Part 16

Some of those assumed illustrations of American palæolithic art cannot be accepted. One implement, for example, from the Californian gravel-drift, is a polished stone plummet perforated at one end, and not only modern in character, but as a genuine discovery in the gold-bearing gravels, tending to discredit the palæolithic origin assigned to ruder implements found under similar circumstances. But the most startling examples of this class are of minor importance when compared with reported discoveries of human remains in the Californian drift. In 1857, Dr. C. F. Winslow produced a fragment of a human skull found eighteen feet below the surface in the “pay drift” at Table Mountain, associated with remains of the mastodon and fossil elephant. From beds underlying the lava and volcanic tufa of California, from time to time other evidences of the assumed ancient presence of man and traces of his art are produced. But the manifestly recent character of some of the latter prove the disturbance of these deposits by subsequent influences. In 1869 Professor J. D. Whitney exhibited, at the Chicago meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a complete human skull, recovered at a depth of 130 feet in the auriferous gravel of Calaveras County, California, underlying five successive beds of lava and volcanic tufa, and vouched for its geological antiquity. The gravel which adhered to the relic found imbedded in it is referred by him to the Pliocene age; and Dr. J. W. Foster remarks of it, in his _Prehistoric Races of the United States_: “This skull, admitting its authenticity, carries back the advent of man to the Pliocene epoch, and is therefore older than the stone implements of the drift-gravel of Abbeville and Amiens, or the relics furnished by the cave-dirt of Belgium and France.” In reality, however, the authenticity of the skull as a pliocene relic cannot be admitted. Like that of Guadaloupe, those found by Dr. Lund in the Brazil caves, and other fossil skulls of the American continent, it proved, according to the trustworthy report of Dr. Wyman, to be of the ordinary Indian type; though to some minds that only confirms the genuineness of the discovery. A human skull recovered from the delta of the Mississippi at New Orleans, and estimated by Dr. Dowler—on what, “to avoid all cavil,” he claimed to be extremely moderate assumptions,—as not less than 57,000 years old, is grouped with others found by Dr. Lund in one of the Brazil caves, at Logoa Santa, and thus commented on: “Numerous species of animals have been blotted from creation since American humanity’s first appearance. The form of these crania, moreover, proves that the general type of races inhabiting America at that inconceivably remote era was the same which prevailed at the Columbian discovery”;[42] and so the authors of _Types of Mankind_ arrived at the conclusion that with such evidence of the native American type having occupied the continent in geological times, before the formation of the Mississippi alluvia, science may spare itself the trouble of looking elsewhere for the origin of the American race! The high authority of Professor Agassiz was adduced at the time in support of this and other equally crude assumptions; but they have ceased to receive the countenance of men of science.

Meanwhile the progress of European discovery has familiarised us with the idea of the rude primeval race of its Palæolithic era, so designated in reference to their characteristic implements recovered from the river-drift of France and England, and from the sedimentary accumulations of their rock shelters and limestone caves. That flint and stone implements of every variety of form abound in the soil of the New World, has been established by ample proof; and if mere rudeness could be accepted as evidence of antiquity, many of them rival in this respect the rudest implements of the European drift. But it has to be kept in view that the indigenous tribes of America have scarcely even now abandoned the manufacture of implements of obsidian, flint, and stone, or of bone and ivory. So striking, indeed, is the analogy between the simple arts of the palæolithic cave-men of Southern France, and those still practised by the Eskimo, that Professor Boyd Dawkins inferred from this conclusive evidence of a pedigree for the Arctic aborigines little less ancient than that which Dr. Dowler long ago deduced from his discovery in the delta of the Mississippi. The implements and accumulated debris of the ancient hunters of the Garonne, the contemporaries of the mammoth and other extinct mammals, and of the reindeer, musk-sheep, cave-bear, and other species known only within the historic period in extreme northern latitudes, undoubtedly suggest interesting analogies with the modern Eskimo. Only under similar climatic conditions to those in which they now live, could such accumulations of animal remains as have been found in the caves of the valley of the Vésère be possible in places habitually resorted to by man. But such analogies form a very slender basis on which to found the hypothesis that the race of the Mammoth and Reindeer period in the remote Post-Pliocene era of Southern France has its living representatives within the Arctic circle of the American continent.

The students of modern archæology have become familiar with startling disclosures; and the supposed identification of living representatives of the race of the pleistocene river beds or cave deposits is too fascinating a one to be readily abandoned by its originator. The men of the River-Drift era are assumed to have been a race of still older and ruder savages than the palæolithic cave-men, who were more restricted in their range, and considerably in advance of them in the variety and workmanship of their weapons and implements. The elder ruder race has vanished; but the cave-race of that indefinite but vastly remote era of pliocene, or post-pliocene Europe, is imagined to still survive within the Arctic frontiers of Canada.

In discussing the plausible hypothesis which thus aims at recovering in the hyperboreans of America the race that before the close of Europe’s Pleistocene age, hunted the mammoth, the musk-sheep, and the reindeer in the valleys of the Garonne, Professor Dawkins reviewed the manners and habits of the Eskimo as a race of hunters, fishers, and fowlers, accumulating round their dwellings vast refuse heaps similar to those of the ancient cave-men. Both were ignorant of the metallurgic arts, were excluded to a large extent by a like rigorous climate from access to stone or flint; while they habitually turned to account the available material, resulting from the spoils of the chase: bone, ivory, and deer’s horn, in the manufacture of all needful tools. The implements and weapons thus common to both do unquestionably prove that their manner of life was in many respects similar. Professor Dawkins also notes, what can scarcely seem surprising in any people familiar with the working in bone, namely, the use at times by the Eskimo of fossil mammoth ivory for the handles of their stone scrapers, and adds: “It is very possible that this habit of the Eskimos may have been handed down from the late pleistocene times.” But what strikes him as “the most astonishing bond of union between the cave-men and the Eskimo is the art of representing animals”; and, after noting those familiar to both, along with the correspondence in their weapons, and habits as hunters, he says: “All these points of connection between the cave-men and the Eskimos can, in my opinion, be explained only on the hypothesis that they belong to the same race.”[43]

As to the ingenious imitative art of the Cro-Magnon cave-dwellers, it is by no means peculiar to them and the modern Eskimo; but, on the contrary, is common to many savage races; though by no modern savage people has a like degree of artistic ability been shown. Professor Dawkins says truly of the cave-man: “He possessed a singular talent for representing the animals he hunted; and his sketches reveal to us that he had a capacity for seeing the beauty and grace of natural form not much inferior to that which is the result of long-continued civilisation in ourselves, and very much higher than that of his successors in Europe in the Neolithic age. The hunter who was both artist and sculptor, who reproduced, with his imperfect means, at one time foliage, at another the quiet repose of a reindeer feeding, has left behind him the proof of a decided advance in culture, such as might be expected to result from the long continuance of man on the earth in the hunter state of civilisation.”[44] All this is correct in reference to the art of the Vézère carvers and draughtsmen; but it would be gross exaggeration if applied to such conventional art as the Eskimo arrow-straightener which Professor Dawkins figures, with its formal row of reindeer and their grotesque accessories. The same criticism is equally applicable to numerous other specimens of Eskimo art, and to similar Innuit, or western Eskimo representations of hunting scenes, such as those figured by Mr. William H. Dall, in his _Alaska_, which he describes as “drawings analogous to those discovered in France in the caves of Dordogne.”[45]

The identity, or near resemblance between harpoons, fowling spears, marrow spoons, and scrapers, of the ancient cave-race of pleistocene France, and implements of the modern Eskimo, is full of interest; as is much also of a like kind between savage races of our own day in the most widely severed regions of the globe; but it is a slender basis on which to found such far-reaching deductions. The old race that lived on the verge of the great glaciers in Southern France gave the preference to bone and ivory over flint or stone, because the climatic conditions under which they lived rendered those most accessible to them; and we see in the familiar types of flint arrow heads, stone hammers, and the like primitive tools of savage man, both in ancient and modern times, how naturally the workman, with the same materials and similar necessities, shapes his few and simple weapons and implements into like form. As to the absence of pottery, alike among the ancient cave-dwellers and the modern Eskimo, in which another element of resemblance is traced, it proves no more than that both had to work under climatic conditions which rendered clay, adequate fuel, and nearly all other appliances of the potter, even less available than flint and stone.

But the caves of the Vézère have furnished examples not only of skulls, but of complete skeletons of an ancient race of cave-dwellers, whether that of the ingenious draughtsmen and reindeer hunters or not; and had those, or the underlying debris, yielded traces of the Eskimo type of head, there would then be good reason for attaching an exceptional value to any evidence of correspondence in arts and habits. But the cerebral capacity of this Cro-Magnon race amply accords with the artistic skill, and the sense of beauty and grace of natural form, ascribed to the ancient draughtsmen; and their well-developed skulls and large bones present the most striking contrast to the stunted Eskimo. The strongly marked physiognomy of the former bears no resemblance to the debased Mongolian type of the latter. No doubt it may be argued with sufficient plausibility that in the slow retreat of the palæolithic race, whether eastward by the river-valleys of Europe, and across the steppes of Asia, to Behring Strait; or over submerging continents, since engulfed in the ocean; and in the vast æons of their retreat to their latest home in another hemisphere, on the verge of the pole, any amount of change may have modified the physical characteristics of the race. But if so, the evidence of their pedigree is no longer producible. The Eskimo may be related by descent to the men of the French Reindeer period, as we ourselves may be descendants of palæolithic man; but, as Professor Geikie has justly remarked: “When anthropologists produce from some of the caves occupied by the reindeer hunters a cranium resembling that of the living Eskimo, it will be time enough to admit that the latter has descended from the former. But, unfortunately for the view here referred to, none of the skulls hitherto found affords it any support.”[46] In truth, the plausible fancy that the discoveries of the last twenty-five years have tended to confirm the identification of the cave-men with the Eskimo, only requires the full appreciation of all that it involves, in order that it shall take its place with that other identification with the red man of the present day of “Dr. Dowler’s sub-cypress Indian who dwelt on the site of New Orleans 57,000 years ago.”

The received interpretation of the imperfect record which remains to us of the successive eras of geological change with the accompanying modifications of animal life, down to the appearance of man, and the deciphering of geological chroniclings as a coherent disclosure of the past history of the earth, are largely due to Sir Charles Lyell. In 1841 he visited America, and then estimated with cautious conservatism some of the evidences adduced for the assumed antiquity of American man. But subsequent observations led him to modify his views; and at length, in 1863, he “read his recantation” of earlier opinions; and—so far at least as Europe is concerned,—gave the full weight of his authority to the conclusions relative to the antiquity of man based on the discovery of flint implements associated with bones of extinct mammalia at Abbeville and in the valley of the Thames. The peculiar geological conditions accompanying the earliest evidence of the presence of palæolithic man in Europe proved, when rightly interpreted, to be no less convincing than the long-familiar sequence of more recent archæological indices by which antiquarian speculation has proceeded step by step back towards that prehistoric dawn in which geology and archæology meet on common ground. The chalk and the overlying river-drift, abounding with flint nodules, left no room for question as to the source of the raw material from which the primitive implements were manufactured. The flint is still abundant as ever, in nodules of a size amply sufficient for furnishing the largest palæoliths, in the localities both of France and England where such specimens of primitive art have been recovered by thousands. But there also other disclosures tell no less conclusively of many subsequent stages of progress, alike in prehistoric and historic times.

Sir John Evans, in his _Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain_, purposely begins with the more recent implements, including those of the Australian and other modern savage races, and traces his way backward, “ascending the stream of time,” and noting the diverse examples of ingeniously fashioned and polished tools of the Neolithic age which preceded that palæolithic class, of vast antiquity and rudest workmanship, which now constitute the earliest known works of man; if they are not, indeed, examples of the first infantile efforts of human skill. But alike in Britain, and on the neighbouring continent, a chronological sequence of implements in stone and metal, with pottery, personal ornaments, and other illustrations of progressive art, supplies the evidence by means of which we are led backward—not without some prolonged interruptions, as we approach the Palæolithic age,—from historic to the remotest prehistoric times.

The relative chronology of the European drift may be thus stated: first, and most modern, the superficial deposits of recent centuries with their mediæval traces of Frank and Gaul; and along with those, the tombs, the pottery, and other remains of the Roman period, scarcely perceptibly affected in their geological relations by nearly the whole interval of the Christian era; next, in the alluvium, seemingly embedded by natural accumulation at an average depth of fifteen feet, occur remains of a European Stone period, corresponding in many respects to those of the pfahlbauten, or pile villages of the Swiss Lakes; and, underlying such accumulations exceeding in their duration the whole historical period, we come at length to the tool-bearing drift, imbedding, along with the fossil remains of many extinct mammals, the implements of palæolithic man, fashioned seemingly when the rivers were only beginning the work of excavating the valleys which give their present contour to the landscapes of France and England.

There, as elsewhere, we recognise progression from the most artless rudeness of tool manufacture, belonging to an epoch when the process of grinding flint or stone to an edge appears to have been unknown; through various stages of the primitive worker in stone, bone, ivory, and the like natural products; and then the discovery and gradual development of the metallurgic arts. Yet at the same time it must not be lost sight of that mere rudeness of workmanship is no evidence of antiquity. Nothing can well be conceived of more artless than some of the stone implements still in use among savage tribes of America. Moreover, it is to be noted that it is not amid the privations of an Arctic winter, with its analogies so suggestive of a condition of life corresponding to that of the men of Europe’s Palæolithic age, but in southern latitudes, with a climate which furnishes abundant resources for savage man, that the crudest efforts at tool-making now occur. In a report of the _United States Geological Survey_ for 1872, Professor Joseph Leidy furnishes an interesting account of numerous implements, rude as any in the Drift, observed by him while engaged on a survey at the base of the Unitah Mountains in Southern Wyoming. “In some places,” he remarks, “the stone implements are so numerous, and at the same time are so rudely constructed, that one is constantly in doubt when to consider them as natural or accidental, and when to view them as artificial.”[47] But with these, others are mingled of fine finish. The Shoshones who haunt the region seem to be incapable of such skill as the latter imply; and express the belief that they were a gift of the Great Spirit to their ancestors. Yet many are fresh in appearance; though others are worn and decomposed on the surface, and may, as Professor Leidy assumes, have lain there for centuries. The tendency is now, even among experienced archæologists, to assume that they are actually palæolithic. Mr. Thomas Wilson remarks, in his _Report_ of 1887: “Dr. Leidy did not know these implements to be what they really were, that is implements of the Palæolithic period.”[48] But in view of Dr. Leidy’s whole narrative, his assumption seems to be more consistent with the observed data. In the same narrative he describes a stone scraper, or _teshoa_, as the Shoshones call it, employed by them in the dressing of buffalo-skins, but of so simple a character that he says, “had I not observed it in actual use, and had noticed it among the materials of the buttes, or horizontal strata of indurated clays and sandstone, I would have viewed it as an accidental spawl.” When illustrating the characteristics of a like class of stone implements and weapons of Great Britain, Sir John Evans figures and describes an axe, or war-club, procured from the Indians of Rio Frio in Texas. Its blade is a piece of trachyte, so rudely chipped that it would scarcely attract attention as of artificial working, but for the club-like haft, evidently chopped into shape with stone tools, into which it is inserted. Nothing ruder has been brought to light in any drift or cave deposit.[49] Another modern Texas implement, in the Smithonnia collections at Washington,[50] is a rudely-fashioned flint blade, presenting considerable resemblance to a familiar class of oval implements of the river-drift.

So far, therefore, as unskilled art and the mere rudeness of workmanship are concerned, it might be assumed that the aborigines of America are thus presented to our study in their most primitive stage. They had advanced in no degree beyond the condition of the European savage of the River-Drift period, when, at the close of the fifteenth century, they were brought into contact with modern European culture; and nothing in their rude arts seemed to offer a clue to their origin, or any evidence of progression. So far as anything could be learned from their work, they might have entered on the occupation of the northern continent, subsequent to the visits of the Northmen in the tenth century; and, indeed, American archæologists generally favour the opinion that the _Skrælings_, as the Northmen designated the New England natives whom they encountered, were not Red Indians but Eskimo. But whatever may have been the local distribution of races at that date, geological evidence, which has proved so conclusive in relation to European ethnology, has at length been appealed to by American investigators, with results which seem to establish for their continent also its primeval Stone period, and remote prehistoric dawn.

The _Report of the Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Ethnology_ for 1877, gave the first publicity to a communication from Dr. Charles C. Abbott, setting forth the data from which he was led to assume that man existed on the American continent during the formation of the great glacial deposit which extends from Labrador as far south as Virginia. The scene of his successful research is in the valley of the Delaware, near Trenton, New Jersey. Though the relative antiquity of the Trenton gravel beds is modern compared with some subsequent disclosures, his discoveries have a special interest as foremost among those of implement-bearing gravels in the New World. In the gravel, deposited by the Delaware river in the process of excavating the valley through which its course now lies, Dr. Abbott’s diligent search has been rewarded by finding numerous specimens of rudely chipped implements of a peculiar type, to which he has given the name of “turtle-back celts.” They are fashioned of a highly indurated argillite, with a conchoidal fracture, and have been recovered at depths varying from five to upwards of twenty feet below the overlying soil, in the undisturbed gravel of the bluff facing the Delaware river, as well as in railway cuttings and other excavations.