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Science and Africa   Chapman

between Frank E. Chapman and the staff of FREEDOMWAYS. The letters were mainly about the book he was writing and how it was progressing. A few months ago he sent us the manuscript and asked ous assistance in finding a publisher. In his letter that accompanied the manuscript he said that some event beyond his control had forced him to stop writing. Because of the extraordinary nature of this manuscript, written by an intelligent black prisoner, now twenty-three years of age, FREEDOMWAYS is printing some excerpts from this manuscript in order to indicate the depth of this work and by way of recommending it to a publisher.

John Henrik Clarke

A CENTURY AGO the English naturalist, Charles Darwin, expounded a theory which put the birthplace of man in Africa, and later Elliot Smith asserted the same. On the other hand Hrdlicka theorized that Europe was the center of man's evolution, and Huxley thought it was Asia. Most naturalists accepted Professor T. H Huxley's theory as the more probable. To date however, there is evidence that man originated in Africa; at any rate we know that some of the earliest forms of human culture existed in Africa as early as a million years ago.

some underlying concepts
The forces which work to determine, or produce, cultural evolution are generally referred to as external and internal forces, the latter being those forces within the culture itself. We usually group external forces under the heading environment. Herbert Spencer subdivided environment into inorganic and organic; he called society the superorganic. The inorganic and organic world includes climate, topography, vegetation, animal life, mineral resources, and similar things. The "... Superorganic environment consists of all other cultures with which the society in question is in some kind of communication, no matter how indirectly."
As to whether it's the geographical, ideological, or economic element which plays the dominant role in cultural evolution there is a great deal of controversy. However, much of this controversy stems from a misconception of man's so-called innate abilities. For example,
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See L.S.B Leakey's Progress and Evolution of Man in Africa.

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-09 11:59:57