CHAPTER VI
THE BEGINNINGS OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION
65. Fossils of the body and of the mind.—66. Stone and metals.—67. The Old and the New Stone Ages.—68. The Eolithic Age.—69. The Palæolithic Age: duration, climate, animals.—70. Subdivisions of the Palæolithic.—71. Human racial types in the Palæolithic.—72. Palæolithic flint implements.—73. Other materials: bone and horn.—74. Dress.—75. Harpoons and weapons.—76. Wooden implements.—77. Fire.—78. Houses.—79. Religion.—80. Palæolithic art.—81. Summary of advance in the Palæolithic.
65. FOSSILS OF THE BODY AND OF THE MIND
The discovery of fossils has yielded some idea of the history of the human body during the past million years. The evidence is far from complete, but there is enough to prove a development much as might be expected under the hypothesis of evolution. To some extent fossils also afford an insight into the development of the human mind. The capacity of a skull gives the size of the brain. The interior surface of the skull corresponds to the outer surface of the brain. In this way some slight knowledge has been gained of the development in ancient types of man of the convolutions and centers of the brain surface with which mental activity is associated. Even limb bones yield indirect indications. A straight thigh means an erect posture of the body, with the arms no longer used for locomotion. Released from this service, they are freed for other purposes, such as grasping, handling, and various forms of what we call work. But a hand adapted for work would be useless without an intelligence to direct its operations. Thus the bones of our precursors provide suggestions as to the degree of development of their minds. The suggestions are sketchy and incomplete, but they are worth something.
A second line of evidence is fuller. When a human or pre-human hand has made any article, one can judge from that article what its purpose is likely to have been, how it was used, how much intelligence that use involved, what degree of skill was necessary to manufacture the article. All such artifacts—tools, weapons, or anything constructed—are a reflection of the degree of “culture” or civilization, elementary or advanced, possessed by the beings who made them.
On the whole the evidence to be got from artifacts as to the degree of advancement of their makers or users is greater than the information derivable from the structure of skeletons. A large brain does not always imply high intelligence. Even a much convoluted brain surface may accompany a mediocre mind. In other words, the correlation between body and mind has not been worked out with accuracy. On the other hand an advanced type of tool necessarily implies more skill in its use, and therefore a decided development of the use of intelligence. Similarly, if one finds nothing but simple tools occurring among any past or present people, we may be sure that their civilization and the training of their minds have remained backward.
It is true that one cannot always infer from a particular manufactured object the mentality of the particular person who owned and used it. An imbecile may come into possession of a good knife and even possess some ability in using it. But he can acquire the knife only if there are other individuals in his community or time who know how to smelt iron and forge steel. In short, even a single jackknife is proof that human ingenuity has progressed to the point of making important discoveries, and that arts of relatively high order are being practised. In this way a solitary implement, if its discovery is thoroughly authenticated, may suffice to establish a relatively high or low degree of civilization for a prehistoric period or a vanished race.
An implement manufactured by human hands of the past is of course different from an actual fossil of a former human being, and it is always necessary to distinguish between the two. The one is something made by a human being and in some measure reflecting the development of his intelligence; the other something left over or preserved from the human body itself. Nevertheless, in a metaphorical sense, the implements of the past may well be spoken of as the fossils of civilization. They are only its fragments, but they allow us to reconstruct the mode of life of prehistoric peoples and utterly forgotten nations, in much the same way as the geologist and the palæontologist reconstruct from true fossils the forms of life that existed on the earth or in the seas millions of years ago.
There is even a further parallel. Just as the geologist knows that one fossil is older or younger than another from its position in the earth’s crust or the stratum in which it was laid down, so the student of the beginnings of human civilization knows that the deposit at the bottom of a cave must be more ancient than the refuse at the top. He calls in the geologist to tell him the age of a glacial deposit or of a river terrace, and thus he may learn that, of two types of implements found at different places or levels, one is so many thousands of years or geological periods older than the other. In the long run, too, the older implements prove to be the simpler. Thus archæologists have succeeded in working out an evolution of civilization which parallels rather neatly the evolution of life forms. This evolution of human mental operations as it is reflected in the artifacts preserved from the lowest and earliest strata of civilization is the subject of the present chapter.
There is another way in which the evidence on the two lines of evolution is similar: its incompleteness. The geological record has been compared to a book from which whole chapters are missing; of others, but stray leaves remain; and only now and then have consecutive pages been preserved unmutilated. Humanity has always been so much less populous than the remainder of the animal kingdom, especially in its earlier stages, that the number of individuals whose bones have been preserved as fossils is infinitely smaller. The result is that we account ourselves fortunate in having been able to assemble six or seven not quite complete skeletons, and fragmentary portions of two or three dozen other individuals, of the Neandertal race which inhabited western Europe for thousands of years. For still earlier races or species of man the actual data are even scantier. Knowledge of so fundamental a form as Pithecanthropus, the earliest of the antecedents of man yet known, rests on two bones and two teeth, plus a third tooth discovered as the sole result of a subsequent expedition. Heidelberg man has to be reconstructed from a jaw.
The remains which illustrate the development of the human mind are not so scarce. A single man might easily manufacture hundreds or even thousands of implements in the course of a lifetime. When these are of stone they are practically imperishable; whereas it is only the exceptional skeleton, protected by favorable circumstances, of which the bones will endure for thousands of years. For every ancient true fossil trace of man that has been found, we have therefore thousands of the works of his hands.
The inadequateness of the cultural record is not in the insufficient number of the specimens, but in their onesidedness. Objects of stone, even those of horn and of metal, last; clothing, fabrics, skins, basketry, and wooden articles ordinarily decay so rapidly as to have no chance of being preserved for tens of thousands of years. Tools of the most ancient times have often been found in abundance; objects manufactured with tools from softer and less enduring materials are scarce even from moderately old periods. Now and then a piece of an earthenware pot may show the imprint of a textile. Textiles and foodstuffs are occasionally preserved by charring in fire or by penetration of metallic salts. Charcoal or ashes found in pockets or beds indicate that fire was maintained in one spot for considerable periods, and must therefore have been controlled and used, possibly even produced, by human agency. A bone needle with an eye proves that some one must have sewn, and one may therefore assume that garments were worn at the time. But for every point established in this way there are dozens about which knowledge remains blank.
Understanding of the social and religious life of the earliest men is naturally filled with the greatest gaps, and the farther back one goes in time, the greater is the enveloping darkness. The problem is as difficult as that of figuring accurately the degree of intelligence attained by the mailed fishes of the Devonian age some thirty or forty million years ago, or of estimating whether the complexion of Pithecanthropus was black, brown, or white. One can guess on these matters. One may by careful comparisons obtain some partial and indirect indication of an answer. But it is clearly wisest not to try to stretch too far the conclusions which can be drawn. Imagination has its value in science as in art and other aspects of life, yet when it becomes disproportionate to the facts, it is a danger instead of an aid.
Still, now and then something has been preserved from which one may draw inferences with a reasonable prospect of certainty even concerning the non-material side of life. If human bones are discovered charred and split open, there is good reason for believing these bones to be the remains of a cannibal feast. When prehistoric skeletons are found in the position in which death might have taken place, the presumption is that the people of that time abandoned their dead as animals would. If on the other hand a skeleton lies intact with its arms carefully folded, there is little room for doubt that the men of the time had progressed to the point where the survivors put away their dead; in other words, that human burial had been instituted, and that accordingly at least some rude form of society was in existence. When, perhaps from a still later period, a skeleton is found with red paint adhering to the bones, although these lie in their natural places, the only conclusion to be drawn is that the dead body was coated with pigment before being interred and that as the soft tissues wasted away the red ocher came to adhere to the bones. In this case the painting was evidently part of a rite performed over the dead.
66. STONE AND METALS
The cultural record of man’s existence is divided into two great periods. In the latter of these, in which we are still living, metals were used; in the earlier, metals were unknown and tools made of stone. Hence the terms “Age of Stone” and “Age of Metals.” The duration of these two main periods is unequal. Metals were first used in Asia and Egypt about 4,000 B.C. and in Europe about 3,000 B.C.—say five to six thousand years ago. The most conservative authorities, however, would allow forty or fifty thousand years for the Stone Age; while others make it cover a quarter million. The assumption, which is here followed, of the intermediate figure of a hundred thousand years gives the Stone Age a duration twenty times as long as the Age of Metals. When one remembers that hand in hand with metals came the art of writing and an infinite variety of inventions, it is clear that larger additions have been made to human civilization in the comparatively brief period of metals than in the tremendously longer time that preceded it. Progress in the Stone Age was not only slow, but the farther back one peers into this age, the more lagging does the evolution of human culture seem to have been. One can definitely recognize a tendency toward the acceleration of evolution: the farther advancement has got the faster it moves.
The Age of Metals is subdivided into the Iron Age, which begins some three thousand years ago, say about 1,500-1,000 B.C.; and an earlier Bronze Age. In the Bronze Age one must distinguish first a period in which native copper was employed in some parts of the world; after which comes an era in which it had been learned that copper melted with a proportion of about one-tenth tin, thus producing bronze, was a superior material. Within the past five thousand years or so, accordingly, there are recognized successively the ages of copper, of bronze, and of iron.
Broadly speaking, these five thousand years are also the historic period. Not that there exist historic records going back so far as this for every people. But the earliest preserved documents that the historian uses, the written monuments of Egypt and Babylonia, are about five thousand years old. The Age of Metals thus corresponds approximately with the period of History; the Stone Age, with Prehistory.
67. THE OLD AND THE NEW STONE AGES
The Stone Age, apart from a rather doubtful introductory era to be mentioned presently, is customarily divided into two periods, the Old Stone Age and the New Stone Age,—the Palæolithic and the Neolithic. These words of Greek origin mean literally “old stone” and “new stone” periods. The criterion by which these two grand divisions were originally distinguished was that in the Palæolithic artifacts were made only by chipping, that is, some process of fracturing stone, whereas Neolithic stone objects were thought to have been pecked, ground, rubbed, and polished. Indeed the two periods have sometimes been designated as the epochs of rough stone and polished stone implements.
This distinction is now known to be inaccurate. It is true that the Old Stone Age did not yet employ frictional processes in shaping stone and confined itself to the older methods of fracturing by blows or pressure. But the converse is not true, that the Neolithic worked stone only by grinding, nor even that grinding was its characteristic process. Stone grinding was invented only toward the middle of the New Stone Age—in what is perhaps best designated the “Full Neolithic.” The Early Neolithic, which lasted half the total Neolithic duration, continued to work stone by fracture. What marked the beginning of the Neolithic was certain inventions having nothing to do with stone: notably pottery and the bow. With these available, human life took on a new color, and it was not until some thousands of years later that shaping of stone by grinding came into use. In other words, the prehistorians’ idea as to what constitutes the Neolithic have changed, and they no longer put stone processes in the first place in characterizing the period. They would do well, therefore, to change its name also to one having reference to its more specific traits. Such a change of designation will perhaps become established in time. But at present the term Neolithic is so intrenched in usage, that to replace it by “Pottery Age” or “Bow Age” would be misleading: all the literature on the subject employs “Neolithic.” The present chapter being concerned specifically with the Palæolithic, and this being an age in which stone implements did loom large and were consistently made by fracture only, the difficulties about the concept of the Neolithic, and its subdivision into an Early and a Full period, can be reserved for discussion later (Chapter XIV). But it is well to bear in mind as the Palæolithic is examined in the pages immediately following, that the Neolithic is neither its antithesis nor its logical complement, but rather a period signalized by the appearance of totally new directions of human culture.
Another point in connection with the two processes of working stone has reference to the mental activities involved by them. A tolerable ground ax or mortar can be made without much difficulty by any one willing to take the trouble. A civilized person entirely inexperienced in the working of stone would be likely to produce a fairly satisfactory implement by the rubbing technique. If however he attempted to manufacture a chipped stone tool, even of simple type, he would probably fail repeatedly before learning to control the method well enough to turn out an implement without first ruining a dozen. In short, the manual dexterity required to produce the best forms of chipped stone tools is greater than that needed for ground ones. Inasmuch as the chipping process is, however, the earlier, we are confronted here with a paradox.
Yet the paradox is only on the surface. It is true that so far as skill alone is concerned a good chipped tool is more difficult to make than a ground one. But it can be made in a shorter time. A rough stone tool can be manufactured in a few minutes. A good artifact may be preceded by a number of unsuccessful attempts or “rejects,” and yet be produced in an hour or less. The processes of pecking, grinding, and polishing, on the other hand, are laborious. They are slow even when pursued with steel tools, and when the shaping material is no better than another stone or sand, as was of course always the case in prehistoric times, the duration of the labor must have been discouraging. Weeks or at least days would be required to manufacture a single implement. If the work was done at odd times, one may imagine that many a stone ax was months in being produced. Patience and forethought of a rather high order are thus involved in the making of implements of the Neolithic type. Dexterity is replaced by higher qualities of what might be called the moral order. By comparison, the earliest men lacked these traits. They would not sit down to-day to commence something that would not be available for use until a month later. What they wanted they wanted quickly. To think ahead, to sacrifice present convenience to future advantage, must have been foreign to their way of life. Therefore they chipped; and although in the lapse of thousands of years they learned to do some chipping of high quality, they continued to operate with modifications of the same rough and rapid process. The uses to which their implements could be put were also correspondingly restricted. A first-class ax, a real chisel, or a mortar in which grinding can be done, can scarcely be made by chipping alone. It was not until men had learned to restrain their childish impulse to work only for the immediate purpose, and had acquired an increased self-control and discipline, that the grinding of stone came into use.
One principle must be clearly adhered to in the dating or proper arrangement of the periods of prehistoric time: the principle that it is always the highest types of implements which determine the age of a deposit. Lower forms often persist from the earlier periods into the later, alongside the newly invented higher types. The men of the Full Neolithic time did not wholly give up making chipped implements because they also ground stone. Just so we have not discarded the use of stone because we use metals, and we still employ copper for a great variety of purposes although we live in an age of which iron and steel are characteristic. To reckon a people as Palæolithic because they had chipped implements as well as ground ones, would be as misleading as to assert that we still belong to the Stone Age because we build houses of granite. In fact, stone masonry has had its principal development since metals have been in use.
This caution seems elementary enough. But it has sometimes been overlooked by scholars in the pursuit of a theory that made them try to stamp some prehistoric or savage race as particularly primitive. If in a stratum of ancient remains there are discovered a thousand chipped artifacts and only ten that are ground or polished but the latter unquestionably left there at the same time as the thousand chipped ones, one is justified in reckoning the whole deposit as Full Neolithic in period. For in such a case it is clear that the art of grinding must have been already known, even though it may as yet have been practised only occasionally.
It is found that all surviving peoples of primitive culture—American Indians, Australian black-fellows, Polynesians, Hottentots, and the like—except probably the Tasmanians, have attained the grinding stage of development. It is true enough that many American Indian tribes chipped arrow-points and knives more frequently than they would grind out axes. Yet without exception they also knew the process of grinding stone and applied it to some purpose. For this reason the endeavors that have been made by certain authors, who compare particular modern savage peoples to the races of prehistoric Europe on the basis of a similarity of their chipped implements, are misleading. It is true that tools like those produced in the Mousterian period of the Old Stone Age are made by the modern Australian tribes, and that certain Magdalenian implements from near the end of the Old Stone Age find parallels among those of the Eskimo. But both the Australians and the Eskimo practise the art of rubbing and polishing of stone, which was unknown in the Palæolithic. They therefore belong clearly to a later stage of civilization. Too great an insistence on such parallels would be likely to give rise to the implication that the Australians were a species of belated Mousterian Stone Age men, and the Eskimo only Magdalenians whom the Arctic regions had somehow perpetuated for ten thousand years; whereas their civilizations consist of Mousterian and Magdalenian ingredients plus many subsequent elements. The stage of development of the art of chipping in stone may be the same; the other arts and customs of modern Australian black-fellows and of Eskimos, and their bodily types, differ from those of the prehistoric Europeans.
With the distinction of the Palæolithic, Neolithic, and the Ages of Copper, Bronze, and Iron in mind, it is in order to examine what may have preceded them, and then to trace in outline the development which human culture underwent during the Palæolithic in the continent in which its records are best explored—Europe.
68. THE EOLITHIC AGE
The earliest of all periods of human handiwork, although a somewhat doubtful one, is the Eolithic, or age of the “dawn of stone” implements.
On purely theoretical grounds it appears likely, indeed almost inevitable, that the first definitely chipped implements did not develop full-fledged, but were preceded by still cruder tools, made perhaps without clear intent, and at any rate so rough and half-shaped that they would be difficult to recognize.
After the evolution of Palæolithic implements had become pretty well known, this conjecture began to be supported by evidence, or at least by alleged evidence. Investigators, especially Rutot in Belgium, found flints of which it was difficult to say whether or not they had been used by human hands. These pieces occurred in extremely ancient deposits. On the basis of these discoveries Rutot and his followers established the Eolithic period. Some have consistently assailed this Eolithic age as imaginary, asserting that the so-called eoliths were nothing but accidental products of nature. Others have accepted the eoliths and recognize the stage of embryonic or pre-human civilization which they imply. Still other students remain in doubt; and their attitude is perhaps still the safest to share.
The view now most prevalent is that the alleged Eolithic flints may have been used by early human hands, but that they were almost certainly not manufactured. This would make them tools only in the sense in which the limb of a tree is a tool when a man in distress seizes it to defend himself.
The eoliths are more or less irregular pieces of flint or similar stone, some of them so blunt that they must have been very inefficient if used for chopping or cutting or scraping. Small nocks or chips along the edge are believed not to have been flaked off with the conscious intent of producing an edge, but to have become chipped away through usage while the stone was being manipulated as a naturally formed tool. This would be much in line with our picking up a cobblestone in default of an ax or hammer, and continuing to maul away with it until the rough handling broke off several pieces and happened accidentally to produce an edge. That the eoliths were such unintentionally made tools is the most that can safely be claimed for them.
Even so some doubts remain. Stones similar to eoliths in every respect, except that their fractures show a fresher appearance, have been taken by dozens out of modern steel drums in which flint-bearing chalk was being broken for industrial purposes.
Then, too, the first believers in the authenticity of the eoliths reported them as occurring from the middle and earlier layers of the Pleistocene, in which periods we know that nearly human or half-human types like Heidelberg man and Pithecanthropus were already in existence. These two species being more similar to modern man than to the apes or other animals, we must imagine them to have been gifted with at least some human intelligence. It would therefore have been entirely possible for them to supplement the tools with which nature endowed them—their hands and teeth—with flints which they picked up and manipulated in one useful way or another without particularly troubling to shape the stones.
So far the argument is all in favor of the reality of the eolith. Before long, however, it was discovered that eoliths were not especially more abundant in the middle Pleistocene just previous to the opening of the Palæolithic, when we should expect them to have been most numerous, than they were in the early Pleistocene, when the human species must still have been most rudimentary. Then it was found that eoliths occur in lower strata than the earliest Pleistocene, namely, in the Pliocene, in the Miocene, and perhaps even earlier, in the Oligocene. Yet these periods are divisions of the Tertiary, or Age of Mammals—the age before man had been evolved! In short, the argument cuts too far. Once one begins to accept eoliths it is difficult to stop accepting them without carrying them back into a period of geological history when evolution could scarcely have produced a form sufficiently advanced in intelligence to use them.[8]
Perhaps on the whole the strongest argument in favor of the authenticity of the Pleistocene eoliths is the fact that the first implements known positively to belong to the Old Stone Age are just a little too well shaped and efficient to represent the products of the very beginnings of human manual dexterity. One cannot help but look for something antecedent that was simpler and ruder; and this need of the imagination the eoliths do go a long way to satisfy.
69. THE PALÆOLITHIC AGE: DURATION, CLIMATE, ANIMALS
With the Eolithic period passed and the Palæolithic entered, our history of incipient human culture is on a solid foundation, especially so far as western Europe, the best explored region, is concerned. The general relation of this Old Stone Age in geological time may be defined as follows. The Quaternary, whose duration may be estimated to have been about a million years, is subdivided into the Pleistocene and the Recent. Of the two, the Recent is very much shorter than the Pleistocene. Broadly speaking, from ninety-eight to ninety-nine per cent of the total duration of the Quaternary was occupied by the Pleistocene. The small remainder which the geologist calls “Recent,” corresponds to those periods which the archæologist and the historian name the New Stone and Metal Ages; say the past ten thousand years. The Old Stone Age therefore falls in the Pleistocene. But it occupies only the later duration of the Pleistocene; the earlier part of the Pleistocene is barren of tools or other records of human culture, except so far as the eoliths may be so considered.
The proportion of the Pleistocene which is covered by the Old Stone Age is variously estimated. Some geologists will not allow the undisputed Palæolithic to have extended over more than the last tenth of the Pleistocene: the rivers have not changed their beds enough to permit the assumption of a longer period. This allowance would give the Palæolithic a duration of perhaps a hundred thousand years, which is the figure here followed. Those who place the beginning of the European Palæolithic in the second instead of the third interglacial period, would have to admit a considerably longer duration.
The geologist, because he deals with such enormous durations, has to operate on a broad-gauge scale, and usually disdains to commit himself to close estimates of years. To measure the lapse of time within the Pleistocene, he has found it most useful to avail himself of the evidences left by the great glaciers which repeatedly covered parts of several continents during the Pleistocene, and he has therefore given this period its popular name of “glacial epoch.” These glaciations must be imagined as having occurred on a much larger scale than one might at first infer from the shrunken remnants of the glaciers that persist in the Alps and other mountains. The Pleistocene glaciers were vast sheets, hundreds of feet in thickness, sliding uniformly over valleys, hills, and mountains except for an occasional high peak. Modern Greenland, which except at the edges is buried under a solid ice cap, evidently presents a pretty fair picture of what the northern parts of Europe and North America repeatedly looked like during the Pleistocene.
Four such glaciations, or periods of maximum extent of the continental ice, have been distinguished, and more or less correlated, in Europe and North America. In Europe they have been designated as the Günz, Mindel, Riss, and Würm glaciations respectively (Fig. 5). Each of these is the name of a locality in the Alps at which typical moraines or erosions produced by the ice of that period have been carefully observed.
Between these four successive advances of the ice sheets there fell more temperate eras, some of them rather arid, and others moist and almost tropical even in the latitude of Europe. These mild intervals are known as the interglacial periods. That Europe was free from ice during these interglacial periods is shown not only by facts of a purely geological nature but by the occurrence in these periods of fossils of a semi-tropical fauna which included elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, and the like.
Coming now to a consideration of the relation of man to these ice eras, we find that the first, second, and probably the third glaciations passed without leaving sure evidence of manufactured stone implements. In the last interglacial period, that which falls between the Riss and the Würm glaciations, the so-called “Chellean picks” appear; and from then on the record of artifacts is a continuous one. Considerable parts of Europe remained habitable all through the fourth and last glaciation, the Würm period, as the implements discovered prove. Gradually, although irregularly and with three minor advances and recessions, always diminishing in rigor, however, this last predominance of the ice died away; until, by the time its effects had wholly disappeared, and the geologically “Recent” era was inaugurated, human civilization had evolved to a point where it began to enter the New Stone Age.
The animals whose fossils are found in the same deposits with human skeletons and artifacts have been of the greatest assistance in the determination of the periods of such remains. The fossils are partly of extinct species until toward the very end of the Pleistocene, when exclusively living types of animals begin wholly to supersede the earlier ones. While the identification of the various species, and the fixation of the age of each, is the work of the specialist in palæontology, the results of such studies are all-important to the historian of man’s beginnings, because they help to determine chronology. If artifacts are found in association with fossil remains of an extinct animal such as the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, they are obviously older than artifacts that are accompanied only by the bones of the reindeer, the dog, or other living species. For this reason, although the history of mammalian life in the past is a science in itself, it also has close relations with human prehistory. Some of the most characteristic animals of the later Pleistocene, and the successive stages of human cultural development with which they were associated, are listed on the following page.
70. SUBDIVISIONS OF THE PALÆOLITHIC
The places at which the men of the Stone Age lived and where their debris accumulated are known as “stations.” The word was first employed in this sense in French, but has been taken over into other languages. A “station” then is simply a spot at which prehistoric remains of human occupation are found. At least a thousand of these have been discovered in western Europe. In general they divide into two classes. One kind is in the open, mostly in the gravels laid down by streams. These are therefore known as “River Drift” or simply “Drift” stations. The other kind is found in caves or under sheltering rocks. The majority of Drift stations have proved to be from the earlier or Lower Palæolithic, whereas the Cave stations date mostly from the later or Upper Palæolithic. The Drift and the Cave periods are therefore often distinguished within the Old Stone Age, especially by English archæologists. French, German, and American students generally use the terms “Lower Palæolithic” and “Upper Palæolithic,” whose reference is to periods of cultural development rather than type of locality inhabited, and which carry more significance. French archæologists also speak of the Upper Palæolithic as the Reindeer Age.
THE LATER GLACIAL FAUNA OF WESTERN EUROPE
(Read upward)
_Postglacial and Recent_: Bison, _Bison priscus_. Wild cattle, _Bos primigenius_. Red deer or stag, _Cervus elaphus_. Roe-deer, _Capreolus_. Reindeer, _Rangifer tarandus_. Wild boar, _Sus scrofa_.
_Fourth Glacial and Postglacial fauna_: typically Mousterian to Magdalenian: Woolly mammoth, _Elephas primigenius_. Woolly or Siberian rhinoceros, _Rhinoceros antiquitatis_. Cave lion, _Felis leo spelaea_. Cave hyaena, _Hyaena crocuta spelaea_. Cave bear, _Ursus spelaeus_. Horse, _Equus caballus_. Ibex. Banded lemming, _Myodes torquatus_.
_Third Interglacial fauna_: typically Chellean and Acheulean: Straight-tusked elephant, _Elephas antiquus_. Broad-nosed rhinoceros, _Rhinoceros Merckii_. Lion, _Felis leo antiqua_. Spotted hyaena, _Hyaena crocuta_. Brown bear, _Ursus arctos_. Horses, probably several varieties.
_Second Interglacial Fauna_: typically Pre-Palæolithic, but in part surviving into the Chellean in favored localities: Southern mammoth, _Elephas meridionalis_. Etruscan rhinoceros, _Rhinoceros etruscus_. _Hippopotamus major_. Saber-tooth tigers, _Machaerodus_. Striped hyaena, _Hyaena striata_. Steno’s horse, _Equus stenonis_. _Bison antiquus_. Mastodon, tapir, anthropoids, and all primates but man and the macaque monkey already extinct in Western Europe.
The student who perhaps contributed most to the foundation of knowledge of the Palæolithic period was Gabriel de Mortillet. He first recognized four distinct sub-periods of the Palæolithic, each possessing its distinctive kinds of implements. These four periods, each named after one particular “station,” are the Chellean or earliest; the Mousterian; the Solutrean; and the Magdalenian or latest. These derived their designations from the four stations of Chelles in northern France, and of Le Moustier, Solutré, and La Madeleine in southern France (Fig. 16). De Mortillet did not endeavor to relate the culture of each of these four periods wholly to the particular locality for which he named it. He chose the stations as typical and included others as belonging to the same eras.
As more implements were found and studied, it was recognized, in part by de Mortillet himself, that while his original classification was sound, it was also incomplete. Two other periods had to be admitted. One of these, the Acheulean, falls before the Mousterian, and the second, the Aurignacian, after it. This makes six periods within the Old Stone Age; and these have been adopted by all students of the prehistory of man in Europe. The first three, the Chellean, Acheulean, and Mousterian, make up the Lower Palæolithic; the last three, the Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian, constitute the Upper Palæolithic or Reindeer Age. These six divisions of the Old Stone Age are so essential to an understanding of the prehistory of man, that the serious student finds it necessary to know their names and sequence automatically.
71. HUMAN RACIAL TYPES IN THE PALÆOLITHIC
When it comes to defining the types of fossil man in the Palæolithic, a curious situation develops. Long before there was even a true Stone Age, in the early and middle Pleistocene, there lived the half-human Pithecanthropus and the primitively human Heidelberg race (§ 11, 12). But for the whole first part of the Palæolithic, throughout the Chellean and Acheulean, no undisputed find of any skeletal remains has yet been made, although thousands of implements have been discovered which are undoubtedly human products.[9]
In the present state of knowledge the strongest case is that for the skull found at Piltdown in southern England. This is said to have been associated with “Pre-Chellean” tools, which would seem to establish the Piltdown type as the race that lived about the beginning of the Palæolithic (§ 13). But the deposit at Piltdown had been more or less rolled or shifted by natural agencies before its discovery, so that its age is not so certain as it might be; and there is no unanimity of opinion as to whether the highly developed skull and the excessively ape-like jaw that were found in the deposit really belong together. With this doubt about the fossil itself, it seems most reasonable not to press too strongly its identification as the type of man that lived in Europe at the commencement of the Old Stone Age.
For the end of the Lower Palæolithic, in the Mousterian, conditions change, and skeletal remains become authentic and comparatively numerous. From this period date the skeletons of the Neandertal species of man: a short, thickset race, powerful in bones and musculature, slightly stooping at the knee and at the shoulder, with a thick neck and a large head (§ 14). The brain was about as large as that of modern man, but the retreating aspect of the forehead was accentuated by heavy brow ridges.
In the Upper Palæolithic the Neandertal species has disappeared. The first precursors of Homo sapiens, or modern man, have come on the scene. A sort of transition from Neandertal man may be presented by the Brünn type, but the prevailing race in western Europe during the Upper Palæolithic period is that of Cro-Magnon, a tall, lithe, well-formed people, as agile and swift as Neandertal man was stocky and strong. The head and features were well proportioned, the skull and brain remarkably large, the general type not inferior to modern man, and probably already proto-Caucasian (§ 16).
Grimaldi man, so far known only from one spot on the Mediterranean shore of Europe, was proto-Negroid, Aurignacian in period, and therefore partly contemporaneous with the Cro-Magnon race (§ 18).
In summary, the types of man in Europe during the Old Stone Age have been as follows:
Magdalenian Cro-Magnon Solutrean Cro-Magnon; Brünn Aurignacian Cro-Magnon (Caucasian); also, locally Grimaldi (Negroid) Mousterian Neandertal (possibly without living descendants) Acheulean Unknown Chellean Unknown; Piltdown perhaps Pre-Chellean
The interrelations of geology, glaciation, human types, periods of the Stone Age, and estimated time in years are brought together in the tables “Antiquity of Man” and “Prehistory” (Figs. 5 and 17.)[10]
72. PALÆOLITHIC FLINT IMPLEMENTS
The most important line of evidence as to the gradual development of civilization through the six periods of the Old Stone Age is the series of flint tools. Hundreds of thousands of these tools have been discovered in western, central, and southern Europe—perhaps millions. At St. Acheul were found 20,000 Chellean coups-de-poing; at Solutré, below the Solutrean layer, 35,000 Mousterian-Aurignacian worked flints besides the remains of 100,000 horses; at Grimaldi in Italy, in the Grotte du Prince, 20,000 Mousterian pieces; at Schweizersbild in Switzerland, 14,000 late Magdalenian implements, and at Kesslerloch, near by, 30,000 from the late Solutrean and Magdalenian; at Hundsteig in Austria, 20,000 Aurignacian flints; at Predmost in Czecho-Slovakia, 25,000 probably of Solutrean age. Stations of such richness are not particularly rare, and the stations are numerous. In France alone 500 Magdalenian stations have been determined.
Clear stratigraphic relations have also been observed again and again. A few examples are:
Castillo Cave, Santander, Spain, implement bearing layers separated by strata of sterile natural debris: 1, Acheulean; 2, 3, 4, early, middle, and late Mousterian; 5, early Aurignacian; 6, 7, 8, late Aurignacian; 9, Solutrean; 10, 11, early and late Magdalenian; 12, Azilian; 13, Copper.
At St. Acheul: 1, limestone; 2, gravel, early Chellean; 3, sand, late Chellean; 4, loam, early Acheulean; 5, flood sand; 6, loess; 7, late Acheulean; 8, pebbles, Mousterian; 9, loess; 10, Upper Palæolithic.
At Mas d’Azil, at the foot of the Pyrenees: 1, gravelly soil; 2, middle Magdalenian; 3, flood loam; 4, upper Magdalenian; 5, flood loam; 6, Azilian; 7, early Neolithic; 8, full Neolithic and Bronze; 9, Iron.
At Ofnet cave, Bavaria: 1, rocks; 2, sand, 65 cm. deep; 3, 4, Aurignacian, 20 cm.; 5, Solutrean, 20 cm.; 6, Magdalenian, 15-20 cm.; 7, Azilian, with two nests of skulls, 5 cm.; 8, Neolithic, 53 cm.; 9, Bronze and Iron, 32 cm.
At La Ferrassie cave: 1, rocks and sand, 40 cm. deep; 2, Acheulean, 50 cm.; 3, Mousterian, with skeleton, 50 cm.; 4, early Aurignacian, 20 cm.; 5, middle Aurignacian, 50 cm.; 6, rock fragments, 35 cm.; 7, late Aurignacian, 35 cm.; rock and soil, 120 cm.
At first inspection Palæolithic relics seem scarcely distinguishable. They are all of flint, chert, or similar stone; are all chipped and therefore more or less rough, and consist of forms meant for cutting, scraping, and piercing. But a closer examination reveals differences in their shapes and fundamental differences in the method of their manufacture. The technique employed in the fashioning of artifacts is more significant than their appearance, and it is by directing attention to the process that one can classify these “fossils of civilization” with accuracy.
_Chellean._—In the Chellean period there was made substantially one type of implement, a sort of rude pick, almond or wedge shaped. It is often somewhat pointed, although rarely very sharp. The butt end may be rounded, some of the original surface of the cobble or nodule of flint being left for convenience of the hand in grasping the implement (Fig. 18, _a_). This tool is known as the “Chellean pick.” The Germans often call it _faust-keil_ or “fist wedge” and the French have coined the expressive epithet _coup-de-poing_ or “blow of the fist.” The Chellean pick averages from four to six inches in length, somewhat less in breadth, and weighs perhaps from a quarter to a full pound. It would have made an effective rude weapon. When firmly grasped and well directed, it could easily crush a skull. It might serve to split wood, hack limbs from trees, butcher large game, and perhaps roughly dress hides. It would not do any one of these things with neatness and accuracy, but neatness and accuracy were qualities to which early Palæolithic men paid little attention. This universal Chellean tool may be described as a combined knife, saw, ax, scraper, and pick, performing the various functions of these implements with notable crudities but efficiently enough when wielded with muscular strength.
The Chellean pick was made by striking a round or oval nodule of flint with another stone and knocking off pieces. Most of the detached flakes were large, as shown by the surfaces from which they came off; perhaps most of the chips averaged a square inch. Anything like fine work or evenness of outline was therefore out of question. One can imagine that many tools were spoiled, or broken in two, by the knocks to which they were subjected in their manufacture. The flakes struck off fell to the ground and were discarded. If the workman was sufficiently skilful, and luck stayed with him, he would before long be holding the sort of implement that has been described. Not more than a few dozen strokes of the hammer stone would be required to produce it.
Some attempt has been made to distinguish variant forms of Chellean tools, such as scrapers, planers, and knives. But some of these identifications of particular types are uncertain, and at best, the differences between the types are slight. It may be said with approximate accuracy that the long Chellean period possessed only the one tool; that this is the first definitely shaped tool known to have been made by human hands; and that it is therefore the concrete evidence of the first stage of that long development which we call civilization.[11]
_Acheulean._—The Acheulean period brings to light a growing specialization of forms and some new types. Rude scrapers, knives, borers, can be distinguished. The flakes struck off are finer than in the Chellean and the general workmanship averages higher; but through the whole of the Acheulean there is no new process. The Chellean methods of manufacture are improved without an invention being added to them.
_Mousterian._—In the Mousterian period a retrogression would at first sight seem to have occurred. Tools become smaller, less regular in outline, and are worked on one side only. The whole Mousterian period scarcely presents a single new type of implement of such all-around serviceability as the Chellean pick. Nevertheless the degeneration is only in the appearance of the implements. Actually they are made by a new process, which is more advanced than that followed in the Chellean and Acheulean. In these earlier periods flakes were struck off until the kernel of stone that remained was of the shape desired for the tool. The Mousterian technique is distinguished by using the flake instead of the core. This is the cause of Mousterian tools being generally smaller and lighter.
Secondly, when the flake dulled by use, its edge was renewed by fine chipping. The pieces detached in this secondary chipping are so small that it would have been difficult to knock them off and maintain any regularity of edge, for to detach a chip by a blow means violent contact. If the blow is a bit feeble, the chip that comes off is too small. If the artifact is struck too hard, too large a chip flies off and the implement is ruined. Fine chips are better worked off by pressure than by impact. A point is laid upon the surface near the edge. When this point is pressed down at the proper angle and with proper firmness, a scale flies off. With some practice the scales can be detached almost equal in size. The point may be of softer material than the stone. It is in the nature of flint, and of all stones that approach glass in their structure, that they break easily under pressure in definite planes or surfaces. Modern tribes that still work flint generally employ as a pressing tool a piece of bone or horn which comes to a somewhat rounded point. This is usually attached to the end of a stick, to enable a better grip of the working tool, the butt end being clamped under the elbow. A tool of the same sort may have been employed in the Palæolithic. The process of detaching the scales or secondary flakes by pressure is known as “retouching.” Retouching allows finer control than strokes delivered with a stone. The result is that Mousterian implements, when at their best, possess truer edges, and also greater variety of forms adapted to particular uses, than those of preceding ages (Fig. 18, _b_).
In spite of their insignificant appearance, Mousterian tools accordingly show advance in two points. First, the flake is used. Secondly, two processes instead of one are followed; the knocking off of the flake followed by its retouching.
_Aurignacian._—With the Mousterian the Lower Palæolithic has ended. In several activities of life, such as art and religion, the Upper Palæolithic represents a great advance over the Lower Palæolithic. Yet it seems that the mental energies of the Aurignacian people must have been pretty well absorbed by their new occupations and inventions, for their tools are largely the same retouched flakes as those the Mousterian had already employed. The Aurignacian carried on the stone technique of the Mousterian much as the Acheulean previously had carried on that of the Chellean.
_Solutrean._—The Solutrean seems to have been a relatively brief period, and to have remained localized, for implements dating from it are the scarcest of any from the six divisions of the Old Stone Age. There was a distinct advance of interest in stone work during the Solutrean. The process of retouching, without being fundamentally altered, was evidently much better controlled than before. The best Solutrean workers were retouching both sides of their tools instead of one side only, as in the past, and working over not only the edge or point but the entire surface of their artifacts. One of the characteristic implements of their time was a laurel-leaf-shaped blade which has often been considered a spear point, but would also have been an effective knife and may often have been used as such. This has the surface of both sides, from tip to butt, finished in even retouching, and is equaled in excellence of workmanship only by the best of the spear points chipped by modern savages (Fig. 18, _c_).
Of course this was not the only stone implement which the Solutrean people knew. They made points with a single shoulder at the butt, as if for mounting, and had crude forms which represented the types of earlier periods. This partial conservatism is in accord with the general observation already stated, that lower types tend to persist even after higher ones have been invented; and that because a period is determined by its best products it by no means follows that simpler ones are lacking.
_Magdalenian._—The sixth period of the Old Stone Age, the Magdalenian, resembles the Mousterian in seeming at first glance to show a retrograde development. The retouching process was carried out with less skill, perhaps because the Magdalenians were devoting themselves with more interest to bone than to stone. Magdalenian retouched implements are less completely worked out and less beautifully regular than those of Solutrean times. One reason for this decline was that another technique was coming to prevail. This technique had begun to come into use earlier, but its typical development was Magdalenian. It was a process which, on account of its simplicity, once it was mastered, was tending to make the art of retouching unnecessary. This new method was the trick of detaching, from a suitable block of flint, long straight-edged flakes, by a single blow, somewhat on the principle by which a cake of ice can be split evenly by a well guided stroke of the pick. The typical Magdalenian implement of stone is a thin flake several inches long, triangular or polygonal in cross section; in other words, a long narrow prism (Fig. 18, _d_).
To detach such a flake, flint of rather even grain is necessary, and the blow that does the work must be delivered on a precise spot, at a precise angle, and within rather narrow limits of force. This means that the hammer or striking tool cannot well come in direct contact with the flint. A short pointed piece, something like a nail or a carpenter’s punch, and probably made in the prehistoric days of horn or bone, is set on a suitable spot near the edge of the block of flint, and is then tapped smartly with the hammer stone. A single stroke slices off the desired flake. The sharp edges left on the block where the flake has flown off can be used to start adjacent flakes, and thus all the way round the block, the workman progressing farther and farther in, until nearly the whole of his core has been split off into strips.
This Magdalenian process, which was in use ten, fifteen, and perhaps twenty thousand years ago, survived, or was reinvented, in modern times. It is only a few years ago that flints were being struck off by English workmen for use on flintlock muskets exported to Africa. The modern Englishman worked with a steel hammer instead of a bone rod and cobblestone, but his technique was the same. Figure 19 shows the complete lot of flakes into which a block has been split, and which were subsequently laid together so as to reform the stone in its original shape. Similar flakes made of obsidian, a volcanic glass similar to flint in its properties, are still being produced in the Indian districts of interior Mexico for use as razors (Fig. 18, _e_).
The Magdalenian method of flint working gives the smoothest and sharpest edge. It is not adapted for making heavy instruments, but it yields an admirable knife. The process is also expeditious.
_Summary._—The successive steps in the art of stone working in the Palæolithic may be summarized thus:
Chellean: Coarse flakes detached by blows from the core, which becomes the implement.
Acheulean: Same process applied to more varied forms.
Mousterian: Flake detached by a blow is sharpened into a tool by retouching by pressure on one side only.
Aurignacian: Same with improved retouching applied.
Solutrean: Both surfaces of implement wholly retouched.
Magdalenian: Prismatic flake, detached by a blow transmitted through a point.
73. OTHER MATERIALS: BONE AND HORN
Stone implements must perhaps always remain in the foreground of our understanding of the Old Stone Age because they were made so much more numerously than other objects, or at any rate have been preserved so much more abundantly, that they will supply us with the bulk of our evidence. At the same time it would be an error to believe that the life of these men of long ago was filled with the making and using of stone tools to the exclusion of everything else. Gradually during the last fifty years, through unremittingly patient explorations and the piecing of one small discovery to another, there has accumulated a fair body of knowledge of other sides of the life of Palæolithic men. There is every reason to believe that as time goes on we shall learn more and more about them, and thus be able to reconstruct a reasonably complete and vivid picture of their behavior.
Implements of bone and horn are next most abundant after those of stone, but it is significant that the Lower Palæolithic still dispensed with these materials. In the Chellean and Acheulean stations, although broken bones of devoured animals occur, bone was not shaped. In the Mousterian this material first came into use, but as yet only as so-called “anvils” on which to chip flint or cut, and not as true tools.
One of the changes that most prominently mark the passage from the Lower to the Upper Palæolithic is the sudden development in the use of bone at the beginning of the Aurignacian, and then of reindeer horn. These materials came more and more into favor as time went on. The Aurignacians had bone awls or pins, polishers, paint tubes of hollowed reindeer leg bone, and points with a grooved base for hafting, generally construed as javelin heads. In the Solutrean, eyed needles were added. The greatest development was attained in the Magdalenian. Bone javelin and spear heads were now made in a variety of forms, with bases pointed, beveled, or grooved. Hammers, chisels or wedges, and perforators were added to the list of bone tools. Whistles and perhaps flutes were blown. Reindeer antler was employed for carved and perforated lengths of horn, “rods of command” or magic, they are usually called; as well as for harpoons and throwers, to be discussed below.
By the close of the Palæolithic, objects of organic substances began to approach in frequency those of flint. This may well have been a sort of preparation for the grinding and polishing of stone which is the distinctive technique of the New Stone Age. Bone cannot well be chipped or retouched. It must be cut, ground, or rubbed into shape. The Neolithic people therefore may be said to have extended to stone a process which their predecessors of the Upper Palæolithic were familiar with but had failed to apply to the harder substance.
74. DRESS
The slender bone needle provided with an eye which the Solutrean and Magdalenian added to the primitive awl implies thread and sewing. It may be concluded therefore that, at least from the middle of the Upper Palæolithic on, the people of Europe went clothed in some sort of fitted garments. It would be going too far to assert that the Neandertal men ran about naked as the lower animals. Several inventions which they had made compel us to attribute to them enough intelligence to lead them to cover themselves with skins when they felt cold. But they may have been too improvident, or habituated to discomfort, to trouble even to dress hides. At any rate there is no positive indication that they regularly clothed themselves. By contrast, the sewing of the Upper Palæolithic Cro-Magnons marked a considerable advance.
Ornament may have been earlier than clothing. The paint of the Aurignacians decorated their own bodies and those of their dead. About their necks and waists they hung rows of perforated shells and teeth. More of these have been found on the skeletons of males than of females. By the Magdalenian, there was sophistication enough to lead to the carving of artificial shells and teeth out of ivory; and amber was beginning to be transported from the German coast to Southern France.
75. HARPOONS AND WEAPONS
Towards the end of the Upper Palæolithic, in the Magdalenian, the harpoon came into extensive use. The shafts have of course long since decayed, but many of the reindeer antler heads have remained intact. At first these were notched with barbs along one edge only. In the later Magdalenian the barbs were cut on both sides. The harpoon differs from the simple spear or javelin in having its head detachable from the shaft. The two are fitted together by a socket. If the prey, be it fish or mammal, is not killed by the first throw, its struggles to escape shake the shaft loose, while the barbs hold the head firmly imbedded in its body. A line is attached to the head and tied to the shaft or held in the hand of the hunter. The animal is thus kept from escaping. During the Magdalenian the line was kept from slipping off the head by one or two knobs near the butt. In the subsequent Azilian period the head was perforated, as is the modern Eskimo practice. The harpoon is really a rather complicated instrument: it consists of at least three pieces—head, shaft, and line.
Another device which the Magdalenians shared with the Aztecs, the Eskimo, and some other modern peoples, is the spear thrower or atlatl. This is a sort of rod or handle, one end of which is grasped by the fingers while the other engages the butt end of the harpoon or dart. The hand only steers the shaft at the beginning of its flight: the propulsion comes from the thrower. The instrument may therefore be described as a device for artificially lengthening the human arm and thus imparting greater velocity and length of flight to the weapon. There is without doubt considerable ingenuity involved in this apparatus, both in its invention and in its successful use. A person unskilled in bodily movements would never hit upon the invention; nor could a race of high native dexterity acquire proficiency in the art of hunting with the thrower until each individual was willing to practise for a considerable period. It may once more be concluded, accordingly, that by the end of the Palæolithic, civilization had developed to a point where men were much readier to undergo protracted training and forbearance than they had been at the beginning of the period.
One instrument that we are wont to associate with the beginnings of civilization, because of its almost universal employment by savages of to-day, is the bow and arrow. So strong has the preconception been that the Palæolithic peoples must have been like modern savages, that time and time again it has been assumed that they possessed the bow. There is no convincing evidence to show that this was so, and a good deal of negative evidence to establish that they were unacquainted with the weapon. All the Palæolithic remains of flint, bone, or horn, which at times have been interpreted as arrow points, are more conservatively explained as knives or heads of darts. The prevailing opinion is that the bow was not invented until the Neolithic. This would make the weapon only about ten thousand years old—a hoary antiquity, indeed, but recent as compared with the knife, the spear, and even the harpoon. The reason for this lateness in the invention of the bow and arrow is probably to be sought in the delicacy of the instrument. It is not essentially more complex than the harpoon, certainly not more complex than the harpoon impelled by the spear thrower. But it involves much finer adjustments. A poorly made harpoon is of course inferior to a well-made one, but may be measurably effective. It may retrieve game half the time. But a bow which falls below a certain standard will not shoot at all, or will shoot so feebly as to have a zero efficiency. In fact, one of the things that students of the beginnings of culture have long been puzzled about is how the bow and arrow could have been invented. Most other inventions can be traced through a series of steps, each of which, although incomplete, achieved a certain utility of its own. But, other than toys or musical instruments, no implement has yet been found, or even satisfactorily imagined, which was not yet a bow, which would still serve a purpose, and which, by addition or improvement, could give rise to the bow.
76. WOODEN IMPLEMENTS
Wood is likely to have been used by primitive men for one purpose or another from the very earliest times. Even “half men” of the “missing link” type, it may be believed, would in case of need pick up a stick or wrench a limb from a tree to serve them as a club. But we do not know when human beings first began to fashion wood into definite implements by working it with their stone tools. Wood is too perishable a substance to have stood any chance of being preserved from so long distant a past.
Our knowledge of the first employment of wood is indirect. Many of the Mousterian chipped flakes are of such size and shape that they could have been operated much more effectively had they been mounted on a handle. Possibly therefore the process of hafting or handling had come to be practised in the Mousterian, although there is no specific evidence to this effect. In the Upper Palæolithic, wood was certainly used to a considerable extent. The harpoon and dart heads, for instance, must have had wooden shafts.
A true ax is not known from the Old Stone Age and seems to have been invented in the Neolithic. The distinctive factor of the instrument, upon which its utility largely depends, is the straightness and smoothness of the edge; and such an edge is best attained by the grinding process. Even the unground axes of the earliest Neolithic depended on a single stroke to provide them with the required straight cutting edge. We may believe, therefore, that the Palæolithic peoples worked wood in the manner familiar to us from the practices of many modern savage races. They split it, rubbed it, and burned it into shape, rather than trying to chop it.
77. FIRE
One of the most fundamental of human arts is the use of fire. It is also one of the most ancient. Its occurrence is easily traced, at any rate in deposits that have not been disturbed by nature, through the presence of charred bones, lumps of charcoal, and layers of ash. Charcoal crumbles easily, but its fragments are practically imperishable. Its presence in considerable quantities in any station, particularly if the coal is accumulated in pockets, is therefore sure proof that the people who occupied the site burned fires for warmth, or cooking, or both purposes. The use of fire has been established throughout the part of the Palæolithic when men lived in caves and under rock shelters; that is, during the Mousterian and Upper Palæolithic.
The Chellean and Acheulean deposits are so much older and more open, and in many cases have been washed over so much by rainfall and by streams, that, if the men of these periods did use fire, as they may well have done, its evidences might have been pretty generally obliterated.
Whether early Palæolithic men knew how to make fire, or whether they only found it and kept it alive, is more difficult to say. They could easily have acquired it in the first place from trees struck by lightning or from other occasional natural agencies. Then, recognizing its value, they may well have nursed it along, lighting one hearth from another. Yet at some time in the Palæolithic the art of producing fire at will, by friction between two pieces of wood, is almost certain to have been invented. One may infer this from the general similarity of level of Magdalenian civilization to that of modern savages, all of whom practise the art of ignition. But in the nature of things it would be difficult to find evidence bearing on this point from more than ten thousand years ago. It can be assumed that man is likely to have lived first for a long period in a condition in which he knew and used and preserved fire, yet was not able to produce it.
78. HOUSES
Although Palæolithic man worked so much in stone, he did not build in it. Hence our knowledge of the kinds of shelters he made for himself is almost _nil_. There are Upper Palæolithic “tectiform” paintings which look as if they might be attempts to depict houses. It is clear, moreover, that in this period the general development of the mechanical arts was sufficiently advanced to allow of the construction of some sort of rude edifices.
It is conceivable that as far back as the Lower Palæolithic simple shelters of branches were constructed, or that skins may have been hung over a few poles to keep off wind and rain. On account of the perishable nature of the materials involved, it happens that there is no proof either for or against such a supposition. It is possible that in time, when patient excavations shall have revealed some particularly well preserved site, the holes may yet be found in which the posts of a Palæolithic hut were once set. In case of a fire, the carbonized stumps might prove to have been preserved in place; or the butts of the posts might have gradually rotted away and the space once occupied by them have become filled with an earthy material of different color and consistency from the surrounding soil. In this lucky event, even the size and shape of the house might be reconstructed from the relative positions of the post holes. From evidence of just this sort some interesting ideas have actually been obtained as to the houses and village plan of Neolithic European peoples. Of course, the chances are much less that remains of this sort would be preserved from the Palæolithic. But the method would be equally applicable if favorable conditions offered; and it is in some such way that we may hope in the future to learn a little about the earliest habitations that mankind constructed. In any event the example serves to illustrate the indirect and delicate means of which the student of prehistory must consistently avail himself in his reconstructions of the past; and gives reason to believe that all that has been learned about early man in the last fifty years is very little in comparison with what the ensuing generation and century will bring to light.
79. RELIGION
It has already been said that knowledge of religion, a non-material thing, can be preserved from the remote past only by the most roundabout means. It is conceivable that the people of the Upper Palæolithic spent at least as much time in ceremonial observances as in working flint. Analogy with modern uncivilized tribes would make us think that this is quite likely. But the stone tools have remained lying in the earth, while the religious customs went out of use thousands of years ago and the beliefs were forgotten. Yet this is known: As far back as the Mousterian, thirty thousand years ago, certain practices were being observed by the Neandertal race of western Europe which modern savages observe in obedience to the dictates of their religion. When these people of the Mousterian laid away their dead, they put some of their belongings with them. When existing nations do this, it is invariably in connection with a belief in the continued existence of the soul after death. We may reasonably conclude therefore that even in this long distant period human beings had arrived at a crude recognition of the difference between flesh and spirit; in short, religion had come into being. Even to say that Neandertal man did not know whether his dead were dead, implies his recognition of something different from life in the body, for he recognized of course that the body had become different. Whether the Neandertal race already held to the existence of spirits distinct from man or superior to him, it is impossible to say.
The Upper Palæolithic Cro-Magnon peoples laid out the bodies of their dead and sometimes folded them. They also sometimes painted the bodies, and buried flint implements and food in the graves. That is, funerary practices were becoming established. We may assume that hand in hand with this development of observances there went a growth of ritual and belief.
80. PALÆOLITHIC ART
The highest achievement of the men of the Old Stone Age is their art. The perfection to which they carried this art is simply astounding in view of the comparative meagerness of their civilization otherwise. It is also remarkable how full-fledged this achievement sprang into existence. The Lower Palæolithic seems to have been without a trace of art. With the Aurignacian, simple carving and painting appear; and while the acme of accomplishment was not reached until the Magdalenian, the essential foundations of a graphic art of high order were laid in the late Aurignacian.
The Upper Palæolithic people carved in ivory, bone, and horn; they incised or engraved on flattened and rounded surfaces of the same material; and they carved and painted the walls of caves. They modeled at times in clay and perhaps in other soft materials, and may have drawn or painted pictures on skins and on exposed rock surfaces, for all we know; we can judge only by the remains that have actually come down to us. This art is not a child-like, struggling attempt to represent objects in the rough, nor is it a mere decorative playing with geometric figures. These first human artists set boldly to work to depict; and while their technique was simple, it was carried to a remarkably high degree of perfection. A few bold strokes gave the outlines of an animal, but they gave it with such fidelity that the species can often be recognized at a glance. The Cro-Magnon people must have developed a high power of mental concentration to be able to observe and reproduce so closely. The most gifted individuals perhaps practised assiduously to attain their facility.
Palæolithic art is very different from that of most modern savages. The latter often work out decorative patterns of some complexity, richness, and æsthetic value, but when they attempt to depict nature, they usually fail conspicuously. The lines are crude and wavering. Any head, body, and tail with four legs stands for almost any animal. It is a reasonable representation of an abstraction that they accomplish, not the delineation of what is characteristic in the visible form. Both observer and painter, among most living savages, are supposed to know beforehand that the drawing represents a fox and not a bear. At most, some symbols are added, such as a bushy tail for a fox or a fin for a whale. It is only in rare cases that any but advanced nations break away from these primitive tendencies and learn to draw things as they really appear. The ancient Egyptians developed such a faculty, and among savages the Bushmen are remarkably gifted, but, on the whole, successful realistic art is an accomplishment of high civilization. It is therefore something of a mystery how the Cro-Magnon men of the Aurignacian brought themselves to do so well.
In sculpture their first efforts were directed upon figurines. These mostly represent the human female. The head, hands, and feet are either absent or much abbreviated. In the body, those parts having to do with reproduction and fecundity are usually heavily exaggerated, but at the same time given with considerable skill (Fig. 20). It is likely that these statuettes served some religious cult. At any rate, the carvings in three dimensions often represent the human figure, whereas two-dimensional drawings, etchings, and paintings mostly represent animals and are much more successful than the human outlines. In the Magdalenian, miniature sculpture of animals was added to that of the human figure (Fig. 21).
Success in seizing the salient outline was the earliest characteristic of the paintings and drawings. The first Aurignacian engravings are invariably in profile and usually show only the two legs on the immediately visible side. In time the artists also learned to suggest typical positions and movements—the motion of a reindeer lowering its head to browse, the way an angry bull switches his tail or paws the ground, the curl of the end of an elephant’s trunk (Figs. 22, 24). In the Magdalenian, all four legs are usually depicted, and the profile, although remaining most frequent, as it is most characteristic, is no longer the only aspect. There are occasional pictures of animals from before or behind, or of a reindeer with its head turned backward.
There are also some devices which look like the beginnings of attempts at composition. The effect of a row of reindeer is produced by drawing out the first few in some detail, and then suggesting the others by sketching in their horns (Fig. 23). Artists were no longer content, in the Magdalenian, always to do each animal as a solitary, static unit. They were trying, with some measure of success, to represent the animals as they moved in life and perhaps to combine several of them into one coherent picture or to suggest a setting.
By this time they had also acquired considerable ability in handling colors. The Aurignacian and Solutrean artists restricted themselves to monochrome effects. They engraved or painted outlines and sometimes accentuated these by filling them in with pigment. But the best of the later painters in the Magdalenian—those, for instance, who left their frescoes on the walls of the famous cave of Altamira in Spain—used three or four colors at once and blended these into transition tones.
While animals constitute the subjects of probably four-fifths of the specimens of Palæolithic art, and human beings most of the remainder, representations of plants and unrealistic decorative designs are known. The latter seem to have begun to be specially prevalent in the latest Magdalenian, as if in preparation of the conventionalized, non-naturalistic art of the transitional Azilian and Neolithic.
81. SUMMARY OF ADVANCE IN THE PALÆOLITHIC
The history of civilization has herewith been outlined from its first dim beginnings to about twelve thousand years ago—say to the neighborhood of 10,000 B.C., as the historian would put it. Progress is immensely slow at the outset, but gradually speeds up. The tabulation in Figure 25 summarizes some of the principal features of this evolution. This diagram does not pretend to be complete; it does try to include some of the most important and representative inventions, arts, and accomplishments of the Old Stone Age.
Thus it appears that the Chellean and Acheulean periods are characterized essentially by a single art, that of chipping implements on a core of flint, plus perhaps the use of fire. The Mousterian evinces progress: stone tools are now made from the flake as well as the core, possibly are sometimes hafted, bone is occasionally utilized, and there are the first indications of budding religion; four or five entries are required to represent these culture traits.
The greatest advance comes from the Mousterian to the Aurignacian; in other words, between the Lower and the Upper Palæolithic. Three times as many accomplishments are listed as in the Mousterian, and whole series of new inventions are now first met with: body ornaments, bone implements, æsthetic products. This sudden leap in the figures goes far to signalize the importance of the division between the Upper and the Lower Palæolithic. In the Solutrean and Magdalenian still further inventions or refinements appear, until, when the Old Stone Age comes to a close,[12] the stock of human civilization may be described as perhaps twenty times as rich as at the beginning. These figures are not to be taken too literally. The tabulation could easily have been compiled on a more elaborate basis. But even then the relative proportion of culture features in each period would remain approximately as here given. And as regards the general fact of accumulation of civilization, and its range and nature, the diagram may be accepted as substantially representative of what happened.
The end of the Palæolithic thus sees man in possession of a number of mechanical arts which enable him to produce a considerable variety of tools in several materials: sees him controlling fire; cooking food; wearing clothes, and living in definite habitations; probably possessing some sort of social grouping, order, and ideas of law and justice; clearly under the influence of some kind of religion; highly advanced in the plastic arts; and presumably already narrating legends and singing songs. In short, many fundamental elements of civilization were established. It is true that the sum total of knowledge and accomplishments was still pitifully small. The most advanced of the Old Stone Age men perhaps knew and could do about one thing for every hundred that we know and can do. A whole array of fundamental inventions—the bow and arrow, pottery, domestication of animals and plants—had not yet been attempted, and they do not appear on the scene until the Neolithic. But in spite of the enormous gaps remaining to be filled in the Neolithic and in the historic period, it does seem fair to say that many of the outlines of what civilization was ultimately to be had been substantially blocked out during the Upper Palæolithic. Most of the framework was there, even though but a small fraction of its content had yet been entered.