was a bold and brave thing to attempt the writing of the Whole physical and cultural evolution of man; but it was eminently well worth doing and it is eminently well done. The developMent of prehistoric archeology has enormously lengthened the story of man, which ,used to begin with Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Assyrians; it has also profoundly altered our perspective of the past. Historians like A. J. -I: oynbee, who have been unable to adjust themselves to this lengthening of the story, and still conceive of man's past—or the relevant part of man's past to the historian—as his past as revealed in writing, have naturally failed to convey the interest and excitement of this new perspective of the past, Which is, perhaps, one of the greatest contributions of the twentieth century to historical thinking. It is thirty-five years since H. G. Wells gave us, in his The Outline of History, a teal world view of history and some inkling of the breadth 0f the new prehistorical perspective of man's past. In 1942 'ordon Childe published his What Happened in History—a best-seller like Wells's book. Coon's History of Man is in the same tradition as these two famous books; it cannot avoid L ,eing a best-seller, and it admirably justifies the success it is °Mind to have. It challenges comparison with Wells and Childe, and emerges well from that severe challenge.
Childe's What Happened in History really ended with the ancient classical world. Coon is bolder and takes us right up to the present day, to the atomic-age rivalries of America and Russia. His last chapter goes farther; it is called 'A Vision of Paradise,' and to this paradise we are led with good sense, scholarship and detachment from the million-year-ago be- ?Innings in the Pleistocene. Coon, the detached anthropologist, 15 concerned with man, 'a unique bipedal mammal, equipped With grasping hands that are capable of fine work, with fine focusing stereoscopic eyes, with a brain unique for its large slAe, and with vocal organs capable of producing the sounds needed in speech.' To a cosmic geographer, says Coon, man *The HISTORY Or M. By Carleton S. Coon. (Cape, 28s.) might appear to be no more than 'a highly organised skin- cancer destroying the surface of the earth with growing rapidity'; but it is man's culture and not his utilisation of the earth's face that concerns Coon. History to him 'is nothing but a record of all the cultures of the world since man first became a reasoning animal and taught his children to chip flint.'
Coon sees the whole history of man as divisible into four great phases. The first is a biological one in which modern man, home, sapiens, was only one of many competing species of two-legged, two-handed, ground-living animals of the primate family. By the end of this first phase, hotno sapiens had eliminated or absorbed all his rivals (unless, as he says, the footprints of the Abominable Snowman indicate that a giant bipedal primate survives above the snow-line of the Himalayas); he learnt to cook food, sew warm clothing, and was in the Upper Paleolithic stage of the archeologists. Phase one consumed over 650,000 years—over 90 per cent. of the known span of human history. Phase two lasted about 30,000 years, and ended in some parts of the world about 6000 BC when animal and vegetable husbandry was dis- covered. This change, introducing phase three, is Childe's Neolithic Revolution. Phase three has lasted to the present day; Coon distinguishes in it first the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages of the conventional archeological nomenclature. and then distinguishes Gunpowder, Coke, Oil, Hydro-Electric Power and Atomic Ages. 'We now stand,' he writes, 'on the threshold of phase four of history, faced with a triple choice. The world will be destroyed or Nature will regain its balance at man's expense, or man will restore Nature without loss of his cultural heritage when he learns to unify the cultures of the world, just as his ancestor made man a single species. As he unified the human species at the highest biological level then in existence, so must we unify man at the highest cultural level existing today, or evolution will come to an end.'
Whatever we think of Professor Coon's judgements and predictions, we can have no doubts about the value and clear- ness of the historical story he presents. His history concentrates on technological discoveries and inventions, and here he is at his most interesting and stimulating. His analyses of the origins of Chinese and pre-Columbian American civilisation, for example, are models of their kind. So, in a different sphere, is his account of the physical evolution of man, and his chapter on the development of races is one of the best things that have ever been written on this subject—so frequently misunderstood in a world of racial prejudices and anthropological ignorance.
Coon's long story is enlivened by flashes of wit and fresh. vigorous turns of phrase, as when the Upper Paleolithic burin is described as `man's first passport to both Russia and America,' and present-day ageing as a process towards 'the numbing haze of arterio-sclerosis, whisky and television- watching,' or when he is trying to convey vividly to his readers the cultural and historical significance of what Columbus, and the conquistadors Cortes and Pizarro, really did. They 'suc- ceeded in doing something every archeologist dreams of, which is to step backwards in time. . . . It was as if, when Sir Leonard Woolley had uncovered the ramp to a royal tomb at Ur, the kings and queens and soldiers and maidens had all come to life and offered him a cup of tea.'
Of course, Professor Coon does not provide us with all the answers; his book would be the most important one ever produced if it did. His is just one way of looking at human history, but it is a way that every student of the past should follow until he appreciates Coon's material and his perspec- tive, and can integrate it into his own way of thought. The life of the spirit gets poor treatment throughout—from Upper Palwolithic art (which is curiously treated) onwards. Coon is more concerned with the institutions and equipment of culture than with the sufferings and achievements of the individuals who created and lived his cultures. This is, in my view, a real failing of anthropology as a whole, and it is this failing that makes him over-emphasise his interpretation of history as the conversion of energy into social structures of increasingly complicated kinds. And in a book-on this scale, with such a breadth of learning to master, there are bound to be factual as well as interpretational mistakes. Thus the masked hunter or sorcerer in Plate IV is not from Lourdes, the charming naked dancer in Plate XIII is not from Harappa, and Les Eyzies is neither a town nor in the valley of the Dordogne. But minor factual errors or disagreement with Coon's general thesis and his messianic warnings should not obscure the central fact that this book achieves something of the greatest value to every man. It provides a clear, authoritative and vigorously written history of man which it would be extremely difficult to better at this mid-twentieth-century moment.
Previous page
