The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and MankindWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
World history
It must be evident from what has already been explained in Chapter III
that man, so widely spread and subjected therefore to great differences
of climate, consuming very different food in different regions, attacked
by different enemies, must always have been undergoing considerable
local modification and differentiation. Man, like every other species of
living thing, has constantly been tending to differentiate into several
species; wherever a body of men has been cut off, in islands or oceans
or by deserts or mountains, from the rest of humanity, it must have
begun very soon to develop special characteristics, specially adapted to
the local conditions. But, on the other hand, man is usually a wandering
and enterprising animal, for whom there exist few insurmountable
barriers. Men imitate men, fight and conquer them, interbreed, one
people with another. Concurrently for thousands of years there have been
two sets of forces at work, one tending to separate men into a multitude
of local varieties, and another to remix and blend these varieties
together before a separate species has been established.
These two sets of forces may have fluctuated in this relative effect in
the past. Palæolithic man, for instance, may have been more of a
wanderer, he may have drifted about over a much greater area, than
later Neolithic man; he was less fixed to any sort of home or lair, he
was tied by fewer possessions. Being a hunter, he was obliged to follow
the migrations of his ordinary quarry. A few bad seasons may have
shifted him hundreds of miles. He may therefore have mixed very widely
and developed few varieties over the greater part of the world.
The appearance of agriculture tended to tie those communities of mankind
that took it up to the region in which it was most conveniently carried
on, and so to favour differentiation. Mixing or differentiation is not
dependent upon a higher or lower stage of civilization; many savage
tribes wander now for hundreds of miles; many English villagers in the
eighteenth century, on the other hand, had never been more than eight or
ten miles from their villages, neither they nor their fathers nor
grandfathers before them. Hunting peoples often have enormous range. The
Labrador country, for instance, is inhabited by a few thousand
Indians,[70] who follow the one great herd of caribou as it wanders
yearly north and then south again in pursuit of food. This mere handful
of people covers a territory as large as France. Nomad peoples also
range very widely. Some Kalmuck tribes are said to travel nearly a
thousand miles between summer and winter pasture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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