Early Man In China

A classic study of Chinese philosophy

Ancestral ritual in early China was an orchestrated dance between what was present (the offerings and the living) and what was absent (the ancestors). The interconnections among the tangible elements of the sacrifice were overt and almost mechanical, but extending those connections to the invisible guests required a medium that was itself invisible. Thus in early China, ancestral sacrifice was associated with focused thinking about the ancestors, with a structured mental effort by the living to reach out to the absent forebears and to give them shape and existence. Thinking about the ancestors-about those who had become distant-required active deliberation and meditation, qualities that had to be nurtured and learned. This study is a history of the early Chinese ancestral cult, particularly its cognitive aspects. Its goals are to excavate the cult's color and vitality and to quell assumptions that it was no more than a simplistic and uninspired exchange of food for longevity, of prayers for prosperity. Ancestor worship was not, the author contends, merely mechanical and thoughtless. Rather, it was an idea system that aroused serious debates about the nature of postmortem existence, served as the religious backbone to Confucianism, and may even have been the forerunner of Daoist and Buddhist meditation practices.

Current Argument on Early Man: Report from a Nobel Symposium is a collection of papers that sheds in light into the evolutionary history of humans. The book reviews the state of knowledge regarding the human origins and pre-history. The coverage of the text includes articles that cover archeological and biological evidence that can lead to the origins of human. This topic includes evidence using viral gene sequences suggesting an Asian origin of human; a review of archeological evidence for early hominid land-use and ecological relations; and the excavation of the cave at Chou-kou-tienin 1927 and 1928. The book will be of great use to anthropologists, paleontologists, archeologists, and evolutionary biologists.

Attempting to reconstruct the life of early societies, particular emphasis is laid upon social behaviour among primates, as well as approaches from ethnology, prehistoric archaeology, geography, genetics, human stress biology and psychology. First published in 1962.