"Men can not afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her."
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
By Alex P. Vidal
AN imaginative naturalist has admitted in The Immense Journey there were days when she found herself "unduly pessimistic" about the future of man.
"Indeed, I will confess that there have been occasions when I swore I would never again make the study of time a profession," explains Dr. Loren Eiseley, author of The Immense Journey.
"My walls are lined with books expounding its mysteries, my hands have been split and raw with grubbing into the quicklime of its waste bins and hidden crevices. I have stared so much at death that I can recognize the lingering personalities in the faces of skulls and feel accompanying affinities and repulsions."
She says one such skull lies in the lockers of a great metropolitan museum. It is labeled simply: Strandlooper, South Africa.
"I have never looked longer into any human face than I have upon the features of that skull. I come there often, drawn in spite of myself. It is a face that would lend reality to the fantastic tale of our childhood," Eiseley adds.
"There is a hint of Well's Time Machine folk in it--those pathetic, childlike people whom Wells pictures as haunting earth's autumnal cities in the far future of the dying planet."
Yet the skull has not been spirited back to us through future eras by a time machine, according to her describing it as "a thing, instead of the millennial past.
It is a caricature of modern man, not by reason of its primitiveness but, startlingly, because of a modernity outreaching his own. It constitutes, in fact, a mysterious prophecy and warning."
For the very moment in which students of humanity have been sketching their concept of the man of the future, that being has already come, and lived, and passed away, explains Eiseley.
CURIOUS
"We are insatiably curious about ourselves and desperately in need of reassurance. Beneath our boisterous self-confidence is fear--a growing fear of the future we are in the process of creating," she explains.
"In such a mood we turn the pages of our favorite magazine and, like as not, come straight upon a description of the man of the future."
She suggests that the descriptions are not pessimistic; they always, with sublime confidence, involve just one variety of mankind--our own--and they are always subtly flattering.
"In fact, a distinguished colleague of mine who was adept at this kind of prophecy once allowed a somewhat etherealized version of his own lofty brow to be used as an illustration of what the man of the future was to look like. Even the bald spot didn't matter--all the men of the future were so bald, anyway," Eiseley writes.
In the minds of many scholars, she points out, a process of "foetalization" is one of the chief mechanisms by which man of today has sloughed off his ferocious appearance of a million years ago, prolonged his childhood, and increased the size of his brain. "Foetalization" or "pedomorphism," as it is termed, means simply the retention, into adult life, of bodily characters which at some earlier stage of evolutionary history were actually only infantile.
Such traits were rapidly lost as the animal attained maturity, she observes.
"If we examine the life history of one of the existing great apes and compare its development with that of man," Eiseley explains, "we observe that the infantile stage of both man and ape are far more similar than the two will be in maturity."
GORILLA
At birth, according to her, we have seen, the brain of the gorilla is close to the size of that of the human infant. Both newborn gorilla and human child are much more alike, facially, than they will ever be in adult life because the gorilla infant will, in the course of time, develop an enormously powerful and protrusive muzzle. She says the sutures of his skull will close early; his brain will grow very little more.
By contrast, she adds, human brain growth will first spurt and then grow steadily over an extended youth. Cranial sutures will remain open into adult life.
Teeth will be later in their eruption. Furthermore, she elaborates, the great armored skull and the fighting characters of the anthropoid male will be held in abeyance.
Eiseley says modern man retains something of his youthful gaiety and nimble mental habits far into adult life. The great male anthropoids, by contrast, lose the playful friendliness of youth.
In the end the massive skull houses a small, savage, and often morose brain.
"It is doubtful whether our thick-skulled forerunners viewed life very pleasantly in their advancing years," she observes.
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