Troglodytes #001

In ancient times, the world around us was called the cosmos. And the spiritual world of man is a microcosm. A small world inside a great world. Man's tiny world is infinitely large. With our thought, we embrace the entire universe, we reach the most distant stars. And the whole universe, the rays of all the stars enter into man. Man absorbs the universe with his body and mind. And she carries it with her, like the ocean carries a speck of dust. At the end of the 18th century, Radishchev wrote: "Man is a consanguineous kinsman, a brother to everything living on earth, not only to animals, birds, fish, insects, crustaceans, polyps, but to plants, fungi, moss, mold, metal, glass, stone, and earth." If the world around us is changing, then its microscopic distorted reflection, the human, must also change. This simple idea did not occur to the sages for a long time. And the surrounding world itself was previously recognized as unchangeable, created once and forever. Even the great biologists of the 18th century, who compiled descriptions of thousands of animals, lost confidence when it came to humans. However, Linnaeus combined humans and apes into one group of humanoid (anthropomorphic) and called them dominant (primates). There were thinkers (Lamarck) who suggested that long-term changes in animals led first to the appearance of monkeys, and then humans. However, the close relationship between humans and monkeys was well understood by the people of Indonesia, who called one of the monkeys an orangutan, that is, a "forest man." And in Africa, there was a legend about monkeys turning into humans. It was retold by Rudyard Kipling. And the real monkeys, frightened by such a terrible fate, began to hide in the woods. However, all these guesses were a figment of the imagination. In Cuvier's time, there was not a single reliable find of any human ancestors. Cuvier was the first scientist to associate the fate of man with the Ice Age (he believed that the last catastrophe was connected with the great cold snap). But this conclusion was forgotten for a long time. It was only in the middle of the last century that facts appeared that proved the antiquity of man.


Comparative anatomy, a field of biology that deals with comparing the body structure of various animals, has achieved great success. Numerous similarities and minor differences in the structure of humans and monkeys have been thoroughly studied. Even their brains turned out to be very similar. And human mental activity, thanks to the work of physiologists (Sechenov, for example), began to lose the veil of mystery. Strange human skulls and bones, different from modern ones, have been discovered in some caves in France and Spain. Stone tools, obviously made by man, began to be found so much that a special archaeological journal was created in 1864 for such reports. In the same year, a mammoth bone plate with a scratched image of a mammoth was found. In 1860, the French Academy forbade paleontologist Larte (by the way, he was the one who found the plate with the mammoth drawing) to make a report on the antiquity of the human race. And three years later, Lyell's book "The Antiquity of Man" was published in England. The famous geologist noted that stone tools are often found among the bones of long-extinct animals. 1xbet 프로모션 코드