Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/482

 mc gee] THE TREND OF HUMAN PROGRESS 4^3

and other substances suggesting riparian or maritime habitat. In somewhat more advanced culture, as shown by Cushing, wood and clay were shaped in similitude of these natural objects under a persistent system of symbolism, at once recording an early shoreland influence and explaining the strong tendency of primi- tive peoples to deify seas and streams and perpetuate other notions implanted by the waterside. The evidence of budding demotic function, especially in America and eastern Asia, is in line with the obvious fact that shores abounding in sea-food afford the simplest and easiest livelihood for humans of the lowest culture, and that they are the natural lines of migration under the pressure of the food-quest, as shown by Mason ; while it is the commonplace experience of both primitive and cultured hunts- men that the stream-diversified woodland — yielding fish, flesh, fowl, and fruit, constituting an easily-memorized natural map, and affording natural ways of travel — is the environment best adapted to life when the appliances of higher culture fail. The leading facts of initial activities, of the localities of easiest liveli- hood, and of the lines of easiest travel are in harmony ; they in- dicate that the earliest men were not only arborean in habit but orarian in habitat.

So it would appear that while the body of recorded experience relating to primitive man is too limited to warrant final judgment concerning the origin and early development of the human genus, it is sufficient to suggest that the prototype was a tailless quad- rumane inhabiting coastwise or river-watered forests. True, there are some indications that in certain provinces man became troglodyte or mountaineer while yet in primal state ; but there are still stronger indications that, whether the cave-dwellers were autochthonous or not, most modern men must be regarded as wanderers from the natural Eden of a wooded shoreland.

Summarily, the trend of somatic progress is clear, despite the mists beclouding the earliest stages: No experience tells of

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