BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
THE DAWN OF HISTORY. An Introduction
to Pre-historic Study. 12mo =$1.25=
OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF
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THE
DAWN OF HISTORY:
_AN INTRODUCTION TO_
PRE-HISTORIC STUDY.
EDITED BY
C. F. KEARY, M.A., F.S.A.
NEW EDITION.
NEW YORK:
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.
1902
THE CAXTON PRESS
NEW YORK.
PREFACE.
The present edition of the _Dawn of History_ is a considerable
enlargement upon the former one, as may be judged from the fact that the
former, including the Appendix, contained only 231 pages, whereas the
present edition contains 357. These enlargements have chiefly affected
the first four chapters with the ninth and tenth, and, generally
speaking, the chapters for which the editor is wholly responsible. He
felt himself quite incapable of improving chapters eight, eleven, and
thirteen, which can hardly fail to be recognized as the best in the
volume; and, unhappily, the hand which wrote them--that of Annie
Keary--is no longer able to revise or alter. Some slight corrections
therefore have been made, in accordance with the advance of these
branches of study during recent years, but nothing more. No more were
needed, for (in the case of the chapters on writing, for example)
further research has only tended to establish more firmly the
conclusions here accepted. The chapters on early social life (vi.,
vii.), again, did not seem to the editor to require more than slight
corrections.
In the chapters dealing with religion and mythology, it was not to be
expected that the writers could avoid treading upon controversial
ground; but as almost every proposition upon these matters is disputed
by some one, it was not possible to adopt the plan of putting forward
only those facts and theories which may be considered as established.
Some disputed points are discussed in the Appendix. Even on the subject
of language the views of one (small) school of philologists had to be
relegated in like manner to the Appendix.
So far for the character of the alterations upon the first edition. The
new matter introduced, whenever it has not been of the nature of a
correction of the old, has been aimed in the direction of making more
clear the _processes_ through which the human mind has gone in the
acquisition of each fresh capacity--more clear the extent to which each
successive phase of pre-historic life has been built upon the preceding
phase--more clear the process by which mankind seems to have gone
through the stages of language-formation, and so forth. This has been
the direction in which the editor has sought to improve upon the earlier
edition: rather than in loading his pages by a greater accumulation of
facts, to make the relationship of the various facts to one another
plainer and more easy to remember; in one word, to appeal to the reason
much more than to the memory.
This is by no means the principle on which a great majority of
_introductions_ and _manuals_ seem to have been written, but upon a
principle almost the reverse of this.
Finally, it has never been lost sight of, that the present volume is
meant to leave the reader, so to say, at the door of history. It is not
designed to be an _anthropology_, or a history of the growth of faculty
among mankind at large, but only a _pre-historic study_, an account of
the ascertainable doings and thoughts on the part of the people who have
gone to make up the historic races of the world. Even the stone-age
civilization is treated, not as a phase of culture in the abstract, but
as an element of the growth in culture of the historic nations of our
planet.
C. F. KEARY.
200, CROMWELL ROAD, S.W.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
The advance of pre-historic study has been during the last ten years
exceptionally rapid; and, considering upon how many subsidiary interests
it touches, questions of politics, of social life, of religion almost,
the science of pre-historic archæology might claim to stand in rivalry
with geology as the favourite child of this century; as much a favourite
of its declining years as geology was of its prime. But as yet, it will
be confessed, we have little popular literature upon the subject, and
that for want of it the general reader is left a good deal in arrear of
the course of discovery. His ideas of nationalities and kindredship
among peoples is, it may be guessed, still hazy. We still hear the
Russians described as Tartars: and the notion that we English are
descendants of the lost Israelitish tribes finds innumerable supporters.
I am told that a society has been formed in London for collecting proofs
of this more than Ovidian metamorphosis. The reason of this public
indifference is very plain. Pre-historic science has not yet passed out
of that early stage when workers are too busy in the various branches
of the subject to spare much time for a comparison of the results of
their labours; when, one may say, fresh contributions are pouring in too
fast to be placed upon their proper shelves in the storehouse of our
knowledge. In such a state of things the reader who is not a specialist
is under peculiar disadvantages for a discovery of what has been done.
He stands bewildered, like the sleeping partner in a firm, to whom no
one--though he is after all the true beneficiary--explains the work
which is passing before his eyes.
It will not be thought a misplaced object to attempt some such
explanation, and that is the object of the following chapters. And as at
some great triumph of mechanism and science--a manufactory, an
observatory, an ironclad,--a junior clerk or a young engineer is told
off to accompany the intelligent visitor and explain the workings of the
machinery; or as, if the simile serve better, in those cities which are
sought for their treasures of art and antiquity, the lower class of the
population become self-constituted into guides to beauties which they
certainly neither helped to create nor keep alive; so this book offers
itself to the interested student as a guide over some parts of the
ground covered by pre-historic inquiry, without advancing pretensions to
stand beside the works of specialists in that field. The peculiar
objects kept in view have been, to put the reader in possession of (1)
the general results up to this time attained, the chief additions which
pre-historic science has made to the sum of our knowledge, even if this
knowledge can be given only in rough outline; (2) the method or
mechanism of the science, the way in which it pieces together its
acquisitions, and argues upon the facts it has ascertained; and (3) to
put this information in a form which might be attractive and suitable to
the general reader.
The various labours of a crowd of specialists are needed to give
completeness to our knowledge of primitive man, and it is scarcely
necessary to say that there are a hundred questions which in such a
short book as this have been left untouched. The intention has been to
present those features which can best be combined to form a continuous
panorama, and also to avoid, as far as possible, the subjects most under
controversy. No apology surely is needed for the _conjoint_ character of
the work: as in every chapter the conclusions of many different and
sometimes contradictory writers had to be examined and compared, and as
these chapters, few as they are, spread over various special fields of
inquiry.
It is to be hoped that some readers to whom pre-historic study is a new
thing may be sufficiently interested in it to desire to continue their
researches. For the assistance of such, lists are given, at the end, of
the chief authorities consulted on the subject of each chapter, with
some notes upon questions of peculiar interest.
The vast extent of the field, the treasures of knowledge which have been
already gathered, and the harvest which is still in the ear, impress
the student more and more the deeper he advances into the study.
Surely, if from some higher sphere, beings of a purely spiritual
nature--nourished, that is, not by material meats and drinks, but by
_ideas_--look down upon the lot of man, they must be before everything
amazed at the complaints of poverty which rise up from every side. When
every stone on which we tread can yield a history, to follow up which is
almost the work of a lifetime; when every word we use is a thread
leading back the mind through centuries of man’s life on earth; it must
be confessed that, for riches of any but a material sort, for a wealth
of ideas, the mind’s nourishment, there ought to be no lack.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN (EDITOR) 1
CHAPTER II.
THE SECOND STONE AGE (EDITOR) 28
CHAPTER III.
THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGE (EDITOR) 55
CHAPTER IV.
FAMILIES OF LANGUAGE (EDITOR) 83
CHAPTER V.
THE NATIONS OF THE OLD WORLD (EDITOR) 113
CHAPTER VI.
EARLY SOCIAL LIFE (H. M. KEARY) 135
CHAPTER VII.
THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY (H. M. KEARY) 156
CHAPTER VIII.
RELIGION (A. KEARY) 171
CHAPTER IX.
ARYAN RELIGIONS (EDITOR) 197
CHAPTER X.
THE OTHER WORLD (EDITOR) 236
CHAPTER XI.
MYTHOLOGIES AND FOLK-TALES (EDITOR) 254
CHAPTER XII.
PICTURE-WRITING (A. KEARY) 280
CHAPTER XIII.
PHONETIC WRITING (A. KEARY) 297
CHAPTER XIV.
CONCLUSION (EDITOR) 313
APPENDIX--_Notes and Authorities_ 329
THE DAWN OF HISTORY.
CHAPTER I.
THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN.
[Sidenote: The dawn of history.]
When St. Paulinus came to preach Christianity to the people of
Northumbria, King Eadwine (so runs the legend) being minded to hear him,
and wishing that his people should do so too, called together a council
of his chief men and asked them whether they would attend to hear what
the saint had to tell; and one of the king’s thanes stood up and said,
‘Let us certainly hear what this man knows, for it seems to me that the
life of man is like the flight of a sparrow through a large room, where
you, King, are sitting at supper in winter, while storms of rain and
snow rage abroad. The sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and
straightway out again at another is, while within, safe from the storm;
but soon it vanishes out of sight into the darkness whence it came. So
the life of man appears for a short space; but of what went before, or
what is to follow, we are all ways ignorant.’[1] This wise and true
saying of the Saxon thane holds good too for the human race as far as
its progress is revealed to us by history. We can watch this progress
through a brief interval--for the period over which real, continuous
authentic history extends; and beyond that is a twilight space, wherein,
amid many fantastic shapes of mere tradition or mythology, here and
there an object or an event stands out more clearly, lit up by a gleam
from the sources of more certain knowledge which we possess.
To draw with as much accuracy as may be the outline of these shapes out
of the past is the business of the prehistoric student; and to assist
him in his task, what has he? First, he has the Bible narrative, wherein
some of the chief events of the world’s history are displayed, but at
uncertain distances apart. Then we have the traditions preserved in
other writings, in books, or on old temple stones--in these the truth
has generally to be cleared from a mist of allegory, or at least of
mythology. And, lastly, besides these conscious records of times gone
by, we have other dumb memorials, old buildings--cities or
temples--whose makers are long since forgotten, old tools or weapons,
buried for thousands of years, to come to light in our days; and again,
old words, old beliefs, old customs, old arts, old forms of civilization
which have been unwittingly handed down to us, can all, if we know the
art to interpret their language, be made to tell us histories of the
antique world. It is, then, no uninteresting study by which we learn how
to make these silent records speak. ‘Of man’s activity and attainment,’
Carlyle finely says, ‘the chief results are aeriform, mystic, and
preserved in tradition only: such are his Forms of Government, with the
Authority they rest on; his Customs or Fashions both of Cloth-habits and
Soul-habits; much more his collective stock of Handicrafts, the whole
Faculty he has acquired of manipulating nature--all these things, as
indispensable and priceless as they are, cannot in any way be fixed
under lock and key, but must flit, spirit-like, on impalpable vehicles
from Father to Son; if you demand sight of them they are nowhere to be
met with. Visible Ploughmen and Hammermen there have been, even from
Cain and Tubalcain downwards; but where does your accumulated
Agricultural, Metallurgic and other Manufacturing SKILL lie warehoused?
It transmits itself on the atmospheric air, on the sun’s rays (by
Hearing and by Vision); it is a thing aeriform, impalpable, of quite
spiritual sort.’
How many of these intangible spiritual possessions must man have
acquired before he has learned the art of writing history, and so of
keeping a record of what had gone before: how much do we know that any
individual race of men has learned before it brings itself forward with
distinctness in this way! For as a first condition of all man must have
learned to write; and writing, as we shall hereafter see, is a slowly
developing art, which man acquired by ages of gradual experiment. His
language, too, must ere this have reached a state of considerable
cultivation; and it will be our object in the course of these pages to
show through what a long history of its own the language of any nation
must go before it becomes fit for the purposes of literature--through
how many changes it passes, and what a story it reveals to us by every
change. And then, again, before a nation can have a history it must _be_
a nation, must have a national life to record; that is to say, the
people who compose it must have left the simple condition of society
which belongs to a primitive age, the state of a mere hunter or fisher,
even the state of being a mere shepherd, the pastoral and nomadic life
which precedes the knowledge of agriculture. He must have drawn closer
the loose bonds which held men together under the conditions of
patriarchal life, and have constituted a more permanent system of
society. Whether under pressure from without, the pressure of hostile
nationalities, or only from the growth of a higher conception of social
life, the nation has had to rise from out of a mere collection of
tribes, until the head of the family has become the king--the rude tents
of early days have grown into houses and temples, and the pens of their
sheepfolds grown into walled cities, such as Corinth or Athens or Rome.
Such changes as these must be completed before history comes to be
written; and with such changes as these, and with a thousand others,
changes and growths in Art, in Poetry, in Manufactures, in Commerce, and
in Laws, the pre-historical student has to deal. On all these subjects
we shall have something to say.
Before, however, we enter upon any one of these it is right that we
remind the reader--and remind him once for all--that our knowledge upon
all these points is but partial and uncertain, and never of such a
character as will allow us to speak with dogmatic assurance. Our
information can necessarily never be direct; it can only be built upon
inferences of a higher or lower degree of probability. It is, however, a
necessity of our minds that from whatever information we possess we must
form an unbroken panorama--imagination has no place for unfilled blanks;
and we may form our picture freely and without danger of harm, so long
as we are ready to modify or enlarge it when more knowledge is
forthcoming. As the eye can in a moment supply the deficiencies of some
incompleted picture, a landscape of which it gets only a partial glance,
or a statue which has lost a feature, so the mind selects from its
knowledge those facts which form a continuous story, and loses those
which are known only as isolated fragments.
Set a practised and an unpractised draughtsman to draw a circle, and we
may witness how differently they go to work. The second never takes his
pencil off the paper, and produces his effect by one continuous line,
which the eye has no choice but at once to condemn as incomplete. The
wiser artist proceeds by a number of short consecutive strokes,
splitting up, as it were, his divergence over the whole length of the
figure he is drawing, and so allows the eye, or perhaps one should
rather say the mind, by that faculty it has, to select the complete
figure which it can conceive more easily than express. No one of the
artist’s strokes is the true fraction of a circle, but the result is
infinitely more satisfactory than if he had tried to make his pencil
follow unswervingly the curve he wished to trace. Or again, notice how a
skilful draughtsman will patch up by a number of small strokes any
imperfect portion of a curve he is drawing, and we have another like
instance of this selective faculty of the eye or of the mind. Just in
the same way is it with memory. Our ideas must be carried on
continuously, we cannot afford to remember _lacunæ_, mere blank spaces.
In the Bible narrative, for example, wherein, as has before been said,
certain events of the world’s history are related with distinctness, but
where as a rule nothing is said of the times which intervened between
them, we are wont to make very insufficient allowance for these
unmentioned periods, and form for ourselves a rather arbitrary picture
of the real course of things, fitting two events on to one another which
were really separated by long ages. To correct this view, to enlarge the
series of known facts concerning the early history of the human race,
comes in pre-historic inquiry; and again, to correct the picture we now
form, doubtless fresh information will continue to pour in. All this is
no reason why we should pronounce our present picture to be untrue; it
is only incomplete. We must be always ready to enlarge it, and to fill
in the outlines, but still we can only remember the facts which we have
already acquired, if we look at them, not as fragments only, but as a
complete whole.
In representing, therefore, throughout the following chapters, the
advance of the human race in the discovery of all those arts and
faculties which go to make up civilization in the light of a continuous
progress, it will not be necessary to pause and remind the reader in
every case that these steps of progress which seem to spread themselves
out so clearly before us have been made in an uncertain manner,
sometimes rapidly, sometimes very slowly and painfully, sometimes by
immense strides, sometimes by continual haltings and goings backwards
and forwards. It will be enough to say here, once for all, that our
history must be thought of as a history of events rather than a strictly
chronological one; just as the geological periods are not measured by
days and years, but by the mutations through which our solid-seeming
earth has passed.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The earliest traces of man.]
First we turn to what must needs be our earliest inquiry--the search
after the oldest traces of man which have been found upon the earth. It
has been said that one of the first fruits of knowledge is to show us
our own ignorance; and certainly in the early history of the world and
of man there is nothing which science points out so clearly as the vast
silent periods whereof until recently we had no idea. It is difficult
for us of the present age to remember how short a time it is since all
our certain knowledge, touching the earth on which we live, lay around
that brief period of its existence during which it had come under the
notice and the care of man.
When all we knew of Europe, and especially of our own islands, belonged
to the comparatively short time during which they have been known to
history, we had in truth much to wonder at in the political changes
these countries were seen to have undergone; and our imaginations could
be busy with the contrast between the unchanged features of our lands
and seas and the ever-varying character of those who dwelt upon or
passed over them. It is interesting to think that on such a river bank
or on such a shore Cæsar or Charlemagne have actually stood, and that
perhaps the grass or flowers or shells under their feet looked just the
same as they do now, that the waves beat upon the strand in the same
cadence, or the water flowed by with the same trickling sound. But when
we open the pages of geology, we have unrolled before us a history of
the earth itself, extending over periods compared with which the longest
epoch of what is commonly called history seems scarcely more than a day,
and of mutations in the face of nature so grand and awful that as we
reflect upon them, forgetting for an instant the enormous periods
required to bring these changes about, they sound like the fantastic
visions of some seer, telling in allegorical language the history of the
creation and destruction of the world.
Of such changes, not the greatest, but the most interesting to the
question we have at present in hand, were those vicissitudes of climate
which followed upon the time when the formation of the crust of the
earth had been practically completed. We learn of a time when, instead
of the temperate climate which now favours our country, these islands,
with the whole of the north of Europe, were wrapped in one impenetrable
sheet of ice. The tops of our mountains, as well as of those of
Scandinavia and the north of continental Europe, bear marks of the
scraping of this enormous glacier, which must have risen to a height of
two or three thousand feet. Not a single green thing, therefore, might
be seen between our latitudes and the pole, while the ice-sheet, passing
along the floor of the North Sea, united these islands with Scandinavia
and spread far out into the deep waters of the Atlantic. For thousands
of years such a state of things endured, but at last it slowly passed
away. As century followed century the glacier began to decrease in size.
From being colder than that of any explored portion of our hemisphere,
the climate of northern Europe began to amend, until at last a little
land became visible, which was covered first with lichens, then with
thicker moss, and then with grass; then shrubs began to grow, and they
expanded into trees and the trees into forests, while still the
ice-sheet went on decreasing, until now the glaciers remained only in
the hills. Animals returned from warmer climates to visit our shores.
The birds and beasts and fishes of the land and sea were not much
different from those which now inhabit there; the species were
different, but the genera were for the most part the same. Everything
seemed to have been preparing for the coming of man, and it is about
this time that we find the earliest traces of his presence upon
earth.[2]
We may try and imagine what was the appearance of the world, and
especially of Europe--for it is in Europe that most of these earliest
traces of our race have as yet been found, though all tradition and
likelihood point out man’s first home to have been in Asia--when we
suppose that man first appeared upon these western shores. At this time
the continent of Europe stood at a higher level than it does now. The
whole of the North Sea, even between Scotland and Denmark, is not more
than fifty fathoms, or three hundred feet deep, while the Irish Sea is
not more than sixty fathoms; and at this period undoubtedly the British
Isles, besides being all joined together, formed part of the mainland,
not by being united to France only, but by the presence of dry land all
the way from Scotland to Denmark, over all that area now called the
German Ocean. Our Thames and our other eastern rivers were then but
tributaries of one large stream, which bore through this continent, and
up into the northern seas, their waters united with those of the Rhine,
and perhaps of the Weser and the Elbe. The same upheaval turned into
land a portion of the Atlantic Ocean, all that bed probably which now
extends from Spain and Africa as far as the Azores and the Canaries. The
north of Africa was joined on to this continent and to Spain, for the
narrow Straits of Gibraltar had not yet been formed; but a great sea
stood where we now have the Great Sahara, and united the Mediterranean
and the Red Sea, while a great Mediterranean Sea stood in Central Asia,
and has left no more than traces in the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Aral.
We have to look at a map to see the effect of these changes in the
appearance of Europe; and there were no doubt other internal changes in
the appearances of the countries themselves. The climate still was much
more extreme than it is now. The glaciers were not yet quite gone. And
the melting of these and of the winter snows gave rise to enormous
rivers which flowed from every hill. Our little river the Ouse, for
instance, which flows out through Norfolk into the Wash, was, when
swollen by these means, probably many miles broad. Vast forests grew
upon the banks of the rivers, and have left their traces in our peat
formations; and in these forests roamed animals unknown to us. Of these
the most notable was the mammoth (_Elephas primigenius_, in the
language of the naturalists), a huge, maned elephant, whose skeleton and
gigantic tusks are conspicuous in some of our museums, and who has given
his name to this the earliest age of man’s existence: it is called the
Mammoth Age of man. With the mammoth, too, lived other species of
animals, which are either now extinct, or have since been driven from
our latitudes; the woolly rhinoceros, the cave lion, the cave bear, the
Lithuanian bison, the urus, the reindeer, and the musk-ox. It is with
the remains of these animals, near the ancient banks of these great
rivers, that we find the earliest tools and weapons manufactured by
human hands.
[Sidenote: Implements of the river drift.]
The earliest of all the known remains of human-kind are the implements
which are found deposited in the ancient beds of rivers. Now flooded by
melting snow into huge lakes and now again drained off by the sudden
bursting of a bound, it was natural that these great streams should
often change their course, and often dig out huge areas of soil from the
land upon their banks. In doing so they sometimes dug out the implements
which earlier generations of men had left behind them on the surface of
the soil, and which a few years would be enough to cover with mould and
hide from sight. Then carrying along these implements of flint, they
have deposited them in great beds of sand and gravel, somewhere in their
ancient course.
We have no means of measuring the time which may have elapsed since
these stone weapons and tools were made. And we need not speak here of
the geological changes which must have passed over the surface of the
earth since they were deposited upon it. All we know is that, after the
great streams flowing through wide valleys have dug these implements
from under the earth which time had heaped over them, carried them
along and deposited them once more amid sand and pebbles in a bed upon
some point of its course, the river must through long subsequent years
have cut so much deeper into the valley through which it flowed, and at
the same time probably so shrunk in its bed, that these river drifts, as
they are called, stand in many cases fifty, eighty, a hundred feet above
the level of the present stream. It is because they are found in the
beds made by the ancient rivers, that the implements of this period are
called _drift implements_.
The river Ouse, of which we spoke just now, which, though to-day a small
river, drains a large and level country as it runs through the counties
of Bedford, Huntingdon, and Cambridge, has been one of the most prolific
in this class of pre-historic remains. Another river which still better
deserves to be remembered in this respect is the Somme in the north of
France. For it was in the beds of this stream, by Abbeville and Amiens,
that the drift implements were first discovered, or first recognized for
what they really are, the earliest traces of human labour; and it was
here that the foundation was laid for this branch of pre-historic study
by M. Boucher de Perthes. This was forty-one years ago, in 1847.
These _drift implements_, then, form a class apart--apart even from all
other stone implements made by man, and probably earlier than any other
class. Very simple and rude are these drift implements. It would require
a skilled eye to detect any difference between most of them and a flint
which had only been chipped by natural means. But the first thing to
remember is, that the makers of these implements had nothing but other
still ruder materials to help them in this manufacture of theirs. Metals
of all kinds were as yet utterly unknown to man.
We who are so habituated to the employment of metal, either in the
manufacture or the composition of every article which meets our eye, can
scarcely realize that man lived long ages on the earth before the metals
and minerals, its hidden treasures, were revealed to him. This pen I
write with is of metal, or, were it a quill, it would still have been
shaped by the use of steel; the rags of which this paper is made up have
been first cut by metal knives, then bleached by a mineral (chlorine),
then torn on a metal cylinder, then thrown into a vat which was either
itself of metal or had been shaped by metal tools, then drawn on a
_wire_-cloth, etc. And so it is with everything which is made nowadays.
We can scarcely think of any single manufacture in which is not
traceable the paramount influence of man’s discoveries beneath the
surface of the ground. But primitive man could profit by no such
inherited knowledge, and had only begun to acquire some powers which he
could transmit to his own descendants. For his tools he must look to the
surface of the earth only; and the hardest substances he could find were
stones. Not only during the period of which we are now speaking, but for
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years lasted man’s ignorance of the
metals, ignorance therefore of all that the metals could produce for
him. The long age of this state of ignorance is distinguished in
pre-history by the name of the Stone Age, because the hardest things
then known to mankind were stones, and the most important of his
implements and utensils had therefore to be made of stones.
There can be no harm if we so far anticipate our second chapter as to
say that this Stone Age is distinguished by pre-historic students into
two main periods: (1) the age in which all the stone implements were
made exclusively by chipping, (2) the age in which grinding or polishing
was brought in to supplement the use of chipping. Wherefore the first
age is also called the Unpolished Stone Age, the second is called the
Polished Stone Age. Not that by any means all the implements in the
later age were made of polished stone; far from it. Only that,
contemporaneously with the stone implements still made by chipping
merely, others of polished stone were used. But of this more hereafter.
Lastly, the two epochs are also distinguished more simply as the Old
Stone Age and the New Stone Age--or, turned into Greek, the Palæolithic
Era and the Neolithic Era.
Now we go back to speak of the Palæolithic Era only. And in this we have
as yet got no further than the implements of the river drifts. It is not
to be supposed that at any time of his history man used implements of
stone and no others; for wood and bone must have been always as ready to
his hand as stone was, and for many purposes bone and wooden utensils
would serve better than stone ones. But the stone implements would
always deserve to be accounted the most important; because by means of
them the others of softer material must have been shaped. As regards the
drift deposits, here the remains of man’s work _are_ exclusively stone
implements, but probably only because all that were made of some softer
substance have perished, or remain as yet undiscovered. And most
primitive these stone tools or weapons are. By the rudeness and
uniformity of their shapes as contrasted even with other classes of
stone implements, they testify to the simplicity of those who
manufactured them. They have for the most part only two or three
distinctive types: they are either of a long, pear-shaped make, narrowed
almost to a point at the thin end, and adapted, we may suppose, for
boring holes, while the broad end of the pear was pressed against the
palm of the hand; and secondly, of a sort of oval form, chipped all
round the edge, capable of being fitted into a wooden haft, a cleft
stick or whatever it might be, to form an implement which might be used
for all sorts of cutting or scraping. A variety of this last implement,
of rather a tongue-like shape, was called by the French workmen who
worked under M. Boucher de Perthes, _langue-de-chat_. These might serve
the purpose of spear-heads. Some have supposed that stones of this last
form were used, as similar ones are used by the Esquimaux to this day,
in cutting holes in the ice for the purpose of fishing: we must not
forget that during at any rate a great part of the early stone age the
conditions of life were those of arctic countries at the present time. A
third variety of stone implements is made of thinner flakes, and capable
of being used as a knife.[3]
We cannot determine all the uses to which primitive man must have put
his rude and ineffective weapons; we can only wonder that with such he
was able to maintain his existence among the savage beasts by which he
was surrounded; and we long to form to ourselves some picture of the way
in which he got the better of their huge strength, as well as of his
dwelling-place, his habits, and his appearance. Rude as his weapons are,
and showing no trace of improvement, it seems as though man of the drift
period must have lived through long ages of the world’s history. These
implements are found associated with the remains of the mammoth and the
woolly rhinoceros, animals naturally belonging to the arctic or
semi-arctic climate which succeeded the glacial era; but like implements
are found, associated with the remains of the bones of the lion, the
tiger, and the hippopotamus, all of which, and the last especially, are
rarely found outside the torrid zone. This would imply that the drift
implements lasted through the change from a rigid to a torrid climate,
and probably back again to a cold temperate one.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Implements of the caves.]
Contemporary very likely with some portion of the drift period are
another series of deposits which contain still more interesting traces
of early man. These are what are called the _cave_ deposits--a
remarkable series of discoveries made in caves in various parts of
Europe which appear to carry us down farther in the history of human
development.
These caves are natural caverns, generally formed in the limestone
rocks, and at present the most remarkable ‘finds’ have been obtained
from the caves of Devonshire, of the Department of the Dordogne in
France, from various caves in Belgium, and from a very remarkable cavern
in the Neanderthal, near Düsseldorf, in Germany. But there is scarcely
any country in Europe where some caves containing human bones and
weapons have not been opened. The rudest drift implements seem older
than almost any of those found in caves; and, on the whole, the
cave-remains seem to give us a picture of man in a more civilized
condition than the man of the drift.
Let us pause for one moment before these cave remains. For, simple as
they are, they open a little bit the veil which hides from us the lives
of the earliest of men. We call the things which we have found
_implements_. For we cannot really tell whether they should be called
tools or weapons. Nay, and this is a thing worth remembering, in the
most primitive conditions of society man’s tools are his weapons and his
weapons are almost his only tools. Man’s first condition of life is the
_venatory_ condition. He is at first a mere hunter (or _trapper_) and
fisherman. He begins without the use of any domestic animal. He has not
even the dog, at first, to help him in his hunting; much less has he
cattle or sheep to vary his occupation in life. With the rest of the
animal creation he is constantly at war. He preys upon other animals,
and other animals, if they can, prey upon him. Wherefore, as I have
said, his earliest tools are likewise his weapons, his weapons are his
tools; and the arts of peace and war are undistinguishable.
The next distinct stage of life is the pastoral stage. Man has now his
domesticated animals; he has cattle and sheep and horses maybe. Tending
his flocks and herds is now his chief occupation. But this tending
implies _protecting_ them and himself. And still, though some of his
implements are for peaceful use--his crooks, his goads, his lassoes, his
bridles, his hurdles and sheep-pens, or, again, his needles for sewing
together the hides which form his clothes--still _most_ are for war.
Yet, if any distinction is possible, his weapons should now be those of
defence rather than those of offence.
The third great stage is the agricultural--a stage of life at which all
civilized nations and many which can hardly be called civilized have
arrived; when man ploughs and sows, and reaps, plants vines and
orchards. Then most of the implements used in these industries, the
implements on which therefore his nourishment depends, are wholly
distinct from the weapons of war, and the peaceful existence has become
(as the phrase is) _differentiated_ from the warlike. This is the token
of a higher civilization.
At present we are far from such a stage of progress in the history of
man. The cave-dwellers were, we may be sure, in the hunting and fishing
stage of civilization; and we cannot really tell, among a large
proportion of their weapons, which were designed to serve against
animals for the purposes of the chase, and which against their
fellow-men. We can hardly distinguish among some of their weapons
whether they were to be used in hunting or fishing. They had stone axes
and spear-heads, and they also had what we may call harpoons. But
harpoons are merely lances attached to a thong, and may be used with
equal success against animals or against the larger fish, salmons or
whales. These harpoons are barbed. They are made of wood and of bone. A
curious and close inquiry has discovered that the bones of animals found
among the human remains in the caves have been scored in such a way as
to suggest that the sinews were cut from them--to be used, no doubt, as
thongs to the harpoons, as lines for fishing, as threads for sewing
garments, etc. The cave men had also barbed hooks--fishing-hooks we may
call them; though they too may sometimes have been employed against
animals or even _birds_. It is most probable that these primitive men
did _not_ know the use of the bow and arrow, and that the name
arrow-heads sometimes given to certain of their weapons is a misnomer;
that they should be called javelin-heads. Bone awls have been found, no
doubt for the sake (chiefly) of piercing the scraped skins of animals,
which might afterwards be sewn together into garments: bone knives,
pins, and _needles_ have also been found--the last a most important form
of implement--in considerable numbers.
What is still more interesting than all these discoveries, we here find
the rudiments of art. Some of the bone implements, as well as some
stones, are engraved, or even rudely sculptured, generally with the
representation of an animal. These drawings are singularly faithful, and
really give us a picture of the animals which were man’s contemporaries
upon the earth; so that we have the most positive proof that man lived
the contemporary of animals long since extinct. The cave of La
Madeleine, in the Dordogne, for instance, contained a piece of a
mammoth’s tusk engraved with an outline of that animal; and as the
mammoth was probably not contemporaneous with man during the latter part
even of the old-stone age, this gives an immense antiquity to the first
dawnings of art. How little could the scratcher of this rough
sketch--for it is not equal in skill to drawings which have been found
in other caves--dream of the interest which his performance would excite
thousands of years after his death! Not the greatest painter of
subsequent times, and scarcely the greatest sculptor, can hope for so
near an approach to immortality for their works. Had man’s bones been
only found in juxtaposition with those of the mammoth and his
contemporary animals, this might possibly have been attributed to chance
disturbances of the soil, to the accumulation of river deposits, or to
many other accidental occurrences; or had the mammoth’s bone only been
found worked by man, there was nothing positive to show that the animal
had not been long since extinct, and this a chance bone which had come
into the hands of a later inhabitant of the earth, just as it has since
come into our hands; but the actual drawing of this old-world, and as it
sometimes seems to us almost fabulous, animal, by one who actually saw
him in real life, gives a strange picture of the antiquity of our race,
and withal a strange feeling of fellowship with this stone-age man who
drew so much in the same way as a clever child among us might have drawn
to-day.[4]
It is worth while to look well at these cave-drawings. They are of
various degrees of merit, for some are so skilful as to excite the
admiration of artists and the astonishment of archæologists. And it is a
curious fact that during ages which succeeded those of the
cave-dwellers, all through the polished stone period and the age of
bronze--of which we shall have to speak anon--no such ambitious
imitative works of art seem to have been attempted. So far as we can
tell, these after generations of men aimed at no such thing as a drawing
of an animal or even of a plant. They confined themselves to ornamental
_patterns_, to certain arrangements of points and lines. The love of
imitation is doubtless one of the rudimentary feelings in the human
mind; as we may see by watching children. But, rudimentary as it is, it
springs from the same root as the highest promptings of the
intellect--that is to say, from the wish to _create_--to fashion
something actually ourselves. This is sufficient to explain the origin
of these carvings; yet we need not suppose that when the art of making
them was once known they were used merely for amusement. Long afterwards
we find such drawings and representations looked upon as having some
qualities of the things they represent; as, for instance, where in an
ancient grave at Mæshow, in the Orkney islands, we find the drawing of a
dragon, which had been supposed to watch over the treasures concealed
therein. Savages in the present day often think that part of them is
actually taken away when a drawing of them is made, and exactly a
similar feeling gave rise to the superstition so prevalent in the Middle
Ages, that witches and magicians could make a figure in wax to imitate
the one on whom they wished to wreak their vengeance, and that all the
pains inflicted upon this waxen antitype were reproduced in the body of
the victim. On such confusion of ideas do all idolatries rest. So may we
not, without too bold a flight, imagine that some superstitious notions,
touching the efficacy of these drawings, was a spur to the industry of
our first forerunners on the earth, and contributed to their wonderfully
acquired skill in their art? May they not have thought that their
representations gave them some power over the animals they represented:
that the lance-head carved with a mammoth would be efficient against the
mammoth’s hide; that the harpoon containing the representation of a deer
or a fish was the weapon best adapted for transfixing either?[5]
However this may be, we cannot close our eyes to the interest which
attaches to the first dawnings of art in the world. Nor is this interest
confined altogether to its æsthetic side--the mere beauty and value of
art itself--great though this be. Not only does drawing share that
mysterious power of imparting intense pleasure which belongs to every
form of art, but it was likewise, after human speech, the first
discovered means of conveying an idea from one man to another. As we
shall come to see in a later chapter, the invention of drawing bore with
it the seeds of the invention of writing, the greatest step forward, in
material things at any rate, that man has ever made.
There is one other fact to be mentioned, and then the information which
our cave discoveries can give us concerning the life of man in those
days is pretty nearly exhausted. Traces of fires have been found in
several caves, so that there can be no doubt that man had made this
important discovery, the discovery of fire, also. It seems to us
impossible to imagine a time when men could have lived upon the earth
without this all-useful element, when they must have devoured their food
uncooked, and only sheltered themselves from the cold by the thickness
of their clothing, or at night by huddling together in close underground
houses. We have certainly no proof that man’s existence was ever of such
a sort as this; but yet it is clear that the art of making fires is one
not discoverable at first sight. How long man took to find out that
method of ignition by friction of two sticks--the method employed in
different forms by all the less cultivated nations spread over the
globe, and one which we may therefore fairly take to be the most
primitive and natural--we shall never know. We have only the negative
evidence that he had discovered it at that primæval time when he began
to leave his remains within the caves.
Thus have we completed the catalogue of facts upon which we may build up
for ourselves some representation of the life of man in the earliest
ages of his existence upon earth. It must be confessed that they are
meagre enough. We should like some further facts which would help us to
picture the man himself, his size, his appearance, what race he most
resembled of any of those which now inhabit our globe. Unfortunately we
have little that can assist us here. Human remains have been found--on
one or two occasions a skeleton in tolerably complete preservation--but
not yet in sufficient numbers to allow us to draw any certain
conclusions from them, or even to hazard any very probable conjecture.
[Sidenote: Human remains.]
Among these discoveries of human skeletons, none excited more interest
at the time it was made than the Neanderthal skeleton, so-called from
the place in which it was found. The discovery was made in 1857 by Dr.
Fuhlrott of Elberfeld; and when the skull and other parts of the
skeleton were exhibited at a scientific meeting at Bonn, in the same
year, doubts were expressed as to the human character of the remains.
These doubts, which were soon dissipated, arose from the very low type
of the head, which was pronounced by many to be the most ape-like skull
that they had ever seen. The bones themselves indicated a person of much
the same stature as a European of the present day, but with such an
unusual thickness in some of them as betokened a being of very
extraordinary strength. This discovery, had it been supported by others,
might have seemed to indicate a race of men of a type inferior even to
the most savage races of our present globe. But it has not been so
supported. On the contrary, another skull found at Engis, near Liége,
not more than seventy miles from the cave of the Neanderthal, was proved
after careful measurements not to differ materially from the skulls of
individuals of the European race--a fact which prevents us from making
any assertions respecting the primitive character in race or physical
conformation of these cave-dwellers. Indeed, in a very careful and
elaborate paper upon the Engis and Neanderthal skulls, Professor Huxley
places an average skull of a modern native of Australia about half-way
between those of the Neanderthal and Engis caves; but he also says that
after going through a large collection of Australian skulls, he ‘found
it possible to select from among these crania two (connected by all
sorts of intermediate gradations), the one of which should very nearly
resemble the Engis skull, while the other should somewhat less closely
approximate to the Neanderthal skull in form, size, and proportions.’
And yet as regards blood, customs, or language, the natives of Southern
and Western Australia are as pure and homogeneous as almost any race of
savages in existence. This shows us how difficult would have been any
reasoning founded upon the insufficient data we possess. In fact, it
would no doubt be possible to find in Europe among persons of abnormal
under-development, such as idiots, skulls of a formation which would
match that of the Neanderthal.
This class of evidence is therefore merely negative. We certainly cannot
pronounce that man of the old stone age was of a lower type than low
types of savages of the present day; we cannot even say that he was as
undeveloped as are the Lapps of modern Europe; but in this negative
evidence there is a certain amount of satisfaction. We might be not
unwilling to place on the level of the Eskimo or the Lapp the fashioners
of the rudest of the stone implements, but the _artists_ of the caves we
may well imagine to have attained a higher development. And there is
nothing at all unreasonable or opposed to our experience of Nature in
supposing a race of human beings to have flourished in Europe in these
old times, to have been possessed of a certain amount of civilization,
but not to have advanced from that towards any very great improvement
before they were at last extinguished by some other race with a greater
faculty for progress. As we shall come to see later on, there is some
reason for connecting man of the later stone age as regards race with
the Eskimo or Lapp of to-day. Yet even if this be admitted, we must look
upon the latter rather as the dregs of the races they represent. It is
not always the highest types of any particular race, whether of men, of
animals, or of plants, which live the longest. Species which were once
flourishing are often only represented by stunted and inferior
descendants; just as the animals of the lizard class once upon a time,
and long before the coming of man upon the earth, had their age of
greatest development and reached proportions which are unknown in these
days.
So we may imagine man spreading out at various times and in many
different streams from his first home in Asia. The earlier races to
leave this nursing-place did not, we may suppose, contain sufficient
force to carry them beyond a low level of culture; very likely they sank
in civilization and in the end got pushed on one side by more energetic
people who came like a second wave from the common source. When, in the
history of the world, we come to speak of races of whom we know more, we
shall see strong reasons to believe that this was the rule followed;
nay, it is even followed at the present day, where European races are
spreading over all the world, and gradually absorbing or extinguishing
inferior members of the human family. We must, therefore, in our present
state of ignorance, be content to look upon palæolithic man merely as we
find him, and not to advance vague surmises whether he gradually
advanced to the use of better stone weapons, and at last to metals, or
whether he was extinguished by subsequent races who did thus advance.
[Sidenote: The life of palæolithic man.]
Taking, then, this race as we find it, without speculating upon its
immediate origin or future, we may endeavour to gather some notion of
man’s way of life in these primitive times. It was of the simplest. We
may well suppose, for some proofs to the contrary would otherwise most
likely have been discovered, that his life was that of the hunter, which
is, it has been said, generally the earliest phase of human society, and
that he had not yet learned to till the ground, or to keep domestic
animals for his use. No bones of animals like the sheep or dog are found
among palæolithic remains, and therefore it seems probable that
palæolithic man had not yet entered upon the next and higher phase, the
pastoral life. He had probably no fixed home, no idea of nationality,
scarcely any of obligations beyond the circle of his own family, in
that larger sense in which the word ‘family’ is generally understood by
savages. Some sort of family or tribe no doubt held together, were it
only for the sake of protecting themselves against the attacks of their
neighbours. For the rest, their time was spent, as the time of other
savages is spent, out of doors in fighting and hunting, within doors in
preserving their food and their skins, in elaborately manufacturing
their implements of stone and bone. In the inclement seasons they were
crowded together in their caves, perhaps for months together, as the
Eskimo are in winter, almost without moving. As appears from the remains
in the caves, they were in the habit at such times of throwing the old
bones and the offal of their food into any corner (the Eskimo do so to
this day), without taking the smallest trouble to obviate the unpleasant
effects produced by the decay of all this animal matter in an atmosphere
naturally close. Through the long winter nights they found time to
perfect their skill in those wonderful bone carvings, and to lay up a
store of weapons which they afterwards--anticipating the rise of
commerce--exchanged with the inhabitants of some other cave for _their_
peculiar manufacture; for in one of the caves of the Dordogne we find
the remains of what must have been a regular manufactory of one sort of
flint-knife or lance-head, almost to the exclusion of any other of the
ordinary weapons, while another cave seems to have been devoted as
exclusively to the production of implements of bone.
Man had no doubt a hard life, not only to obtain the food he needed, but
to defend himself against the attacks of many wild animals by whom he
was surrounded, animals whose particular species have in many cases
become extinct, and whose classes have long ceased to inhabit Europe.
Such are the cave lion, cave bear, cave hyæna, brown bear, grizzly bear,
mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, urus, bison, and such rarities (with us) as
the reindeer, the Irish elk, and the beaver.
Some people have thought that they discovered in the traces of fires
which had been sometimes lighted before caves in which were found human
skeletons, the indication of sepulchral rites, and that these caves were
used as burial-places. But these suppositions are too vague and
uncertain to be relied upon. It may, however, be said that we have
evidence pointing to the fact that even in the drift period men buried
their dead, and it is hardly possible to believe that they did so
without paying some obsequies to the remains. On this interesting
subject of sepulchral rites we must forbear to say anything until we
come to speak of the second stone age. Our knowledge of the early
stone-people must close with the slight picture we have been able to
form of their life; of their death, of their rites of the dead, and the
ideas concerning a future state which these might indicate, we cannot
speak.
This, then, is all we know of man of the first stone age, and it is not
probable that our knowledge will ever be greatly increased. New finds of
these stone implements are being made almost every day, not in Europe
only, though at present chiefly there, but in many other parts of the
globe. But the new discoveries closely resemble the old, the same sort
of implements recur again and again, and we only learn by them over how
great a part of the globe this stage in our civilization extended.
Further information of this kind may change some of our theories
concerning the duration or the origin of this civilization, but it will
not add much to our knowledge of its nature. Yet it cannot be denied
that the thought of man’s existence only, though we know little more
than this, a contemporary of the mammoth at the time which immediately
succeeded the glacial period, or perhaps before the glacial period had
quite come to an end, is full of the deepest interest for us. The long
silent time which intervenes between the creation of our first parents
and those biblical events whereof the narration is to a certain extent
continuous and consecutive, till the dawn of history in the Bible
narrative in fact, is to some small extent filled in. We shall see in
the next chapter how the second stone age serves to carry the same
picture further. In rudest outline the life of man is placed before us,
and if we have no more than this, we have at any rate _something_ which
may occupy our imaginations, and prevent them, as they otherwise would
do, as, of old, men’s minds did, from leaping almost at a bound from the
Creation to the Flood, and from the Flood to the time of Abraham.