ANTIQUITY OF MAN
History, in the narrower sense of the word, depends on written records.
As we follow back history to the point at which our written records
grow hazy, and the immediate ancestors or predecessors of the peoples
who appear in history are disclosed in legend that needs much eking
out by the help of the spade, we pass into proto-history. At the back
of that, again, beyond the point at which written records are of any
avail at all, comes pre-history.
How, then, you may well inquire, does the pre-historian get to work?
What is his method of linking facts together? And what are the sources
of his information?
First, as to his method. Suppose a number of boys are in a field playing
football, whose superfluous garments are lying about everywhere in
heaps; and suppose you want, for some reason, to find out in what order
the boys arrived on the ground. How would you set about the business?
Surely you would go to one of the heaps of discarded clothes, and take
note of the fact that this boy's jacket lay under that boy's waistcoat.
Moving on to other heaps you might discover that in some cases a boy
had thrown down his hat on one heap, his tie on another, and so on.
This would help you all the more to make out the general series of
arrivals. Yes, but what if some of the heaps showed signs of having
been upset? Well, you must make allowances for these disturbances in
your calculations. Of course, if some one had deliberately made hay
with the lot, you would be nonplussed. The chances are, however, that,
given enough heaps of clothes, and bar intentional and systematic
wrecking of them, you would be able to make out pretty well which boy
preceded which; though you could hardly go on to say with any precision
whether Tom preceded Dick by half a minute or half an hour.
Such is the method of pre-history. It is called the stratigraphical
method, because it is based on the description of strata, or layers.
Let me give a simple example of how strata tell their own tale. It
is no very remarkable instance, but happens to be one that I have
examined for myself. They were digging out a place for a gas-holder
in a meadow in the town of St. Helier, Jersey, and carried their borings
down to bed rock at about thirty feet, which roughly coincides with
the present mean sea-level. The modern meadow-soil went down about
five feet. Then came a bed of moss-peat, one to three feet thick. There
had been a bog here at a time which, to judge by similar finds in other
places, was just before the beginning of the bronze-age. Underneath
the moss-peat came two or three feet of silt with sea-shells in it.
Clearly the island of Jersey underwent in those days some sort of
submergence. Below this stratum came a great peat-bed, five to seven
feet thick, with large tree-trunks in it, the remains of a fine forest
that must have needed more or less elevated land on which to grow.
In the peat was a weapon of polished stone, and at the bottom were
two pieces of pottery, one of them decorated with little pitted marks.
These fragments of evidence are enough to show that the foresters
belonged to the early neolithic period, as it is called. Next occurred
about four feet of silt with sea-shells, marking another advance of
the sea. Below that, again, was a mass, six to eight feet deep, of
the characteristic yellow clay with far-carried fragments of rock in
it that is associated with the great floods of the ice-age. The land
must have been above the reach of the tide for the glacial drift to
settle on it. Finally, three or four feet of blue clay resting
immediately on bed-rock were such as might be produced by the sea,
and thus probably betokened its presence at this level in the still
remoter past.
Here the strata are mostly geological. Man only comes in at one point.
I might have taken a far more striking case--the best I know--from
St. Acheul, a suburb of Amiens in the north of France. Here M. Commont
found human implements of distinct types in about eight out of eleven
or twelve successive geological layers. But the story would take too
long to tell. However, it is well to start with an example that is
primarily geological. For it is the geologist who provides the
pre-historic chronometer. Pre-historians have to reckon in geological
time--that is to say, not in years, but in ages of indefinite extent
corresponding to marked changes in the condition of the earth's surface.
It takes the plain man a long time to find out that it is no use asking
the pre-historian, who is proudly displaying a skull or a stone
implement, "Please, how many years ago exactly did its owner live?"
I remember hearing such a question put to the great savant, M.
Cartailhac, when he was lecturing upon the pre-historic drawings found
in the French and Spanish caves; and he replied, "Perhaps not less
than 6,000 years ago and not more than 250,000." The backbone of our
present system of determining the series of pre-historic epochs is
the geological theory of an ice-age comprising a succession of periods
of extreme glaciation punctuated by milder intervals. It is for the
geologists to settle in their own way, unless, indeed, the astronomers
can help them, why there should have been an ice-age at all; what was
the number, extent, and relative duration of its ups and downs; and
at what time, roughly, it ceased in favour of the temperate conditions
that we now enjoy. The pre-historians, for their part, must be content
to make what traces they discover of early man fit in with this
pre-established scheme, uncertain as it is. Every day, however, more
agreement is being reached both amongst themselves and between them
and the geologists; so that one day, I am confident, if not exactly
to-morrow, we shall know with fair accuracy how the boys, who left
their clothes lying about, followed one another into the field.
Sometimes, however, geology does not, on the face of it, come into
the reckoning. Thus I might have asked the reader to assist at the
digging out of a cave, say, one of the famous caves at Mentone, on
the Italian Riviera, just beyond the south-eastern corner of France.
These caves were inhabited by man during an immense stretch of time,
and, as you dig down, you light upon one layer after another of his
leavings. But note in such a case as this how easily you may be baffled
by some one having upset the heap of clothes, or, in a word, by
rearrangement. Thus the man whose leavings ought to form the layer
half-way up may have seen fit to dig a deep hole in the cave-floor
in order to bury a deceased friend, and with him, let us suppose, to
bury also an assortment of articles likely to be useful in the life
beyond the grave. Consequently an implement of one age will be found
lying cheek by jowl with the implement of a much earlier age, or even,
it may be, some feet below it. Thereupon the pre-historian must fall
back on the general run, or type, in assigning the different implements
each to its own stratum. Luckily, in the old days fashions tended to
be rigid; so that for the pre-historian two flints with slightly
different chipping may stand for separate ages of culture as clearly
as do a Greek vase and a German beer-mug for the student of more recent
times.
* * * * *
Enough concerning the stratigraphical method. A word, in the next place,
about the pre-historian's main sources of information. Apart from
geological facts, there are three main classes of evidence that serve
to distinguish one pre-historic epoch from another. These are animal
bones, human bones, and human handiwork.
Again I illustrate by means of a case of which I happen to have
first-hand knowledge. In Jersey, near the bay of St. Brelade, is a
cave, in which we dug down through some twenty feet of accumulated
clay and rock-rubbish, presumably the effects of the last throes of
the ice-age, and came upon a pre-historic hearth. There were the big
stones that had propped up the fire, and there were the ashes. By the
side were the remains of a heap of food-refuse. The pieces of decayed
bone were not much to look at; yet, submitted to an expert, they did
a tale unfold. He showed them to be the remains of the woolly rhinoceros,
the mammoth's even more unwieldy comrade, of the reindeer, of two kinds
of horse, one of them the pony-like wild horse still to be found in
the Mongolian deserts, of the wild ox, and of the deer. Truly there
was better hunting to be got in Jersey in the days when it formed part
of a frozen continent.
Next, the food-heap yields thirteen of somebody's teeth. Had they eaten
him? It boots not to inquire; though, as the owner was aged between
twenty and thirty, the teeth could hardly have fallen out of their
own accord. Such grinders as they are too! A second expert declares
that the roots beat all records. They are of the kind that goes with
an immensely powerful jaw, needing a massive brow-ridge to counteract
the strain of the bite, and in general involving the type of skull
known as the Neanderthal, big-brained enough in its way, but uncommonly
ape-like all the same.
Finally, the banqueters have left plenty of their knives lying about.
These good folk had their special and regular way of striking off a
broad flat flake from the flint core; the cores are lying about, too,
and with luck you can restore some of the flakes to their original
position. Then, leaving one side of the flake untouched, they trimmed
the surface of the remaining face, and, as the edges grew blunt with
use, kept touching them up with the hammer-stone--there it is also
lying by the hearth--until, perhaps, the flake loses its oval shape
and becomes a pointed triangle. A third expert is called in, and has
no difficulty in recognizing these knives as the characteristic
handiwork of the epoch known as the Mousterian. If one of these worked
flints from Jersey was placed side by side with another from the cave
of Le Moustier, near the right bank of the Vezere in south-central
France, whence the term Mousterian, you could hardly tell which was
which; whilst you would still see the same family likeness if you
compared the Jersey specimens with some from Amiens, or from Northfleet
on the Thames, or from Icklingham in Suffolk.
Putting all these kinds of evidence together, then, we get a notion,
doubtless rather meagre, but as far as it goes well-grounded, of a
hunter of the ice-age, who was able to get the better of a woolly
rhinoceros, could cook a lusty steak off him, had a sharp knife to
carve it, and the teeth to chew it, and generally knew how, under the
very chilly circumstances, both to make himself comfortable and to
keep his race going.
There is one other class of evidence on which the pre-historian may
with due caution draw, though the risks are certain and the profits
uncertain. The ruder peoples of to-day are living a life that in its
broad features cannot be wholly unlike the life of the men of long
ago. Thus the pre-historian should study Spencer and Gillen on the
natives of Central Australia, if only that he may take firm hold of
the fact that people with skulls inclining towards the Neanderthal
type, and using stone knives, may nevertheless have very active minds;
in short, that a rich enough life in its way may leave behind it a
poor rubbish-heap. When it comes, however, to the borrowing of details,
to patch up the holes in the pre-historic record with modern rags and
tatters makes better literature than science. After all, the
Australians, or Tasmanians, or Bushmen, or Eskimo, of whom so much
is beginning to be heard amongst pre-historians, are our
contemporaries--that is to say, have just as long an ancestry as
ourselves; and in the course of the last 100,000 years or so our stock
has seen so many changes, that their stocks may possibly have seen
a few also. Yet the real remedy, I take it, against the misuse of analogy
is that the student should make himself sufficiently at home in both
branches of anthropology to know each of the two things he compares
for what it truly is.
* * * * *
Having glanced at method and sources, I pass on to results. Some
text-book must be consulted for the long list of pre-historic periods
required for western Europe, not to mention the further complications
caused by bringing in the remaining portions of the world. The
stone-age, with its three great divisions, the eolithic (_eos_, Greek
for dawn, and _lithos_, stone) the palaeolithic (_pallaeos_, old),
and the neolithic (_neos_, new), and their numerous subdivisions,
comes first; then the age of copper and bronze; and then the early
iron-age, which is about the limit of proto-history. Here I shall
confine my remarks to Europe. I am not going far afield into such
questions as: Who were the mound-builders of North America? And are
the Calaveras skull and other remains found in the gold-bearing gravels
of California to be reckoned amongst the earliest traces of man in
the globe? Nor, again, must I pause to speculate whether the
dark-stained lustrous flint implements discovered by Mr. Henry Balfour
at a high level below the Victoria Falls, and possibly deposited there
by the river Zambezi before it had carved the present gorge in the
solid basalt, prove that likewise in South Africa man was alive and
busy untold thousands of years ago. Also, I shall here confine myself
to the stone-age, because my object is chiefly to illustrate the long
pedigree of the species from which we are all sprung.
The antiquity of man being my immediate theme, I can hardly avoid saying
something about eoliths; though the subject is one that invariably
sets pre-historians at each other's throats. There are eoliths and
eoliths, however; and some of M. Rutot's Belgian examples are
now-a-days almost reckoned respectable. Let us, nevertheless, inquire
whether eoliths are not to be found nearer home. I can wish the reader
no more delightful experience than to run down to Ightham in Kent,
and pay a call on Mr. Benjamin Harrison. In the room above what used
to be Mr. Harrison's grocery-store, eoliths beyond all count are on
view, which he has managed to amass in his rare moments of leisure.
As he lovingly cons the stones over, and shows off their points, his
enthusiasm is likely to prove catching. But the visitor, we shall
suppose, is sceptical. Very good; it is not far, though a stiffish
pull, to Ash on the top of the North Downs. Hereabouts are Mr.
Harrison's hunting-grounds. Over these stony tracts he has conducted
Sir Joseph Prestwich and Sir John Evans, to convince the one authority,
but not the other. Mark this pebbly drift of rusty-red colour spread
irregularly along the fields, as if the relics of some ancient stream
or flood. On the surface, if you are lucky, you may pick up an
unquestionable palaeolith of early type, with the rusty-red stain of
the gravel over it to show that it has lain there for ages. But both
on and below the surface, the gravel being perhaps from five to seven
feet deep, another type of stone occurs, the so-called eolith. It is
picked out from amongst ordinary stones partly because of its shape,
and partly because of rough and much-worn chippings that suggest the
hand of art or of nature, according to your turn of mind. Take one
by itself, explains Mr. Harrison, and you will be sure to rank it as
ordinary road-metal. But take a series together, and then, he urges,
the sight of the same forms over and over again will persuade you in
the end that human design, not aimless chance, has been at work here.
Well, I must leave Mr. Harrison to convert you into the friend or foe
of his eoliths, and will merely add a word in regard to the probable
age of these eolith-bearing gravels. Sir Joseph Prestwich has tried
to work the problem out. Now-a-days Kent and Sussex run eastwards in
five more or less parallel ridges, not far short of 1,000 feet high,
with deep valleys between. Formerly, however, no such valleys existed,
and a great dome of chalk, some 2,500 feet high at its crown, perhaps,
though others would say less, covered the whole country. That is why
rivers like the Darenth and Medway cut clean through the North Downs
and fall into the Thames, instead of flowing eastwards down the later
valleys. They started to carve their channels in the soft chalk in
the days gone by, when the watershed went north and south down the
slopes of the great dome. And the red gravels with the eoliths in them,
concludes Prestwich, must have come down the north slope whilst the
dome was still intact; for they contain fragments of stone that hail
from right across the present valleys. But, if the eoliths are man-made,
then man presumably killed game and cut it up on top of the Wealden
dome, how many years ago one trembles to think.
* * * * *
Let us next proceed to the subject of palaeoliths. There is, at any
rate, no doubt about them. Yet, rather more than half a century ago,
when the Abbe Boucher de Perthes found palaeoliths in the gravels of
the Somme at Abbeville, and was the first to recognize them for what
they are, there was no small scandal. Now-a-days, however, the world
takes it as a matter of course that those lumpish, discoloured, and
much-rolled stones, shaped something like a pear, which come from the
high terraces deposited by the Ancient Thames, were once upon a time
the weapons or tools of somebody who had plenty of muscle in his arm.
Plenty of skill he had in his fingers, too; for to chip a flint-pebble
along both faces, till it takes a more or less symmetrical and standard
shape, is not so easy as it sounds. Hammer away yourself at such a
pebble, and see what a mess you make of it. To go back for one moment
to the subject of eoliths, we may fairly argue that experimental forms
still ruder than the much-trimmed palaeoliths of the early river-drift
must exist somewhere, whether Mr. Harrison's eoliths are to be classed
amongst them or not. Indeed, the Tasmanians of modern days carved their
simple tools so roughly, that any one ignorant of their history might
easily mistake the greater number for common pieces of stone. On the
other hand, as we move on from the earlier to the later types of
river-drift implements, we note how by degrees practice makes perfect.
The forms grow ever more regular and refined, up to the point of time
which has been chosen as the limit for the first of the three main
stages into which the vast palaeolithic epoch has to be broken up.
The man of the late St. Acheul period, as it is termed, was truly a
great artist in his way. If you stare vacantly at his handiwork in
a museum, you are likely to remain cold to its charm. But probe about
in a gravel-bed till you have the good fortune to light on a
masterpiece; tenderly smooth away with your fingers the dirt sticking
to its surface, and bring to view the tapering or oval outline, the
straight edge, the even and delicate chipping over both faces; then,
wrapping it carefully in your handkerchief, take it home to wash, and
feast till bedtime on the clean feel and shining mellow colour of what
is hardly more an implement than a gem. They took a pride in their
work, did the men of old; and, until you can learn to sympathize, you
are no anthropologist.
During the succeeding main stage of the palaeolithic epoch there was
a decided set-back in the culture, as judged by the quality of the
workmanship in flint. Those were the days of the Mousterians who dined
off woolly rhinoceros in Jersey. Their stone implements, worked only
on one face, are poor things by comparison with those of late St. Acheul
days, though for a time degenerated forms of the latter seem to have
remained in use. What had happened? We can only guess. Probably
something to do with the climate was at the bottom of this change for
the worse. Thus M. Rutot believes that during the ice-age each big
freeze was followed by an equally big flood, preceding each fresh
return of milder weather. One of these floods, he thinks, must have
drowned out the neat-fingered race of St. Acheul, and left the coast
clear for the Mousterians with their coarser type of culture. Perhaps
they were coarser in their physical type as well.[1]
[Footnote 1: Theirs was certainly the rather ape-like Neanderthal
build. If, however, the skull found at Galley Hill, near Northfleet
in Kent, amongst the gravels laid down by the Thames when it was about
ninety feet above its present level, is of early palaeolithic date,
as some good authorities believe, there was a kind of man away back
in the drift-period who had a fairly high forehead and moderate
brow-ridges, and in general was a less brutal specimen of humanity
than our Mousterian friend of the large grinders.]
To the credit of the Mousterians, however, must be set down the fact
that they are associated with the habit of living in caves, and perhaps
may even have started it; though some implements of the drift type
occur in Le Moustier itself, as well as in other caves, such as the
famous Kent's Cavern near Torquay. Climate, once more, has very
possibly to answer for having thus driven man underground. Anyway,
whether because they must, or because they liked it, the Mousterians
went on with their cave life during an immense space of time, making
little progress; unless it were to learn gradually how to sharpen bones
into implements. But caves and bones alike were to play a far more
striking part in the days immediately to follow.
The third and last main stage of the palaeolithic epoch developed by
degrees into a golden age of art. But I cannot dwell on all its glories.
I must pass by the beautiful work in flint; such as the thin blades
of laurel-leaf pattern, fairly common in France but rare in England,
belonging to the stage or type of culture known as the Solutrian (from
Solutre in the department of Saone-et-Loire). I must also pass by the
exquisite French examples of the carvings or engravings of bone and
ivory; a single engraving of a horse's head, from the cave at Creswell
Crags in Derbyshire, being all that England has to offer in this line.
Any good museum can show you specimens or models of these delightful
objects; whereas the things about which I am going to speak must remain
hidden away for ever where their makers left them--I mean the paintings
and engravings on the walls of the French and Spanish caves.
I invite you to accompany me in the spirit first of all to the cave
of Gargas near Aventiron, under the shadow of the Pic du Midi in the
High Pyrenees. Half-way up a hill, in the midst of a wilderness of
rocky fragments, the relics of the ice-age, is a smallish hole, down
which we clamber into a spacious but low-roofed grotto, stretching
back five hundred feet or so into infinite darkness. Hard by the mouth,
where the light of day freely enters, are the remains of a hearth,
with bone-refuse and discarded implements mingling with the ashes to
a considerable depth. A glance at these implements, for instance the
small flint scraper with narrow high back and perpendicular chipping
along the sides, is enough to show that the men who once warmed their
fingers here were of the so-called Aurignacian type (Aurignac in the
department of Haute Garonne, in southern France), that is to say, lived
somewhere about the dawn of the third stage of the palaeolithic epoch.
Directly after their disappearance nature would seem to have sealed
up the cave again until our time, so that we can study them here all
by themselves.
Now let us take our lamps and explore the secrets of the interior.
The icy torrents that hollowed it in the limestone have eaten away
rounded alcoves along the sides. On the white surface of these, glazed
over with a preserving film of stalactite, we at once notice the
outlines of many hands. Most of them left hands, showing that the
Aurignacians tended to be right-handed, like ourselves, and dusted
on the paint, black manganese or red ochre, between the outspread
fingers in just way that we, too, would find convenient. Curiously
enough, this practice of stencilling hands upon the walls of caves
is in vogue amongst the Australian natives; though unfortunately, they
keep the reason, if there is any deeper one than mere amusement,
strictly to themselves. Like the Australians, again, and other rude
peoples, these Aurignacians would appear to have been given to lopping
off an occasional finger--from some religious motive, we may guess--to
judge from the mutilated look of a good many of the handprints.
The use of paint is here limited to this class of wall-decoration.
But a sharp flint makes an excellent graving tool; and the Aurignacian
hunter is bent on reproducing by this means the forms of those
game-animals about which he doubtless dreams night and day. His efforts
in this direction, however, rather remind us of those of our
infant-schools. Look at this bison. His snout is drawn sideways, but
the horns branch out right and left as if in a full-face view. Again,
our friend scamps details such as the legs. Sheer want of skill, we
may suspect, leads him to construct what is more like the symbol of
something thought than the portrait of something seen. And so we wander
farther and farther into the gloomy depths, adding ever new specimens
to our pre-historic menagerie, including the rare find of a bird that
looks uncommonly like the penguin. Mind, by the way, that you do not
fall into that round hole in the floor. It is enormously deep; and
more than forty cave-bears have left their skeletons at the bottom,
amongst which your skeleton would be a little out of place.
Next day let us move off eastwards to the Little Pyrenees to see another
cave, Niaux, high up in a valley scarred nearly up to the top by former
glaciers. This cave is about a mile deep; and it will take you half
a mile of awkward groping amongst boulders and stalactites, not to
mention a choke in one part of the passage such as must puzzle a fat
man, before the cavern becomes spacious, and you find yourself in the
vast underground cathedral that pre-historic man has chosen for his
picture-gallery. This was a later stock, that had in the meantime
learnt how to draw to perfection. Consider the bold black and white
of that portrait of a wild pony, with flowing mane and tail, glossy
barrel, and jolly snub-nosed face. It is four or five feet across,
and not an inch of the work is out of scale. The same is true of nearly
every one of the other fifty or more figures of game-animals. These
artists could paint what they saw.
Yet they could paint up on the walls what they thought, too. There
are likewise whole screeds of symbols waiting, perhaps waiting for
ever, to be interpreted. The dots and lines and pothooks clearly belong
to a system of picture-writing. Can we make out their meaning at all?
Once in a way, perhaps. Note these marks looking like two different
kinds of throwing-club; at any rate, there are Australian weapons not
unlike them. To the left of them are a lot of dots in what look like
patterns, amongst which we get twice over the scheme of one dot in
the centre of a circle of others. Then, farther still to the left,
comes the painted figure of a bison; or, to be more accurate, the front
half is painted, the back being a piece of protruding rock that gives
the effect of low relief. The bison is rearing back on its haunches,
and there is a patch of red paint, like an open wound, just over the
region of its heart. Let us try to read the riddle. It may well embody
a charm that ran somewhat thus: "With these weapons, and by these
encircling tactics, may we slay a fat bison, O ye powers of the dark!"
Depend upon it, the men who went half a mile into the bowels of a
mountain, to paint things up on the walls, did not do so merely for
fun. This is a very eerie place, and I daresay most of us would not
like to spend the night there alone; though I know a pre-historian
who did. In Australia, as we shall see later on, rock-paintings of
game-animals, not so lifelike as these of the old days, but symbolic
almost beyond all recognizing, form part of solemn ceremonies whereby
good hunting is held to be secured. Something of the sort, then, we
may suppose, took place ages ago in the cave of Niaux. So, indeed,
it was a cathedral after a fashion; and, having in mind the carven
pillars of stalactite, the curving alcoves and side-chapels, the
shining white walls, and the dim ceiling that held in scorn our powerful
lamps, I venture to question whether man has ever lifted up his heart
in a grander one.
Space would fail me if I now sought to carry you off to the cave of
Altamira, near Santander, in the north-west of Spain. Here you might
see at its best a still later style of rock-painting, which deserts
mere black and white for colour-shading of the most free description.
Indeed, it is almost too free, in my judgment; for, though the control
of the artist over his rude material is complete, he is inclined to
turn his back on real life, forcing the animal forms into attitudes
more striking than natural, and endowing their faces sometimes, as
it seems to me, with almost human expressions. Whatever may be thought
of the likelihood of these beasts being portrayed to look like men,
certain it is that in the painted caves of this period the men almost
invariably have animal heads, as if they were mythological beings,
half animal and half human; or else--as perhaps is more
probable--masked dancers. At one place, however--namely, in the rock
shelter of Cogul near Lerida, on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees,
we have a picture of a group of women dancers who are not masked, but
attired in the style of the hour. They wear high hats or chignons,
tight waists, and bell-shaped skirts. Really, considering that we thus
have a contemporary fashion-plate, so to say, whilst there are likewise
the numerous stencilled hands elsewhere on view, and even, as I have
seen with my own eyes at Niaux in the sandy floor, hardened over with
stalagmite, the actual print of a foot, we are brought very near to
our palaeolithic forerunners; though indefinite ages part them from
us if we reckon by sheer time.
* * * * *
Before ending this chapter, I have still to make good a promise to
say something about the neolithic men of western Europe. These people
often, though not always, polished their stone; the palaeolithic folk
did not. That is the distinguishing mark by which the world is pleased
to go. It would be fatal to forget, however, that, with this trifling
difference, go many others which testify more clearly to the contrast
between the older and newer types of culture. Thus it has still to
be proved that the palaeolithic races ever used pottery, or that they
domesticated animals--for instance, the fat ponies which they were
so fond of eating; or that they planted crops. All these things did
the neolithic peoples sooner or later; so that it would not be strange
if palaeolithic man withdrew in their favour, because he could not
compete. Pre-history is at present almost silent concerning the manner
of his passing. In a damp and draughty tunnel, however, called Mas
d'Azil, in the south of France, where the river Arize still bores its
way through a mountain, some palaeolithic folk seem to have lingered
on in a sad state of decay. The old sureness of touch in the matter
of carving bone had left them. Again, their painting was confined to
the adorning of certain pebbles with spots and lines, curious objects,
that perhaps are not without analogy in Australia, whilst something
like them crops up again in the north of Scotland in what seems to
be the early iron-age. Had the rest of the palaeolithic men already
followed the reindeer and other arctic animals towards the north-east?
Or did the neolithic invasion, which came from the south, wipe out
the lot? Or was there a commingling of stocks, and may some of us have
a little dose of palaeolithic blood, as we certainly have a large dose
of neolithic? To all these questions it can only be replied that we
do not yet know.
No more do we know half as much as we should like about fifty things
relating to the small, dark, long-headed neolithic folk, with a
language that has possibly left traces in the modern Basque, who spread
over the west till they reached Great Britain--it probably was an
island by this time--and erected the well-known long barrows and other
monuments of a megalithic (great-stone) type; though not the round
barrows, which are the work of a subsequent round-headed race of the
bronze-age. Every day, however, the spade is adding to our knowledge.
Besides, most of the ruder peoples of the modern world were at the
neolithic stage of culture at the time of their discovery by Europeans.
Hence the weapons, the household utensils, the pottery, the
pile-dwellings, and so on, can be compared closely; and we have a fresh
instance of the way in which one branch of anthropology can aid another.
In pursuance of my plan, however, of merely pitching here and there
on an illustrative point, I shall conclude by an excursion to Brandon,
just on the Suffolk side of the border between that county and Norfolk.
Here we can stand, as it were, with one foot in neolithic times and
the other in the life of to-day. When Canon Greenwell, in 1870, explored
in this neighbourhood one of the neolithic flint-mines known as Grime's
Graves, he had to dig out the rubbish from a former funnel-shaped pit
some forty feet deep. Down at this level, it appeared, the neolithic
worker had found the layer of the best flint. This he quarried by means
of narrow galleries in all directions. For a pick he used a red-deer's
antler. In the British Museum is to be seen one of these with the miner's
thumb-mark stamped on a piece of clay sticking to the handle. His lamp
was a cup of chalk. His ladder was probably a series of rough steps
cut in the sides of the pit. As regards the use to which the material
was put, a neolithic workshop was found just to the south of Grime's
Graves. Here, scattered about on all sides, were the cores, the
hammer-stones that broke them up, and knives, scrapers, borers,
spear-heads and arrow-heads galore, in all stages of manufacture.
Well, now let us hie to Lingheath, not far off, and what do we find?
A family of the name of Dyer carry on to-day exactly the same old method
of mining. Their pits are of squarer shape than the neolithic ones,
but otherwise similar. Their one-pronged pick retains the shape of
the deer's antler. Their light is a candle stuck in a cup of chalk.
And the ladder is just a series of ledges or, as they call them, "toes"
in the wall, five feet apart and connected by foot-holes. The miner
simply jerks his load, several hundredweight of flints, from ledge
to ledge by the aid of his head, which he protects with something that
neolithic man was probably without, namely, an old bowler hat. He even
talks a language of his own. "Bubber-hutching on the sosh" is the term
for sinking a pit on the slant, and, for all we can tell, may have
a very ancient pedigree. And what becomes of the miner's output? It
is sold by the "jag"--a jag being a pile just so high that when you
stand on any side you can see the bottom flint on the other--to the
knappers of Brandon. Any one of these--for instance, my friend Mr.
Fred Snare--will, while you wait, break up a lump with a short round
hammer into manageable pieces. Then, placing a "quarter" with his left
hand the leather pad that covers his knee, he will, with an oblong
hammer, strike off flake after flake, perhaps 1,500 in a morning; and
finally will work these up into sharp-edged squares to serve as
gun-flints for the trade with native Africa. Alas! the palmy days of
knapping gun-flints for the British Army will never return to Brandon.
Still, there must have been trade depression in those parts at any
time from the bronze-age up to the times of Brown Bess; for the
strike-a-lights, still to be got at a penny each, can have barely kept
the wolf from the door. And Mr. Snare is not merely an artisan but
an artist. He has chipped out a flint ring, a feat which taxed the
powers of the clever neolithic knappers of pre-dynastic Egypt; whilst
with one of his own flint fishhooks he has taken a fine trout from
the Little Ouse that runs by the town.
Thus there are things in old England that are older even than some
of our friends wot. In that one county of Suffolk, for instance, the
good flint--so rich in colour as it is, and so responsive to the hammer,
at any rate if you get down to the lower layers or "sases," for instance,
the floorstone, or the black smooth-stone that is generally below
water-level--has served the needs of all the palaeolithic periods,
and of the neolithic age as well, and likewise of the modern Englishmen
who fought with flintlocks at Waterloo, or still more recently took
out tinder-boxes with them to the war in South Africa. And what does
this stand for in terms of the antiquity of man? Thousands of years?
We do not know exactly; but say rather hundreds of thousands of years.