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object:3.02 - THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE
book class:The Phenomenon of Man
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Integral Theory
class:chapter



CHAPTER TWO

THE DEPLOYMENT OF
THE NOOSPHERE



In order to multiply the contacts necessary for its gropings
and to be able to store up the multifarious variety of its riches,
life is obliged to move forward in terms of deep masses. And
when therefore its course emerges from the gorges in which a
new mutation has so to speak strangled it, the narrower the
channel from which it emerges and the vaster the surface it has
to cover with its flow, the more it needs to re-group itself in
multitude.

Our picture is of mankind labouring under the impulsion of
an obscure instinct, so as to break out through its narrow point
of emergence and submerge the earth ; of thought becoming
number so as to conquer all habitable space, taking precedence
over all other forms of life ; of mind, in other words, deploy-
ing and convoluting the layers of the noosphere. This effort at
multiplication and organic expansion is, for him who can see,
the summing up and final expression of human pre-history and
history, from the earliest beginnings down to the present day.

We will now try, in a few bold strokes, to map out the
phases or successive waves of this invasion (diag. 4).



1. THE RAMIFYING PHASE OF THE
PRE-HOMINIDS



Towards the very end of the lower Pleistocene period, a vast
upward movement, a positive jolt, seems to have affected the

191



THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERB




■ - MODERN
- NEOLITHIC



Homo sapiens

Neanderthaloid

Prehominions

+ — + Australopithecus
Socialized Zone



J



A
//J


diagram 4. The development of the human Layer.
The figures on the left indicate thousands of years. They
are a minimum estimate and should probably be at least
doubled. The hypothetical zone of convergence on the point
Omega is obviously not to scale. By analogy with other
living layers, its duration should certainly run into thousands
of years.



continental masses of the old world from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. 1 Almost everywhere, at this period, we find the land
being drained, ravines being carved, and thick layers of alluvium
spreading over the plains. Before this great upheaval we can
establish no certain trace of man anywhere. Yet it was barely over
when we find chipped stone mixed with the gravels on almost
all the raised lands of Africa, Western Europe and Southern
Asia.

Man of the Lower Quaternary period, the contemporary
and the author of these earliest tools is only known to us in
two fossil remains. We know them well, however — the Pithe-
canthropus of Java, long represented only by a simple skull,
but now by much more satisfactory specimens recendy dis-
covered ; and the Sinanthropus of China, numerous specimens
of which have been found in the last ten years. These two beings
are so closely related that the nature of each would have remained
obscure if we had not had the good fortune to be able to compare
them. 8

What can we learn from these venerable relics which are at
least some one or two hundred thousand years old ?

To begin with, anthropologists are now in agreement on
one point : both Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus are already
definitely hominid in their anatomy. If we arrange their skulls
in series between those of the great apes on the one hand and
modern man on the other, we are at once struck by the wide
morphological breach, the void, apparent between them and the
anthropoids, while on the human side they seem to fall naturally
into the same cast. We find a relatively short face and a relatively
spacious cranium. In Trinil man die cerebral capacity hardly
descends below 800 c.c. while with Peking man in the biggest

1 At the end of the Villafranchian age, to be more exact. [By a decision of
the International Geological Congress (1948), the Villafranchian is now included
in the Pleistocene.]

* To avoid complicating the story, I will say nothing here of Heidelberg
man. However ancient and remarkable his jaw, we do not know enough
about him to determine his real anthropological position.

193



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

males it reaches noo. 1 We find a lower jaw essentially con-
structed on human lines towards the symphysis, and lastly and
most important of all. we find erect biped posture leaving the
fore limbs free. With all these signs it is quite obvious that we
are on the human side of the line.

However hominid the Pithecanthropus and Smanthropus
were, judged by their physiognomy they were certainly strange
creatures such as have long ago vanished from the earth. Elon-
gated skull, markedly compressed behind enormous orbits ;
flattened cranium whose transverse section, instead of being
ovoid or pentagonal, as with us, forms an arch widely open at
the level of the ears ; strongly ossified skull whose brain-box
does not project backwards but is surrounded posteriorly by a
thick occipital roll ; a prognathous skull whose dental arches
project far forward above a symphysis which not only lacks a
chin but is receding ; and finally, highly marked sexual dimor-
phism, the females being small with rather slender jaws and
teeth, 'the males robust with strong molars and canines. These
various characters, in no way teratologicai, but expressing a
well-established, well-balanced architecture, seem to suggest, ana-
tomically, a downward convergence towards the ' simian ' world.
All things considered, the scientist can affirm without further
hesitation that, thanks to the double discovery of Trinil man
and Peking man, we recognise within mankind a further morpho-
logical rung, a further evolutionary stage and a further zoological

verticil.

They are a morphological rung because on the line separating,
for instance, a white man from a chimpanzee, we must place them,
by the form of their skull, almost exactly half-way ;

They are an evolutionary stage because, whether they have
or have not left any direct descendants in the contemporary
world, they probably represent a type through which modern
man must once have passed in the course of his phylogenesis ;

Lastly, they are a zoological verticil, for, though in all appear-
1 In present-day anthropoid apes, the cerebral capacity does not exceed
600 c.c.

TQ4



THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHEHE

ance narrowly localised on the farthest confines of Eastern Asia,
this group obviously belonged to a very much bigger group
whose nature and structure 1 shall be dealing with a little further
on.

In short, Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus are far from being
merely a couple of interesting anthropological types. Through
them, we are able to glimpse a whole wave of mankind.

Thus palaeontologists have once again shown their sense of
proportion in picking out this very old and very primitive human
layer and treating it as a distinct natural unity, to which they
have even given a name, calling these early types the pre-hominids.
This is an expressive and correct term from the standpoint of
the anatomical progression of forms, but one liable to veil or
misplace that psychic discontinuity in which we thought it
necessary to place the very pith of hominisation. To call
Pithecanthropus and Smanthropus pre-hominids might suggest
that they were not yet quite man. And that, according to my
argument, would mean they had not yet crossed the threshold of
reflection. The contrary seems to me much more probable ;
that, while admittedly far from having reached the level on
which we stand, they were already, both of them, in the full
sense of the word, intelligent beings.

That they were so seems to me to be stipulated by the
general mechanism of phylogenesis. A mutation as fundamental
as that of thought, a mutation which gives its specific impetus
to the whole human group, could not in my opinion have
appeared in the middle of the journey ; it could not have hap-
pened half-way up the stalk. It dominates the whole edifice.
Its place must therefore be beneath every recognisable verticil
in the unattainable depths of the peduncle, and thus beneath
those creatures which (however pre-hominid in cranial structure)
are already clearly situated above the point of origin and blossom-
ing of our human race.

And there is more to it than that. So far we can find no
trace of industry associated directly with the remains of Pithe-
canthropus. This is due to the conditions of where they lie :

195



THE PHENOMENON OP MAN

around Trinil the fossils are of bones that have been carried

down by streams to a Jake. Near Peking, on the other hand,

Sinanthropus has been caught in his lair, a filled-up cave littered

with stone implements mixed with charred bones. Ought we,

as M. Boule suggests, to see in this industry (sometimes, I admit,

of an astonishing quality) the vestiges of another man, unknown

to us, to whom Sinanthropus, himself not a homo fabcr, served as

prey ? As long as no remains are found of this hypothetical man,

1 consider the idea gratuitous and, everything considered, less

scientific. Sinanthropus already worked stones and made fire.

Until disproved, those two accomplishments must be considered

on the same level as reflection, forming with it an integral part

of the ' peduncle '. Taken together in one strand, these three

elements crop up universally at the same time as mankind. That,

objectively, is the situation.

And if it is really so, we see that despite their osteological
features so reminiscent of the anthropoids, the prc-hominids
were psychologically much nearer to us and thus phylctically
much less young and primitive than might have been supposed.
It must have taken time to discover fire and the art of making
a cutting tool— so much so that there is plenty of room for at
least one more human verticil still lower down, which we shall
perhaps unearth one day in Villafranchian times.

We have already said that other hominids, at a similar stage
of development, unquestionably lived at the same time as
Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus. Unfortunately we have only
very inadequate relics of them : the famous jaw from Heidelberg
perhaps, and the badly preserved cranium of Africanthropus
from East Africa. This is not enough to enable us to work
out the general physiognomy of the group. An observation
may, however, serve to shed light indirectly on what we want
to know.

We now know two species of Pithecanthropus, one relatively
small, the other much more robust and ' brutal '. To these
must be added two other forms positively gigantic, the one from
Java represented by the fragment of a jaw, the other from South

196



THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE

China by some isolated teeth. This makes, with Sinanthropus (for
the same period and the same continental fringe), five different
types in all, certainly related.

This multiplicity of related forms living closely pressed
together in a narrow strip, and also this curious common
tendency to gigantism, surely suggest the idea of an isolated,
marginal, zoological offshoot mutating upon itself in an almost
autonomous manner. And so it might seem that what was
going on in China and Malaya may have had its equivalent
elsewhere, in the case of other stems farther west.

If this is so we should have to say that, zoologically speaking,
the human group in the Lower Quaternary period still formed
only a loosely coherent group in which the divergent structure,
usual in animal verticils, was still dominant.

But at the same time, doubtless in the more central regions
of the continents, 1 the elements of a new and more compact
wave of mankind were mustering, ready to take over from this
archaic world.



2. THE GROUP OF THE NEANDER.THALOIDS



Geologically, after the Lower Quaternary period, the curtain
falls. During the interval, the Trinil deposits were folded ; the
red earth of China was carved with valleys ready to receive
their thick coating of yellow loess ; the face of Africa was
further fissured ; elsewhere glaciations advanced and receded.
When the curtain rises again some sixty thousand years ago,
and we can see the scene again, we find that the pre-hominids
have disappeared. Their place is now occupied by the Neander-
thaloids.

This new humanity is much better represented by fossil
remains than the preceding one, because it is not only more

1 Perhaps among the populations whose anatomical form is still unknown,
but whose 'bi-faccd' industry can be followed in the ancient Pleistocene
from the Cape to the Thames and from Spain to Java.

197



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

recent, but also more numerous. Little by little the network of
thought has extended and consolidated.

We find both progress in number and progress in hominisa-
tion.

With Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus, science could still
hesitate, wondering what sort of creature it was dealing with.
By the Middle Quaternary period, on the other hand, except
for a moment's hesitation at the Spy cranium or the Neanderthal
skull, there is never any serious doubt but that we are studying
the vestiges of members of our own race. This great development
of the brain, this industry of the caves, and for the first time those
incontestable cases of burial— everything goes to show that we
are in the presence of true man.

We have true man, then— but man who was not yet pre-
cisely us.

We fmd his cranium generally elongated, a low forehead,
thick, prominent orbital ridges, a still noticeable prognathism
of the face, as a rule the absence of canine fossae, absence of
chin, large teeth without any distinct neck between crown and
root. Confronted with these different features, no anthropolo-
gist could fail to recognise at a glance the fossil remains of a
European Neandcrthaloid. No people on earth today could be
confused with him, not even an Australian Aborigine or an
Aino. The advance from Trinil or Peking man is, as I have said,
manifest ; but the gulf in relation to modern man is hardly
less. Accordingly we have now another rung on the morpho-
logical ladder, another evolutionary stage. And in conformity
with the laws of phylogenesis we must inevitably suspect another
zoological verticil here, whose reality has not ceased to assert
itself in pre-history in the last few years. When the first Mous-
terian crania were discovered in Western Europe, and when it
became dear that these bones had not belonged cither to idiots
or degenerates, anatomists were naturally led to imagine that
in the Middle Palaeolithic age the earth was peopled by men
corresponding exactly to the Neanderthal type. Whence a
certain disappointment, perhaps, when fresh discoveries, more

198



THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE

and more numerous, failed to confirm this simple hypothesis.
Actually the diversity of the Neanderthaloids, year by year more
apparent, is precisely what we ought to have expected. For we can
now see it is that very diversity which definitely gives to their
' bundle ' its interest and its true physiognomy.

Of the forms called Neanderthaloids, our science today
recognises two distinct groups at different levels of phyletic
evolution, a group of terminal forms and an infant group :

a. The terminal group. Survivors, gradually dying out, of the
more or less autonomous offshoots which probably composed
the pre-hominid verticil — Solo man of Java, a direct and scarcely
changed descendant of Trinil man, 1 in Africa the extraordinarily
brutal Rhodesian man and, in Europe, unless I am mistaken,
Neanderthal man himself who, in spite of his remarkable and
persistent distribution over the whole of Western Europe, seems
really to represent nothing but the last florescence of a dying stock.

b. The infant group. A nebulous, not easily distinguishable
group of pseudo-Neanderthaloids with primitive features, but
definitely modernised or modernisable — a rounder head, less
prominent orbital ridges, canine fossae better marked, sometimes
the beginning of a chin : such are Steinhcim man and the finds
in Palestine. They arc incontestably Neanderthaloids, but they
are ever so much nearer to us ; a progressive branch, sleeping,
one might say, waiting for the coming dawn.

So let us put this triple ' bundle ' in its proper light, geo-
graphically and morphologically. Far from being a disconcerting
combination, the pattern is familiar. Leaves which have just
fallen ; leaves still alive but beginning to turn yellow ; leaves
not yet opened but full of vigour ; the complete section, almost
an ideal one, of zoological ramification.

1 Found in number in the horizontal terraces levelling the folded beds at
Trinil, homo soloensis seems to have been simply a big Pithecanthropus with a
more rounded cranium. This is an almost unique case in palaeontology, ot one
and the same phylum seen at the same place, across a geological discordance,
at two different stages of its development.



199



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN



3. THE HOMO SAPIENS COMPLEX

One of the great surprises of botany is to see at the beginning
of the Cretaceous period the world of cycads and conifers
abruptly submerged and replaced by a forest of angiosperms,
plane trees, oaks, etc., the bulk of modern forms bursting ready-
made on the Jurassic flora from some unknown region of the
globe. No less is the anthropologist bewildered when he discovers,
superimposed upon each other, hardly separated in the caves
by a floor of stalagmites, Mousterian man and Cromagnon man
or Aurignacian man. Here there is hardly any geological hiatus
at all, yet none the less we find a fundamental rejuvenation of
mankind. We fuid the sudden invasion of Homo sapiens, driven
by climate or the restlessness of his soul, sweeping over the Nean-
derthaloids.

Where did he come from, this new man ? Some anthropo-
logists would like to see in him the culmination of certain lines
of development already pin-pointed in earlier epochs— a direct
descendant, for example, of Sinanthropus. For definite technical
reasons, however, and still more because of overall analogies,
it is better to view things in another way. Without doubt,
somewhere or other and in his oivn way, Upper Palaeolithic man
must have passed through a prc-hominid phase and then through
a Neanderthaloid one. But, like the mammals, the trituberculates,
and all the other phyla, he disappears from our field of vision
in the course of his (possibly accelerated) embryogencsis. We
find imbrication and replacement rather than continuity and
prolongation : the law of succession once again dominates history.
I can thus easily picture the new-comer as the scion of an autono-
mous line of evolution, long hidden though secretly active— to
emerge triumphantly one fine day doubdess in the midst of those
pseudo-Neanderthaloids whose vital and probably very ancient
' bundle ' we have already mentioned. But at any rate, one thing
is certain and admitted by everybody. The man we find on the

200



THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE

face of the earth at the end of the Quaternary period is already
modern man — and in every way.

First of all anatomically without any possible doubt. We
see it in his high forehead with reduced orbits ; in his well-
rounded parietal bones ; in his weak occipital crest now below
his swelling brain ; in his slight jaw with its prominent chin —
all these features, so well marked in the last cave-dwellers, are
definitely our own. So clearly are they ours that, from this
moment onwards, the palaeontologist, accustomed to working
on pronounced morphological differences, no longer finds it
easy to distinguish between the remains of these fossil men and
men today. For that subtle task their over-all methods and
visual sizing-up are no longer adequate, and they must now
have recourse to the most delicate techniques (and audacities)
of anthropology. We arc no longer dealing with the recon-
struction on general lines of the mounting horizons of life, but
■with the analysis of the overlapping nuances making up our fore-
ground. Thirty thousand years. A long period measured in
terms of our lifetime, but it is a mere second for evolution.
From the osteological point of view there is during this interval
no appreciable breach of continuity in the human phylum. It
might even be said that there is, up to a point, no major change
in the progress of its somatic ramification.

And this is where we get our greatest surprise. In itself, it is
only very natural that the stem of Homo sapiens fossilis, studied at
its point of emergence, far from being simple, should display in
the composition and divergence of its fibres the complex structure
of a fan. This is, as we know, the initial condition of each phylum
on the tree of life. At the very least we should have counted on
finding, in those depths, a cluster of relatively primitive and
generalised forms, something antecedent in form to our present
races. And what we fmd is rather the opposite. Assuming one
can trust bones to give us an idea of flesh and blood, what were in
fact those first representatives, in the age ot the reindeer, of a
new human verticil freshly opening ? Nothing more or less
than what we see living today in approximately the same

201



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

regions of the earth. Negroes, white men and yellow men
(or at the most pre-negro, pre-white and pre-yellow), and those
various groups already for the most part settled to north, to
south, to east, to west, in their present geographical zones. That
is what we find all over the ancient world from Europe to China
at the end of the last Ice Age. Accordingly when we study Upper
Palaeolithic man, not only in the essential features of his anatomy
but also in the main lines of his ethnography, it is really ourselves
and our own infancy that we are finding, not only the skeleton
of modern man already there, but the framework of modem
humanity. We see the same general bodily form ; the same
fundamental distribution of races ; the same tendency (at least in
outline) for the ethnic groups to join up together in a coherent
system, over-riding all divergence. And (how could it fail to
follow?) the same essential aspirations in the depths of their soul.
Among the Neanderthaloids, as we have seen, a psychic
advance was manifest, shown amongst other signs by the presence
in the caves of the first graves. Even to the more brutal Neander-
thals, everyone is prepared to grant the flame of a genuine
intelligence. Most of it, however, seems to have been used up
in the sheer effort to survive and reproduce. If there was any
left over, we see no signs of it or fail to recognise them. What
went on in the minds of those distant cousins of ours ? We
have no idea. But in the age of the reindeer, with homo sapiens,
it is a definitely liberated thought which explodes, still warm,
on to the walls of the caves. Within them, these new-comers
brought art, an art still naturalistic but prodigiously accom-
plished. And thanks to the language of this art, we can for the
first time enter right into the consciousness of these vanished
beings whose bones we put together. There is a strange spiritual
nearness, even in detail. Those rites expressed in red and black
on the walls of caves in Spain, in the Pyrenees and Pengord,
are after all still practised under our eyes in Africa, in Oceania,
and even in America. What difference is there, for example,
between the sorcerer of the Trois-Freres Cave dressed up in
his deerskin, and some oceanic god ? But that's not the most

202



THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE

important point. We could make mistakes in interpreting in
modern terms the prints of hands, the bewitched bisons, and
the fertility symbols which give expression to the preoccupation
and religion of an Aurignacian or a Magdalenian man. Where
we could not be mistaken is in perceiving in the artists of those
distant ages a power of observation, a love of fantasy, and a joy
in creation (manifest as much in the perfection of movement
and outline as in the spontaneous play of chiselled ornament)
— these ilowers of a consciousness not merely reflecting upon
itself, but rejoicing in so doing. So the examination of skeletons
and skulls has not led us astray. In the Upper Quaternary
period it is indeed and in the fullest sense present-day man
at whom we are looking, not yet adult, admittedly, but having
nevertheless reached the ' age of reason '. And when we compare
him to ourselves, his brain is already perfect, so perfect that
since that time there seems to have been no measurable variation
or increased perfection in the organic instrument of our thought.

Are we to say, then, that the evolution in man ceased widi
the end of the Quaternary era ?

Not at all. But, without prejudice to what may still be
developing slowly and secretly in the depths of the nervous
system, evolution has since that date overtly overflowed its
anatomical modalities to spread, or perhaps even to transplant
its main thrust into the zones of psychic spontaneity both indivi-
dual and collective.

Henceforward it is in that form almost exclusively that we
shall be recognising it and following its course.



4. THE NEOLITHIC METAMORPHOSIS



Throughout living phyla, at all events among the higher animals
where wc can follow the process more easily, social development
is a progress that comes relatively late. It is an achievement of
maturity. In man, for reasons closely connected with his power
of reflection, this transformation is accelerated. As far back

203



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

as we can meet them, our great-great-ancestors are to be found
in groups and gathered round the fire.

Definite as may be the signs of association at those remote
periods, the whole phenomenon is far from being clearly out-
lined. Even in the Upper Palaeolithic era, the peoples we meet
with seem to have constituted no more tlian loosely bound
groups of wandering hunters. It was only in the Neolithic age
that the great cementing of human elements began which was
never thenceforward to stop. The Neolithic age, disdained by
pre-historians because it is too young, neglected by historians
because its phases cannot be exactly dated, was nevertheless a
critical age and one of solemn importance among all the epochs
of the past, for in it Civilisation was born.

Under what conditions did that birth take place ? Once
again, and always in conformity with the laws regulating our
vision of time in retrospect, we do not know. A few years ago
it was usual to speak of a ' great gap ' between the last levels of
chipped stone and the earliest levels of polished stone and pottery.
Since then a series of intercalated horizons, better defmed, have
little by little brought together the verges of this gap, yet
essentially the gulf still persists. Did it come from a play of
migrations, or was it the effect of contagion ? Was it due to the
sudden arrival of some ethnic wave, which had been silently
assembling in some other and more fertile region of the globe,
or the irresistible propagation of fruitful innovations ? Did
the emphasis he on a movement of peoples or primarily on a
movement of cultures ? We should find it hard, as yet, to say.
What is certain is that, after a gap geologically negligible, but
long enough nevertheless for the selection and domestication of all
the animals and plants on which we are still living today, we find
sedentary and socially organised men in place of the nomadic
hunters of the horse and the reindeer. In a matter of ten or
twenty thousand years man divided up the earth and struck
his roots in it.

In this decisive period of socialisation, as previously at the
instant of reflection, a cluster of partially independent factors

204



THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE

seems to have mysteriously converged to favour and even to
force the pace of hominisation. Let us try to sort them out.

First of all come the incessant advances of multiplication.
With the rapidly growing number of individuals the available
land diminished. The groups pressed against one another. As
a result migrations were on a smaller scale. The problem now
was how to get the most out of ever more diminishing land,
and we can well imagine that under pressure of this necessity
the idea was born of conserving and reproducing on the spot
what had hitherto been sought for and pursued far and wide.
Agriculture and stock-breeding, the husbandman and the herds-
man, replaced mere gathering and hunting.

From that fundamental change all the rest followed. In the
growing agglomerations the complex of rights and duties began
to appear, leading to the invention of all sorts of communal
and juridical structures whose vestiges we can still see today in
the shadow of the great civilisations among the least progressive
populations of the world. In regard to property, morals and
marriage, every possible social form seems to have been tried.

Simultaneously, in the more stable and more densely popu-
lated environment created by the first farms, the need and the
taste for research were stimulated and became more methodical.
It was a marvellous period of investigation and invention when,
in the unequalled freshness of a new beginning, the eternal
groping of life burst out in conscious reflection. Everything
possible seems to have been attempted in this extraordinary
period : the selection and empirical improvement of fruits,
cereals, live-stock ; the science of pottery ; and weaving. Very
soon followed the first elements of pictographic writing, and
soon the first beginnings of metallurgy.

Then, in virtue of all this, consolidated on itself and better
equipped for conquest, mankind could fling its final waves in
the assault on those positions which had not yet fallen to it.
Henceforward it was in the full flush of expansion. It was in
fact at the dawn of the Neolithic age that man reached America
(passing through an Alaska free of ice and perhaps by other ways)

205



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

there to start again — on new material and at the cost of new
efforts — his patient work of installation and domestication.
Among them were many hunters and fishers still living a more
or less Palaeolithic life despite their pottery and polished stone.
But beside them were genuine tillers of the soil — the maize
eaters. And at the same time, no doubt, another layer began to
spread whose long trail is still marked by the presence of banana
trees, mango trees and coconut palms — the fabulous adventure
across the Pacific.

At the end of this metamorphosis (whose existence, once
again, we can only just infer from the results) die world was
practically covered with a population whose remains — polished
stone implements, mill stones and shards, found under recent
humus or sand deposits — litter the old earth of the continents.

Mankind was of course still very much split up. To get an
idea of it, we must think of what the first white men found in
America or Africa — a veritable mosaic of groups, profoundly
different both ethnically and socially.

But mankind was already outlined and linked up. Since the
age of the reindeer the peoples had been little by little finding
their definitive place, even in matters of detail. Between them
exchanges increased in the commerce of objects and the trans-
mission of ideas. Traditions became organised and a collective
memory was developed. Slender and granular as this first
membrane might be, the noosphere there and then began to
close in upon itself — and to encircle the earth.



THE PROLONGATIONS OF THE

NEOLITHIC AGE
AND THE RISE OF THE WEST



We have retained the habit, come down to us from the days
when human palaeontology did not exist, of isolating that par-
ticular slice of six thousand years or so for which we possess
written or dated documents. This for us is History, as opposed

206



THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERE

to pre-History. In reality, however, there is no breach of con-
tinuity between the two. The better we get the past into
perspective, the more clearly we see that the periods called
' historic ' (right down to and including the beginning of
' modern ' times) are nothing else than direct prolongations of
the Neolithic age. Of course, as we shall point out, there was
increasing complexity and differentiation, but essentially follow-
ing the same lines and on the same plane.

From the biological point of view — which is the one we
are taking — how shall we define and represent the progress of
hominisation in the course of this period, so short yet so pro-
digiously fruitful ?

Essentially, what history records among the welter of
institutions, peoples and empires, is the normal expansion of
Homo sapiens at the heart of the social atmosphere created by
the Neolithic transformation. We find a gradual falling away
of the oldest ' splinters ' some of which, like the Australian
aborigines, still adhere to the extreme fringe of our civilisation
and our continents ; on die other hand we find accentuation
and domination of certain other stems, more central and more
vigorous, which attempt to monopolise the land and the light.
Here and there we find disappearances causing a thinning-out,
here and there some fresh buddings which make the foliage
more dense. Some branches wither, some sleep, some shoot up
and spread everywhere. We find endless interlacing of ramifi-
cations, none of which allow their peduncles to be seen clearly,
not even at a mere two thousand years back ; in other words the
whole series of cases, situations and appearances usually met
with in any phylum in a state of active proliferation.

Nor is this quite all. We might suppose that, after the
Neolithic age, what constituted the extreme difficulty, but also
the exceptional interest, of human phylogenesis was the proximity
of the facts, allowing us to follow with the naked eye, as it were,
the biological mechanism of the ramification of the species. In
fact, something more than that happens.

So long as science had to deal only with pre-historic human

207



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

groups, more or less isolated and to a greater or less extent
undergoing anthropological formation, the general rules of
animal phylogenesis were still approximately valid. From
Neolithic times onwards the influence of psychical factors
begins to outweigh — and by far— the variations of ever-dwindling
somatic factors. And henceforward the foreground is taken up
by the two series of effects we announced above when describing
the main lines of hominisation — (i) the apparition above the
genealogical verticils of political and cultural units ; a complex
scale of groupings which, on the multiple planes of geographical
distribution, economic links, religious beliefs and social institu-
tions, have proved capable, after submerging ' the race ', of
reacting between themselves in every proportion ; and simul-
taneously (ii) the manifestation — between these branches of a
new kind — of the forces of coalescence (anastomoses, confluences)
liberated in each one by the individualisation of psychological
sheath, or more precisely of an axis — a whole conjugated play of
divergences and convergences.

There is no need for me to emphasise the reality, diversity
and continual germination of human collective unities, at any
rate potentially divergent ; such as the birth, multiplication and
evolution of nations, states and civilisations. We see the spec-
tacle on every hand, its vicissitudes fdl the annals of the peoples.
But there is one thing that must not be forgotten if we want to
enter into and appreciate the drama. However hominised the
events, the history of mankind in this rationalised form really
does prolong — though in its own way and degree — the organic
movements of life. It is still natural history through the pheno-
mena of social ramification that it relates.

Much more subtle and fraught with biological potentialities
are the phenomena of confluence. Let us try to follow them in
their mechanism and their consequences.

Between animal branches or phyla of low ' psychical '
endowment, reactions are limited to competition and eventually
to elimination. The stronger supplants the weaker and ends by
stifling it. The only exceptions to this brutal, almost mechanical

208



THE DEPLOYMENT OP THE NOOSPHERE

law of substitution are those (mostly functional) associations of
' symbiosis ' inferior organisms — or with the most socialised
insects, the enslavement of one group by another.

With man (at all events with Post-Neolithic man) simple
elimination tends to become exceptional, or at all events second-
ary. However brutal the conquest, the suppression is always
accompanied by some degree of assimilation. Even when
partially absorbed, the vanquished still reacts on the victor so
as to transform him. There is, as the geologists call the process,
endomorphosis — especially in the case of a peaceful cultural
invasion, and yet still more with populations, equally resistant
and active, which interpenetrate slowly under prolonged tension.
What happens then is mutual permeation of the psychisms com-
bined with a remarkable and significant interfecundity. Under
this two-fold influence, veritable biological combinations are
established and fixed which shuffle and blend ethnic traditions
at the same time as cerebral genes. Formerly, on the tree of life
we had a mere tangle of stems ; now over the whole domain
of Homo sapiens we have synthesis.

But of course we do not find this everywhere to the same
extent.

Because of the haphazard configuration of continents on the
earth, some regions are more favourable than others for the
concourse and mixing of races — extended archipelagoes, junctions
of valleys, vast cultivable plains, particularly, irrigated by a
great river. In such privileged places there has been a natural
tendency ever since the installation of settled life for the human
mass to concentrate, to fuse, and for its temperature to rise.
Whence the no doubt ' congenital ' appearance on the Neolithic
layer of certain foci of attraction and organisation, the prelude
and presage of some new and superior state for the noosphere.
Five of these foci, of varying remoteness in the past, can easily
be picked out — Central America, with its Maya civilisation ;
the South Seas, with Polynesian civilisation ; the basin of
Yellow River, with Chinese civilisation ; the valleys of the
Ganges and the Indus, with Indian civilisation ; and lastly the

209



THE PHENOMENON OP MAN

Nile Valley and Mesopotamia with Egyptian and Sumerian
civilisation. The last three foci may have first appeared almost
at the same period, the first two were much later. But they were
all largely independent of one another, each struggling blindly
to spread and ramify, as though it were alone destined to absorb
and transform the earth.

Basically can we not say that the essential diing in history
consists in the conflict and finally the gradual harmonisation of
these great psycho-somatic currents ?

In fact this struggle for influence was quickly localised. The
Maya centre which was too isolated in the New World, and
the Polynesian centre which was too dispersed on the mono-
tonous dust of its distant islands, soon met their respective fates,
one being completely extinguished and the other radiating in
a vacuum. So finally the contest for the future of the world
was fought out by the agricultural plain dwellers of Asia and
North Africa. One or two thousand years before our era the
odds between them may have seemed fairly equal. But we
today, in the light of events, can sec that even at that stage
there were the seeds of weakness in two of the contestants in
the East.

Either by its own genius or as an effect of immensity, China
(and I mean the old China, of course) lacked both the inclination
and the impetus for deep renovation. A singular spectacle is
presented by this gigantic country which only yesterday repre-
sented — still living under our eyes — a scarcely changed fragment
of the world as it could have been ten thousand years ago. The
population was not only fundamentally agricultural but essentially
organised according to the hierarchy of territorial possessions —
the emperor being nothing more than the biggest proprietor.
It was a population ultra-specialised in brick work, pottery and
bronze, a population carrying to the lengths of superstition the
study of pictograms and the science of the constellations ; an
incredibly refined civilisation, admittedly, but unchanged as to
method since its beginning, like the writing which betrays the
fact so ingenuously. Well into the nineteenth century it was

210



THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE NOOSPHERB

still Neolithic, not rejuvenated, as elsewhere, but simply inter-
minably complicated in on itself, not merely continuing on the
same lines, but remaining on the same level, as though unable
to life itself above the soil where it was formed.

And while China, already encrusted in its soil, multiplied
its gropings and discoveries without ever taking the trouble to
build up a science of physics, India allowed itself to be drawn
into metaphysics, only to become lost there. India — the region
par excellence of high philosophic and religious pressures : we
can never make too much of our indebtedness to the mystic
influences which have come down to each and all of us in the
past from this ' anticyclone '. But however efficacious these
currents for ventilating and illuminating the atmosphere of
mankind, we have to recognise that, with their excessive passivity
and detachment, they were incapable of building the world.
The primitive soul of India arose in its hour like a great wind
but, like a great wind also, again in its hour, it passed away.
How indeed could it have been otherwise ? Phenomena regarded
as an illusion (Maya) and their connections as a chain (Karma),
what was left in these doctrines to aiumate and direct human
evolution ? A simple mistake was made — but it was enough —
in the definition of the spirit and in the appreciation of the
bonds which attach it to the sublimations of matter.

Then step by step we are driven nearer to the more western
zones of the world — to the Euphrates, the Nile, the Mediter-
ranean — where an exceptional concurrence of places and peoples
was, in the course of a few thousand years, to produce that happy
blend, thanks to which reason could be harnessed to facts and
religion to action. And this without losing any of their up-
ward thrust — in fact quite the contrary. Mesopotamia, Egypt,
Greece — with Rome soon to be added — and above all the
mysterious Judaeo-Christian ferment which gave Europe its
spiritual form. But I shall be coming back to that at the end of
this book.

It is easy for the pessimist to reduce this extraordinary period
to a number of civilisations which have fallen into ruins one after

211



THE PHENOMENON OF MAN

the other. Is it not far more scientific to recognise, yet once again,
beneath these successive oscillations, the great spiral of life :
thrusting up, irreversibly, in relays, following the master-line
of its evolution ? Susa, Memphis and Athens can crumble.
An ever more highly organised consciousness of the universe
is passed from hand to hand, and glows steadily brighter.

Later on, when I come to speak of the current planetisation
of the noosphere, I shall try to restore to the other fragments of
mankind the great and essential part reserved for them in the
expected plenitude of the earth. At this point of our investiga-
tion, we would be allowing sentiment to falsify the facts if we
failed to recognise that during historic time the principal axis
of anthropogenesis has passed through the West. It is in this
ardent zone of growth and universal recasting that all that goes
to make man today has been discovered, or at any rate must
have been rediscovered. For even that which had long been known
elsewhere only took on its definitive human value in becoming
incorporated in the system of European ideas and activities. It
is not in any way naive to hail as a great event the discovery by
Columbus of America.

In truth, a neo-humanity has been germinating round the
Mediterranean during the last six thousand years, and precisely
at this moment it has finished absorbing the last vestiges of the
Neolithic mosaic; thus starts the budding of another layer on the
noosphere, and the densest of all.

The proof of this lies in the fact that from one end of the
world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to
become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and
problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which
the West has formulated them.



212




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