A TRIBAL WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 3, 4 January 1941, Page 9

A TRIBAL WAR

VIEW OF A BIOLOGIST

NAZI CONDUCT EXPLAINED

FALLACY OF RACE

It is generally agreed that Neanderthal man, who lived in Europe 30,000 years ago, was not Man as we understand it, writes Frank Kingdon Ward in the London "Daily Telegraph." He was not even in the direct succession. He was sub-man, almost, one might say, a side issue, one of Nature's experimental models. Nature was content •• to throw him on the scrap-heap and try again.

She did so, but not before something had happened which was to have the most incalculable consequence lor Europe.and the world. Nature's Mark 11, or it may be Mark 111 or Mark IV, was already on the Blue Print. Before Neanderthal man had rusted completely away, Man appeared to hasten his end —and to save him from extinction.

It is one of the fatal defects of savage warfare that the conqueror never completely exterminates the weaker and. inferior tribe. He merges with it. Always the conquering tribe killed its male enemies and captured the women, who, of course, became concubines.

So it was when Homo sapiens was killing out Neanderthal man in Europe. Neanderthal man was no ape. Anatomically he was very near early man. He lived in caves, dressed in skins, hunted, ate berries, and warmed himself at a fire which he knew how to kindle at will.

LEAVENING TODAY.

We may perhaps visualise him slouching painfully across the chill European landscape, haunted by the spectre of hunger, fearful and bewildered in the dawn of consciousness, clutching, famished, at a handful of grass seeds or coloured berries while he hunted—and was hunted. For the violent sabre-toothed tiger was abroad, and ever dogging his footsteps cams Man the newest biped, who herded him' murderously up into the northwest corner of Europe as the ice went back. ; ■ , ~ It is a profoundly significant and disquieting thought, which had scarcely been admitted even by anthropologists until the beginning of the present century that there is in.Europe today not only a basic Homo sapiens, but also, an appreciable leavening of Neanderthal man who was certainly not sapiens and probably not Homo. .... . The Neanderthal strain did not, 01 course, remain segregated. On the contrary, it was later carried like an infectious disease all over the world. Yet it outcrops more persistently in some places than in others, and nowhere more virulently than in its last stronghold, where the remnant of the Neanderthal tribes turned at bay and survived. . The rapidly-changing climate or Europe in the post-glacial age also laid up trouble for the future. It scattered the poison. When the bleak European steppe was being consumed by; lortot from the south-east almost with the fury of a prairie fire, sc, tha: trees sprang up if not overnight, like the magfc beanstalk, at least with an urgency never known before or since Hunting Man, adapted to life in the great open spaces, scattered and fled before the relentless advance of the trees as his quarry, deprived of grazing, migrated. Thus were man and hybrid man dispersed. WAR'S TRIBAL NATURE. Politicians are trying to persuade us that this war is being fought to restore Poland, to eradicate the gospel of force, to crush tyranny, or even to make the world safer for bureaucracy. If any or all of these aims are to be accomplished the more certain is it that we must fight the war to a finish on the basic issue, even if it takes as long as the siege of Troy. It is not civilisation that is threatened; it is the wit to become civilised that is in gravest danger. What, then, is the basic issue? This is not a religious war. No war was ever less a crusade. It cuts across all religions, and no sectarian symbol, neither crescent, nor cross, nor coloured flag bids us take up the gauntlet. It is not a trade war, fought.to decide who shall dominate the markets of the world for a time. We know now that war ruins trade for the ordinary business man. Nor is it in the accepted sense a racial war on so paltry a scale as Teuton versus Frank, or Saxon or Celt. But in a far deeper and truer sense it is a tribal war. ' The historian is accustomed to go further back than the ordinary man in seeking the causes of a particular} war. He analyses men's motives, | weighs movements, and distinguishes i between the match which set off the I explosion and the events which led up i to the explosion and to the matches being there. EUROPE'S NEW MODEL. Probing beneath the surface, he may perceive that the unexpected success of a political doctrine sowed the awful seeds of the present conflict. The free democracies on the western fringes of i Europe, accustomed to a monopoly of political dogma, suddenly found this branch of their export trade crippled by the unprecedented success of the new model developed in Central Europe. State after State was installing it, and that in some of the most densely, as well as in some of the most thinly, | populated regions of the world. The new model paid no heect to economic factors, nor to cultural. Itself proclaimed a new economic order, a new culture; peasant State, military State, industrial State, it was all the same. Asia followed Europe— or was it Europe that, after the lapse of 5000 years, followed Asia? But this contemporary analysis, although true as far as it goes, does not satisfy the biologist. Who, he asks, developed the new political model, and why? Is it not like an invention for converting a clean brook into a muddy one? Why is civilisation apparently retracing the rough path it has, through 10,000 years, plodded over so patiently towards the light? Why? FRANTIC UTTERANCES. To the biologist there is one answer, and only one. Accustomed to seek for | origins much further back . than the historian, he goes to the root of the matter. It is essential that in order to understand the implications of the astonishing war on which we have not lightly embarked, we should go back to the dim past. - Only there "will we find the cause of the present struggle. Daily the frantic utterances of'the'Nazi leaders prove it. For this-war is a tribal war; (he echo of a more ancient tribal war.

To a Victorian-minded generation brought up on a simple colour scheme of human classification, the concept of the five races of man, red man, yellow man (let us give them in the order of the spectrum), brown man, black man, and white man seems natural. Politically perhaps it is; scientifically it is meaningless. The conflict between science and politics has always contrived to obscure the true relationships of mankind. Nowadays we at least know that the- word "race" is ridicul-

ous when applied to the, political and cultural groups we call nations. Time and again politicians have tried to redraw the map of Europe on a basis of supposed racial affinities; and always they have failed to because they have

never tried to define what they mean by race.

In fact, it is no longer possible to distinguish races in Europe—unless by "race" we mean what the plant breeder means.