The Immense Journey

by Loren Eiseley

  When the skull is studied in projection and ratios computed, we find that these fossil South African folk, generally called “Boskop” or “Boskopoids” after the site of first discovery, have the amazing cranium-to-face ratio of almost five to one. In Europeans it is about three to one. This figure is a marked indication of the degree to which face size had been “modernized” and subordinated to brain growth. It is true that Dr. Ronald Singer has recently contended that the “Boskop” people cannot be successfully differentiated from the Bushman because Boskopoid features can be observed in this latter group, but even he would not deny the appearance of the peculiarly pedomorphic and ultrahuman features we have been discussing. At best, he would contend, in contrast to Keith and Drennan, that these characters have emerged in a sporadic fashion throughout the racial history of South Africa. By contrast, the facial structure of existing Caucasians, advanced though we imagine it, has only a mediocre rating.

  The teeth vary a little from the usual idea about man of the future, yet they, too, are modern. Our prophecies generally include the speculation that we will, in time, lose our third molar teeth. This seems likely indeed, for the tooth often fails to erupt, crowds, and causes trouble. The Boskop folk had no such difficulty. Their teeth are small, neatly reduced in proportion to their delicate jaws, and free from any sign of the dental ills that trouble us. Here, in a hunter’s world that would seem to have demanded at least the stout modern dentition of the Congo Negro, nature had decreed otherwise. These teeth could have nibbled sedately at the Waldorf, nor would the customers have been alarmed.

  With the face, however, it would have been otherwise. In its anatomical structure we observe characters which relate these people both with the dwarf modern Bushman and to some ancient Negroid strain distinct from the West Coast blacks. We believe that they had the tightly-kinked “pepper-corn” hair of the Bushman as well as his yellow-brown skin. A branch of the Negro race has thus produced what is actually, so far as we can judge from the anatomical standpoint, one of the most ultrahuman types that ever lived! Had these characters appeared among whites, they would undoubtedly have been used in invidious comparisons with other “lesser” races.

  We can, of course, repeat the final, unanswerable question: What did this tremendous brain mean to the Boskop people? We can marvel over their curious and exotic anatomy. We can wonder at the mysterious powers hidden in the human body, so potent that once unleashed they brought this more than modern being into existence on the very threshold of the Ice Age.

  We can debate for days whether that magnificent cranial endowment actually represented a superior brain. We can smile pityingly at his miserable shell heaps, point to the mute stones that were his only tools. We can do this, but in doing it we are mocking our own rude forefathers of a similar day and time. We are forgetting the high artistic sensitivity which flowered in the closing Ice Age of Europe and which, oddly, blossomed here as well, lingering on even among the dwarfed Bushmen of the Kalahari. No, we cannot dismiss the Boskop people on such grounds, for even remarkable potential endowment cannot create high civilization overnight.

  What we can say is that perhaps the unloosed mechanism ran too fast, that these people may have been ill-equipped physically to compete against the onrush of more ferocious and less foetalized folk. In a certain sense the biological clock had speeded them out of their time and place—a time which ten thousand years later has still not arrived We may speculate that even mentally they may have lacked something of the elemental savagery of their competitors.

  Their evolutionary gallop has led precisely nowhere save to a dwarfed and dying folk—if, with some authorities, we accept the later Bushmen as their descendants. This, then, was the logical end of complete foetalization: a desperate struggle to survive among a welter of more prolific and aggressive stocks. The answer to the one great question is still nowhere, still nothing. But there in the darkened laboratory, after the students have gone, I look once more at the exalted photograph of my friend upon the screen, noting character by character the foetalized refinement by which the artist has attempted to indicate the projected trend of future development—the expanded brain, the delicate face.

  I look, and I know I have seen it all before, reading, as I have long grown used to doing, the bones through the living flesh. I have seen this face in another racial guise in another and forgotten day. And once again I grow aware of that eternal flickering of forms which we are now too worldly wise to label progress, and whose meaning forever escapes us.

  The man of the future came, and looked out among us once with wistful, if unsophisticated eyes. He left his bones in the rubble of an alien land. If we read evolution aright, he may come again in another million years, Are the evolutionary forces searching for the right moment of his appearance? Or is his appearance itself destined always, even in the moment of emergence, to mark the end of the drama and foretell the extinction of a race?

  Perhaps the strange interior clockwork that is here revealed as so indifferent to environmental surroundings has set, after all, a limit to the human time it keeps. That is the real question propounded by my friend’s fine face. That is the question that I sometimes think the Boskop folk have answered. I wish I could be sure. I wish I knew.

  Whatever else these skulls or those of occasional variant moderns may tell us, one thing they clearly reveal: Those who contend that because of present human cranial size, and the limitations of the human pelvis, man’s brain is no longer capable of further expansion, are mistaken. Cranial capacities of almost a third more than the modern average have been occasionally attained among the Boskop people and even in rare individuals among other, less foetalized races. The secret does not lie in the size of the brain before birth; rather, as we have seen, it is contained in that strange spurt which in the first year of life carries man upward and outward into a social world from which his fellow beings are excluded. Whether that postnatal expansion is destined to be further enhanced in the long eras to come there is no telling, nor, perhaps, does it matter greatly. For in the creation of the social brain, nature, through man, has eluded the trap which has engulfed in one way or another every other form of life on the planet. Within the reasonable limits of the brain that now exists, she has placed the long continuity of civilized memory as it lies packed in the world’s great libraries. The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger, and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.

  I once sat, a prisoner, long ago, and watched a peasant soldier just recently equipped with a submachine gun swing the gun slowly into line with my body. It was a beautiful weapon and his finger toyed hesitantly with the trigger. Suddenly to possess all that power and then to be forbidden to use it must have been almost too much for the man to contain. I remember, also, a protesting female voice nearby—the eternal civilizing voice of women who know that men are fools and children, and irresponsible. Sheepishly the peon slowly dropped the gun muzzle away from my chest. The black eyes over the barrel looked out at me a little wicked, a little desirous of better understanding.

  “Thompson, Tome’-son’,” he repeated proudly, slapping the barrel. “Tome’-son’.” I nodded a little weakly, relaxing with a sigh. After all, we were men together and understood this great subject of destruction. And was I not a citizen of the country that had produced this wonderful mechanism? So I nodded again and said carefully after him. “Thompson, Tome’-son’. Bueno, si, muy bueno.” We looked at each other then, smiling a male smile that ran all the way back to the Ice Age. In academic halls since, considering the future of humanity, I have never been quite free of the memory of that soldier’s smile. I weigh it mentally against the future whenever one of those delicate forgotten skulls is placed upon my desk.

  LITTLE MEN AND FLYING SAUCERS
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  Today, as never before, the sky is menacing. Things seen indifferently last century by the wandering lamplighter now trouble a generation that has grown up to the wail of air-raid sirens and the ominous expectation that the roof may fall at any moment. Even in daytime, reflected light on a floating dandelion seed, or a spider riding a wisp of gossamer in the sun’s eye, can bring excited questions from the novice unused to estimating the distance or nature of aerial objects.

  Since we now talk, write, and dream endlessly of space rockets, it is no surprise that this thinking yields the obverse of the coin: that the rocket or its equivalent may have come first to us from somewhere “outside.” As a youth, I may as well confess, I waited expectantly for it to happen. So deep is the conviction that there must be life out there beyond the dark, one thinks that if they are more advanced than ourselves they may come across space at any moment, perhaps in our generation. Later, contemplating the infinity of time, one wonders if perchance their messages came long ago, hurtling into the swamp muck of the steaming coal forests, the bright projectile clambered over by hissing reptiles, and the delicate instruments running mindlessly down with no report.

  Sometimes when young, and fossil hunting in the western Badlands, I had thought it might yet be found, corroding and long dead, in the Tertiary sod that was once green under the rumbling feet of titanotheres. Surely, in the infinite wastes of time, in the lapse of suns and wane of systems, the passage, if it were possible, would have been achieved. But the bright projectile has not been found and now, in sobering middle age, I have long since ceased to look. Moreover, the present theory of the expanding universe has made time, as we know it, no longer infinite. If the entire universe was created in a single explosive instant a few billion years ago, there has not been a sufficient period for all things to occur even behind the star shoals of the outer galaxies. In the light of this fact it is now just conceivable that there may be nowhere in space a mind superior to our own.

  If such a mind should exist, there are many reasons why it could not reside in the person of a little man. There is, however, a terrible human fascination about the miniature, and one little man in the hands of the spinner of folk tales can multiply with incredible rapidity. Our unexplainable passion for the small is not quenched at the borders of space, nor, as we shall see, in the spinning rings of the atom. The flying saucer and the much publicized little men from space equate neatly with our own projected dreams.

  When I first heard of the little man there was no talk of flying saucers, nor did his owner ascribe to him anything more than an earthly origin. It has been almost a quarter of a century since I encountered him in a bone hunter’s camp in the West. A rancher had brought him to us in a box. “I figured you’d maybe know about him,” he said. “He’ll cost you money, though. There’s money in that little man.”

  “Man?” we said.

  “Man,” he countered. “What you’d call a pygmy or a dwarf, but smaller than any show dwarf I ever did see. A mummy, too, a little dead mummy. I figure it was some kind of bein’ like us, but little. They put him in the place I found him; maybe it was a thousand years ago. You’ll likely know.”

  Our heads met over the box. The last paper was withdrawn. The creature emerged on the man’s palm. I’ve seen a lot of odd things in the years since, and fakes by the score, but that little fellow gave me the creeps. He might have been two feet high in a standing posture—not more. He was mummified in a crouching position, arms folded. The face with closed eyes seemed vaguely evil. I could have sworn I was dreaming.

  I touched it. There was a peculiar, fleshy consistency about it, still. It was not a dry mummy. It was more like what you would expect a natural cave mummy to be like. It had no tail. I know because I looked. And to this day the little man sits on there, in my brain, and as plain as yesterday I can see the faint half-smirk of his mouth and the tiny black hands at his knees.

  “You can have it for two hundred bucks,” said the man. We glanced at each other, sighed, and shook our heads. “We aren’t in the market,” we said. “We’re collecting, not buying, and we’re staying with our bones.”

  “Okay,” said the man, and gave us a straight look, closing his box. “I’m going to the carnival down below tonight. There’s money in him. There’s money in that little man.”

  I think it may have been just as well for us that we made no purchase. I have never liked the little man, nor the description of the carnival to which he and his owner were going. It may be, I used to think, that I will yet encounter him before I die, in some little colored tent on a country midway. Once, in the years since, I have heard a description that sounded like him in another guise. It involved a fantastic tale of some Paleozoic beings who hunted among the tree ferns when the world was ruled by croaking amphibians. The story did not impress me; I knew him by then for what he was: an anomalous mummified stillbirth with an undeveloped brain.

  I never expected to see him emerge again in books on flying saucers, or to see the “little men” multiply and become so common that columnists would take note of them. Nor, though I should have known better, did I expect to live to hear my little man ascribed an extraplanetary origin. There is a story back of him, it is true, but it is a history of this earth, and, of all unlikely things, it involves that great man of science, Charles Darwin, though by a curious, lengthy, and involved route.

  Men have been men for so long that they tend not to question the fact. All their experience tells them that their children will precisely resemble themselves; that kittens will become cats and cats will have kittens, and that even caterpillars, though the pattern seems a little odd, will become butterflies, and butterflies will produce caterpillars. It is so habitual an event that we do not stop to ask why this happens, or to consider that this amazing precision in results implies a strange ordering of life in a world we often think is chanceful and meaningless.

  A few wise men since the time of the Greeks have found it a source of wonder, but they have been a minority. Most people have shrugged and spoken indifferently of the gods, or contented themselves, as the Christian world did for so long, with the idea of special creation of each species. Nevertheless, the wise ones kept on wondering.

  They found, as they began their first groping attempts to classify and arrange the living world, that in spite of the assumed individual creation of every living species by the supernatural intervention of divine power, a basic similarity of structure existed among many forms of life. This was a remarkable thing to find among supposedly individual creations. Offhand one would say that a much greater degree of spontaneous novelty would have been possible. In fact, man once innocently believed himself part of such a creation. The fabulous animals of the ancient bestiaries, the mermaids, griffins, and centaurs, not to mention the men whose ears were so large that their owners slept in them, would have been the natural, spontaneous products of such uncontrolled, creative whimsy.

  But there was the pattern: the ape and the man with their bone-by-bone correspondence. The very fact that one can add a plural to the word reptile and so suggest anything from a brontosaurus to a garter snake shows that a pattern exists. Birds all have feathers, wings, and claws; they are a common class in spite of their diversities. They have been pulled into many shapes, but there is still an eternal “birdliness” about them. They are built on a common plan, just as I share mammalian characters with a small mouse who inhabits my desk drawer. This is hard to account for in a disordered world, so that recently, when I came upon this mouse, trapped and terrified in the wastebasket, his similarity to myself rendered me helpless, and out of sheer embarrassment I connived in his escape.

  Now so long as these remarkable patterns could be observed only in the living world around us, they occasioned no great alarm. Even after Cuvier, in 1812, made a magnificent attempt to reduce the forms of animal life to four basic blueprints or “archetypes” of divergent character, no one was particularly disturbed—least of all from the religious point of view. In the wo
rds of one great naturalist, Louis Agassiz, “This plan of creation … has not grown out of the necessary action of physical laws, but was the free conception of the Almighty Intellect, matured in his thought before it was manifested in tangible external forms.”

  It was not long, however, before pattern, the divine blueprint, first recognized in the existing world, was extended by the geologist across the deeps of time. The animal world of the past was in the process of discovery. It proved to be a world without man. Curiously enough, it was soon learned that extinct animals could be fitted into the broad classifications of the existing world. They were mammals or amphibia or reptiles, as the case might be. Though no living eye had beheld them, they seemed to mark the continuation of the divine abstraction, the eternal patterns, across the enormous time gulfs of the past.

  The second fact, that man had not been discovered, was a cause for dismay. In the man-centered universe of the time, one can appreciate the anguish of the Reverend Mr. Kirby discovering the Age of Reptiles: “Who can think that a being of unbounded power, wisdom, and goodness, should create a world merely for the habitation of a race of monsters, without a single, rational being in it to serve and glorify him?” This is the wounded outcry of the human ego as it fails to discover its dominance among the beasts of the past. Even more tragically, it learns that the world supposedly made for its enjoyment has existed for untold eons entirely indifferent to its coming. The chill vapors of time and space are beginning to filter under the closed door of the human intellect.