Influences of Geographic Environment Part 11

Nevertheless, the divergent types of men and societies developed in segregated regions are an echo of the formation of new species under conditions of isolation which is now generally acknowledged by biological science. Isolation was recognized by Darwin as an occasional factor in the origin of species and especially of divergence; in combination with migration it was made the basis of a theory of evolution by Moritz Wagner in 1873;[217] and in recent years has come to be regarded as an essential in the explanation of divergence of types, as opposed to differentiation.[218]

[Sidenote: Differentiation and digression.]

The traditions of the Delaware Indians and Sioux in the north of the United States territory, and of the Creeks in the south, commence with each stock group as a united body, which, as it migrates, splits into tribes and sends out offshoots developing different dialects. Here was tribal differentiation after entry into the general stock area, the process going on during migration as well as after the tribes had become established in their respective habitats. Culture, however, made little progress till after they became sedentary and took up agriculture to supplement the chase.[219] Tribes sometimes wander far beyond the limits of their stock, like the Iroquoian Cherokees of East Tennessee and North Carolina or the Athapascan Navajos and Apaches of arid New Mexico and Arizona, who had placed twenty or thirty degrees of lat.i.tude between themselves and their brethren in the basins of the Yukon and Mackenzie rivers. Such inevitably come into contrasted climatic conditions, which further modify the immigrants. [See map page 54.]

Wide digressions differentiate them still further from the parent stock by landing them amid different ethnic and social groups, by contact with whom they are inevitably modified. The Namaqua Hottentots, living on the southern margin of the Hottentot country near the frontier of the European settlements in Cape Colony, acquired some elements of civilization, together with a strain of Boer and English blood, and in some cases even the Dutch vernacular. They were therefore differentiated from their nomadic and warlike kinsmen in the gra.s.slands north of the Orange River, which formed the center of the Hottentot area.[220] A view of the ancient Germans during the first five or six centuries after Christ reveals differentiation by various contacts in process along all the ragged borders of the Germanic area. The offshoots who pushed westward across the Rhine into Belgian Gaul were rapidly Celticized, abandoning their semi-nomadic life for sedentary agriculture, a.s.similating the superior civilization which they found there, and steadily merging with the native population. They became _Belgae_, though still conscious of their Teutonic origin.[221] The Batavians, an offshoot of the ancient Chatti living near the Thuringian Forest, appropriated the river island between the Rhine and the Waal. There in the seclusion of their swamps, they became a distinct national unit, retaining their backward German culture and primitive type of German speech, which the Chatti themselves lost by contact with the High Germans.[222] Far away on the southeastern margin of the Teutonic area the same process of a.s.similation to a foreign civilization went on a little later when the Visigoths, after a century of residence on the lower Danube in contact with the Eastern Empire, adopted the Arian form of Christianity which had arisen in the Greek peninsula.[223] The border regions of the world show the typical results of the historical movement--differentiation from the core or central group through a.s.similation to a new group which meets and blends with it along the frontier.

[Sidenote: Geographic conditions of heterogeneity and h.o.m.ogeneity.]

Entrance into a naturally isolated district, from which subsequent incursions are debarred, gives conditions for divergence and the creation of a new type. On the other hand, where few physical barriers are present to form these natural pockets, the process of a.s.similation goes on over a wide field. Europe is peculiar among the family of continents for its "much divided" geography, commented upon by Strabo.

Hence its islands, peninsulas and mountain-rimmed basins have produced a variegated a.s.semblage of peoples, languages and culture. Only where it runs off into the monotonous immensity of Russia do we find a people who in their physical traits, language, and civilization reflect the uniformity of their environment.[224]

Africa's smooth outline, its plateau surface rimmed with mountains which enclose but fail to divide, and its monotonous configuration have produced a racial and cultural uniformity as striking as Europe's heterogeneity. Constant movements and commixture, migration and conquest, have been the history of the black races, varied by victorious incursions of the Hamitic and Semitic whites from the north, which, however, have resulted in the amalgamation of the two races after conquest.[225] Constant fusion has leveled also the social and political relations of the people to one type; it has eliminated primordial groups, except where the dwarf hunters have taken refuge in the equatorial forests and the Bushmen in the southwestern deserts, just as it has thwarted the development of higher social groups by failure to segregate and protect. It has sown the Bantu speech broadcast over the immense area of Central Africa, and is disseminating the Hausa language through the agency of a highly mixed commercial folk over a wide tract of the western Sudan. The long east-and-west stretch of the Sudan gra.s.slands presents an un.o.bstructed zone between the thousand-mile belt of desert to the north and the dense equatorial forests to the south, between hunger and thirst on one side, heat and fever and impenetrable forests on the other. Hence the Sudan in all history has been the crowded Broadway of Africa. Here pa.s.s commercial caravans, hybrid merchant tribes like the Hausa, throngs of pilgrims, streams of peoples, herds of cattle moving to busy markets, rude incursive shoppers or looters from the desert, coming to buy or rob or rule in this highway belt. [See map page 105.]

[Sidenote: Differentiation versus a.s.similation.]

Historical development advances by means of differentiation and a.s.similation. A change of environment stimulates variation. Primitive culture is loath to change; its inertia is deep-seated. Only a sharp prod will start it moving or accelerate its speed; such a prod is found in new geographic conditions or new social contacts. Divergence in a segregated spot may be overdone. Progress crawls among a people too long isolated, though incipient civilization thrives for a time in seclusion.

But in general, accessibility, exposure to some measure of ethnic amalgamation and social contact is essential to sustained progress.[226]

As the world has become more closely populated and means of communication have improved, geographical segregation is increasingly rare. The earth has lost its "corners." All parts are being drawn into the circle of intercourse. Therefore differentiation, the first effect of the historical movement, abates; the second effect, a.s.similation, takes the lead.

[Sidenote: Elimination by historical movement.]

The ceaseless human movements making for new combinations have stimulated development. They have lifted the level of culture, and worked towards h.o.m.ogeneity of race and civilization on a higher plane.

Since the period of the great discoveries inaugurated by Columbus enabled the historical movement to compa.s.s the world, whole continents, like North America and Australia, have been reclaimed to civilization by colonization. The process of a.s.similation is often ruthless in its method. Hence it has been attended by a marked reduction in the number of different ethnic stocks, tribes, languages, dialects, social and cultural types through wide-spread elimination of the weak, backward or unfit.[227] These have been wiped out, either by extermination or the slower process of absorption. The Indian linguistic stocks in the United States have been reduced from fifty-three to thirty-two; and of those thirty-two, many survive as a single tribe or the shrinking remnant of one.[228] In Africa the slave trade has caused the annihilation of many small tribes.[229] The history of the Hottentots, who have been pa.s.sive before the active advance of the English, Dutch and Kaffirs about them, shows a race undergoing a widespread process of hybridization[230] and extermination.[231]

Strong peoples, like the English, French, Russians and Chinese, occupy ever larger areas. Where an adverse climate precludes genuine colonization, as it did for the Spanish in Central and South America, and for the English and Dutch in the Indies, they make their civilization, if not their race, permeate the acquired territory, and gradually impose on it their language and economic methods. The Poles, who once boasted a large and distinguished nationality, are being Germanized and Russified to their final national extinction. The Finns, whose Scandinavian offshoot has been almost absorbed in Sweden,[232] are being forcibly dissolved in the Muscovite dominion by powerful reagents, by Russian schoolmasters, a Russian priesthood, Russian military service.

[Sidenote: No new ethnic types.]

No new types of races have been developed either by amalgamation or by transfer to new climatic and economic conditions in historic times.

Contrasted geographic conditions long ago lost their power to work radical physical changes in the race type, because man even with the beginnings of civilization learned to protect himself against extremes of climate. He therefore preserved his race type, which consequently in the course of ages lost much of its plasticity and therewith its capacity to evolve new varieties.[233] Where ethnic amalgamations on a large scale have occurred as a result of the historical movement, as in Mexico, the Sudan and Central Africa, the local race, being numerically stronger than the intruders and better adapted to the environment, has succeeded in maintaining its type, though slightly modified, side by side with the intruders. The great historical movements of modern times, however, have been the expansion of European peoples over the r.e.t.a.r.ded regions of the world. These peoples, coming into contact with inferior races, and armed generally with a race pride which was antagonistic to hybrid marriages, preserved their blood from extensive intermixture.

Hybridism, where it existed, was an ephemeral feature restricted to pioneer days, when white women were scarce, or to regions of extreme heat or cold, where white women and children could with difficulty survive. Even in Spanish America, where ethnic blendings were most extensive, something of the old Spanish pride of race has rea.s.serted itself.

[Sidenote: Checks to differentiation.]

Improved communication maintains or increases the ranks of the intruders from the home supply. The negroes in North America, imported as they were _en ma.s.se_, then steadily recruited by two centuries of the slave trade, while their race integrity was somewhat protected by social ostracism, have not been seriously modified physically by several generations of residence in a temperate land. Their changes have been chiefly cultural. The Englishman has altered only superficially in the various British colonial lands. Constant intercourse and the progress of inventions have enabled him to maintain in diverse regions approximate uniformity of physical well-being, similar social and political ideals.

The changed environment modifies him in details of thought, manner, and speech, but not in fundamentals.

Moreover, civilized man spreading everywhere and turning all parts of the earth's surface to his uses, has succeeded to some extent in reducing its physical differences. The earth as modified by human action is a conspicuous fact of historical development.[234] Irrigation, drainage, fertilization of soils, terrace agriculture, denudation of forests and forestration of prairies have all combined to diminish the contrasts between diverse environments, while the acclimatization of plants, animals and men works even more plainly to the same end of uniformity. The unity of the human race, varied only by superficial differences, reflects the unity of the spherical earth, whose diversities of geographical feature nowhere depart greatly from the mean except in point of climate. Differentiation due to geography, therefore, early reached its limits. For a.s.similation no limit can be forseen.

[Sidenote: Geographical origins.]

In view of this constant differentiation on the one hand, and a.s.similation on the other, the historical movement has made it difficult to trace race types to their origin; and yet this is a task in which geography must have a hand. Borrowed civilizations and purloined languages are often so many disguises which conceal the truth of ethnic relations.h.i.+ps. A long migration to a radically different habitat, into an outskirt or detached location protected from the swamping effects of cross-breeding, results eventually in a divergence great enough to obliterate almost every cue to the ancient kins.h.i.+p. The long-headed Teutonic race of northern Europe is regarded now by ethnologists as an offshoot of the long-headed brunette Mediterranean race of African origin, which became bleached out under the pale suns of Scandinavian skies. The present distribution of the various Teutonic stocks is a geographical fact; their supposed cradle in the Mediterranean basin is a geographical hypothesis. The connecting links must also be geographical.

They must prove the former presence of the migrating folk in the intervening territory. A dolichocephalic substratum of population, with a negroid type of skull, has in fact been traced by archaeologists all over Europe through the early and late Stone Ages. The remains of these aboriginal inhabitants are marked in France, even in spa.r.s.ely tenanted districts like the Auvergne Plateau, which is now occupied by the broad-headed Alpine race; and they are found to underlie, in point of time, other brachycephalic areas, like the Po Valley, Bavaria and Russia.[235]

The origin of a people can be investigated and stated only in terms of geography. The problem of origin can be solved only by tracing a people from its present habitat, through the country over which it has migrated, back to its original seat. Here are three geographical ent.i.ties which can be laid down upon a map, though seldom with sharply defined boundaries. They represent three successive geographic locations, all embodying geographic conditions potent to influence the people and their movement. Hence the geographical element emerges in every investigation as to origins; whether in ethnology, history, philology, mythology or religion. The transit land, the course between start and finish, is of supreme importance. Especially is this true for religion, which is transformed by travel. Christianity did not conquer the world in the form in which it issued from the cramped and isolated environment of Palestine, but only after it had been remodelled in Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece and Rome, and cosmopolized in the wide contact of the Mediterranean basin. The Roman speech and civilization, which spread through the Romance speaking peoples of Europe, were variously diluted and alloyed before being transplanted by French, Spaniard and Portuguese to American sh.o.r.es, there to be further transformed.

[Sidenote: Large centers of dispersion.]

In view of the countless springs and tributaries that combine to swell the current of every historical movement, anthropo-geography looks for the origin of a people not in a narrowly defined area, but in a broad, ill-defined center of dispersion, from which many streams simultaneously and successively flow out as from a low-rimmed basin, and which has been filled from many remoter sources. Autochthones, aborigines are therefore merely scientific tropes, indicating the limit beyond which the movement of people cannot be traced in the gray light of an uncertain dawn. The vaguer and more complex these movements on account of their historical remoteness, the wider their probable range. The question as to the geographical origin of the Aryan linguistic family of peoples brings us to speculative sources, more or less scientifically based, reaching from Scandinavia and Lithuania to the Hindu Kush Mountains and northern Africa.[236] The sum total of all these conjectural cradles, amounting to a large geographical area, would more nearly approximate the truth as to Aryan origins. For the study of the historical movement makes it clear that a large, highly differentiated ethnic or linguistic family presupposes a big center end a long period of dispersion, protracted wanderings, and a diversified area both for their migrations and successive settlements.

[Sidenote: Small centers.]

The slighter the inner differences in an ethnic stock, whether in culture, language or physical traits, the smaller was their center of distribution and the more rapid their dispersal. The small initial habitat restricts the chances of variation through isolation and contrasted geographic conditions, as does also the short duration of their subsequent separation. The amazing uniformity of the Eskimo type from Bering Strait to eastern Greenland can only thus be explained, even after making allowance for the monotony of their geographic conditions and remoteness from outside influences. The distribution of the Bantu dialects over so wide a region in Central Africa and with such slight divergences presupposes narrow limits both of s.p.a.ce and time for their origin, and a short period since their dispersal.[237]

Small centers of dispersion are generally natural districts with fixed boundaries, favored by their geographical location or natural resources or by both for the development of a relatively dense population. When this increases beyond the local limits of subsistence, there follows an emigration in point of number and duration out of all proportion to the small area whence it issues. Ancient Phoenicia, Crete, Samos, mediaeval Norway, Venice, Yemen, modern Malta, Gilbert Islands, England and j.a.pan furnish examples. Such small favored areas, when they embody also strong political power, may get the start in the occupation of colonial lands.

This gives them a permanent advantage, if their colonies are chosen with a view to settlement in congenial climates, as were those of the English, rather than the more ephemeral advantage of trade, as were those of the Dutch and Portuguese in the Tropics. It seems also essential to these centers of dispersion, that, to be effective, they must command the wide choice of outlet and destination afforded by the mighty common of the sea. Only the Inca Empire in South America gives us an example of the extensive political expansion of a small mountain state.

[Sidenote: Tests of origin.]

The question arises whether any single rule can as yet be formulated for identifying the original seats of existing peoples. By some ethnologists and historians such homes have been sought where the people are distributed in the largest area, as the Athapascan and Algonquin Indians are a.s.signed to a northern source, because their territories attained their greatest continuous extent in Canada, but were intermittent or attenuated farther south. The fact that colonial peoples often multiply inordinately in new lands, and there occupy a territory vastly greater than that of the mother country, points to the danger in such a generalization. Of the ten millions of Jews in the world, only a handful remain in the ancient center of dispersion in Palestine, while about eight millions are found in Poland and the contiguous territories of western Russia, Roumania, Austria-Hungary and eastern Germany. Moreover, history and the German element in the "Yiddish" speech of the Russian Jews point to a secondary center of dispersion in the Rhine cities and Franconia, whither the Jews were drawn by the trade route up the Rhone Valley in the third century.[238]

A more scientific procedure is to look for the early home of a race in the locality around which its people or family of peoples centers in modern times. Therefore we place the cradle of the negro race in Africa, rather than Melanesia. Density often supplies a test, because colonial lands are generally more spa.r.s.ely inhabited than the mother country. But even this conclusion fails always to apply, as in the case of Samos, which has a population vastly more dense than any section of the Grecian mainland. The largest compact area including at once the greatest density of population and the greatest purity of race would more nearly indicate the center of dispersion; because purity of race is incompatible with long migrations, as we have seen, though in the native seat it may be affected by intrusive elements. When this purity of race is combined with archaic forms of language and culture, as among the Lithuanians of Aryan speech among the Baltic swamps, it may indicate that the locality formed a segregated corner of the early center of dispersion. It seems essential to such an original seat that, whether large or small, it should be marked by some degree of isolation, as the condition for the development of specific racial characteristics.

The complexity of this question of ethnic origins is typical of anthropo-geographic problems, typical also in the warning which it gives against any rigidly systematic method of solution. The whole science of anthropo-geography is as yet too young for hard-and-fast rules, and its subject matter too complex for formulas.

NOTES TO CHAPTER IV

[126] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 179-187. London, 1904. W.Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, pp. 306-310, 319-326. New York, 1899.

[127] Compare observations of Georg Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, Vol. I, pp. 312-313. London, 1873.

[128] Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, p. lvii. Philadelphia, 1868.

[129] D.M. Wallace, Russia, pp. 151-155. New York, 1904.

[130] Thucydides, Book I, chap. II.

[131] Strabo, Book II, chap. III, 7.

[132] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 408-414, Vol. XIX of _History of North America_, edited by T.N. Thorpe. Philadelphia, 1905.

[133] Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, p. 214. Oxford, 1892.

[134] Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, p. 587. New York, 1872.

[135] D.G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 116-119. Philadelphia, 1901.

[136] O.T. Mason, Primitive Travel and Transportation, pp. 249-250.

_Smithsonian Report_, Was.h.i.+ngton, 1896.

[137] Thucydides, Book I, chap. II.

[138] Edward A. Boss, Foundations of Sociology, pp. 359-363, 386-389.

New York, 1905.

[139] D.G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 73-75. Philadelphia, 1901.