now in the Museum of Natural History, Paris. One-third the size (linear)
of nature. _a-b_ is a line drawn from a point above the brow ridges
(_a_) to a point on the exterior of the skull corresponding to the inner
attachment of the membrane called the “tentorium” which separates the
cerebrum above from the cerebellum beneath it. The part of the skull
above this line (or rather the horizontal plane, the edge of which it
represents) is the cranial dome, and is in this skull comparatively
shallow. Compare it with the same line and the cranial dome in Fig. 75
of a Reindeer Man, which agrees with a modern European skull in the
greater height of the dome above the line _a-b_. The line drawn from the
line _a-b_ to the point _e_ is the vertical line erected at the middle
point of the line _a-b_. It gives the measure of the greatest height of
the cranial dome. The line from _f_ similarly falls on to the point
half-way between the line _e_ and the point _b_. It measures the height
of the back part of the cranial dome. Compare these and the other lines
in the other figures of human skulls and that of the chimpanzee (Fig.
81), which are all drawn to the same scale as this figure, namely,
one-third the linear measurement. _c_ is the point on the top of the
skull known as the “bregma”; it is the point where the frontal bone
meets the two parietal bones. The line _c-a_ cuts off a curved area
lying in front of it. This is “the frontal boss,” and the vertical line
to _d_, drawn from its most prominent point to the line _a-c_, gives a
very good measure of the amount of prominence and volume of the
forehead. Compare this area and the line _d_ in the other skulls
figured, especially in the well-developed skull of the Reindeer Man
(Fig. 75) and in the chimpanzee’s skull. The reader is referred also in
regard to these measurements to my _Kingdom of Man_ (Constable & Co.).
Besides these lines of measurement, the reader should note the great
brow ridges, the prominence of the whole face below the orbits (not
merely of the teeth-sockets). Fig. 65 gives the actual state of the
skull. In Fig. 80 the same skull is drawn as restored by Prof. Marcelin
Boule.]
XLI
THE MOST ANCIENT MEN
In the winter of 1908-09 a very interesting discovery was announced in
the daily newspapers—the discovery of a human skull and some bones
buried in a cave called the Grotto of the Chapelle-aux-Saints, in the
central department of France, known as the Corrèze, not very far from
Perigueux, in the Dordogne. An account was given of this discovery by
Professor Marcelin Boule, of the Paris Museum, to the Académie des
Sciences, and the description of the bones, which had been carefully
pieced together, and were exhibited to the meeting of the Academy, was
sent by him to me (see Fig. 65). Some exaggerated statements as to the
monkey-like character of the race to which these bones belonged
(exaggerated, but not altogether devoid of truth) were circulated by
imaginative correspondents in the newspapers. It is the fact that these
human remains are of enormous antiquity, and belong to a very peculiar
and primitive race known as the Neander Men, so called because a skull
and some bones of this same race were found fifty years ago in a cave in
the Neander valley,[7] near Elberfeld, on the Rhine.
The French archæologists, or “prehistorians,” as we now call them—are
the leading discoverers in all that relates to very early man. The caves
in Central and Southern France (Dordogne, Pyrenees, and Riviera) and the
gravels in the north have furnished the most wonderful and interesting
evidences of the existence of human beings at an immensely remote period
in this part of Europe. Enthusiastic excavators and collectors of French
nationality have discovered, preserved, and described the weapons,
carvings, and drawings made by the old cave-dwellers of Southern France,
buried by the accumulated deposits of ages deep in the caverns where the
human artists who made these things used to live. In England only two
such caves containing the implements of prehistoric men have been
found—whilst a few are known in Belgium, Moravia, and Switzerland.
Although we know an immense number of the flint instruments, bone
harpoons, and carvings and drawings of the ancient cave-dwellers, yet
skulls and bones of the men themselves are extremely rare. Bones,
skulls, and teeth of the animals they killed and ate are abundant in the
caves—such as those of great bulls, deer, and horses. The bones also of
animals which lived in these caves and contended with the ancient men
for the possession of the shelter afforded by them, are abundant: bones
of hyæna, of bear, of lion, and wolf. But human bones are exceedingly
rare. This arises partly from the fact that human bones are not so thick
and strong as those of large animals, and more easily soften, break up,
and are lost. It is also due partly to the fact that the men were not
nearly so numerous as the wild animals; but it is chiefly due to the
fact that these people usually, but not always, buried their dead in the
open; and whilst the bones of animals which had been eaten were left
about in heaps on the floor of the caves, and became cemented together
by the petrifying deposit caused by water dripping from the walls of
these limestone caverns or by streams actually flooding the caverns, the
bodies of the men themselves were removed when they died by their
friends and families, and buried in the open ground, where they have
gradually dissolved and broken up. Only a few here and there of the more
ancient races were buried in a cave, and are in consequence preserved
until the present day. Obviously, it would only be an exceptional honour
or superstition which would cause the giving up of a cave to the
interment of a dead body, or only rarely that a corpse could be
tolerated in the floor of the cave still inhabited by living men.
It is a mistake to suppose that all the bones of all the men and animals
which have lived on the earth’s surface are naturally and as a matter of
course permanent enduring things. On the contrary, when they are buried
in soil or sand permeated by water, they slowly soften and decay,
dissolve and disappear. When washed into streams and rivers or into the
sea, they break up and dissolve. No bones were dredged up from the floor
of the ocean by the explorers of the Challenger expedition. A bone sunk
in the sea gradually dissolves. Only those bones (and the same is true
of shells) are permanently preserved which happen to get into certain
favourable positions, embedded in clay or hard deposit, which is not
disturbed, and becomes slowly raised up and free from soaking water
before the bone is dissolved; or, again, those which have been protected
in the accumulated deposits of the floor of a cavern covered in by
layers of hard calcareous slab or stalagmite, which usually is formed by
the water dripping from the limestone roof and walls. The limestone is
dissolved like sugar, and is deposited when the water evaporates—“petrifying”
the floor of the cave. It is owing to this rarity of the natural
preservation of bones that we never find more than a few of those of
extinct animals of various degrees of antiquity, and never more than a
very few of those of the ancient men who lived in caverns and made
“flint implements.”
[Illustration: FIG. 66.—An unpolished but beautifully chipped flint
knife, of the Neolithic Age, from Denmark. (This figure and Fig. 67 are
from the guide to the antiquities of the Stone Age in the British
Museum).]
As a preliminary to dealing below with the story of “the Neander
Men”—to which race the newly-found skull and bones from the Corrèze
belong—it will help to make the importance of that skeleton obvious if
I very briefly and dogmatically state what are the great periods in the
prehistoric record of man, and the probable distance in time from us of
those periods. It must be remembered that what I have to say applies
only to the “prehistoric history” of man in Western Europe and the
Mediterranean region, for it is only this part of the world which has
been sufficiently carefully examined to yield any definite conclusions.
Let us suppose that we can travel back through the ages, and proceed to
do so. We find that there are three well-marked successive periods in
Europe—which are called the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, and the Stone
Age. When we go back to Julius Cæsar conquering Gaul and parts of
Germany and Britain, we find that the Romans had steel swords, and
freely made use of that metal for a variety of tools and constructive
purposes. The Gauls and Belgi and Allemanni and Britons were still in
the Bronze Age; they had beautifully made bronze swords and daggers and
helmets and shields, which were weaker and softer than those of iron
used by the Romans. The use of iron was soon spread by the conquerors,
and the rest of Europe entered on the Iron Age. When the Anglo-Saxons
arrived in England they had iron weapons. At what date precisely the
Romans themselves took to the use of iron is not known, probably they
learnt its use from the peoples of Africa; but at no distant date, a few
hundred years before Christ, they, too, and the Greeks were in the
Bronze Age. In Western Europe we see the Bronze Age, as we travel back
in time, disappearing, and we come to the Stone Age, about 2000 B.C.
Copper was used at the later stage of the Stone Age, and then the alloy
with tin, which is called “bronze.” At the time that the big stones of
Stonehenge were set up (the smaller stones of the outer circle are more
ancient) the Stone Age was coming to its end, and the Bronze Age coming
in.
[Illustration: FIG. 67.—A polished flint axe-head, of Neolithic Age,
from Denmark.]
Everywhere, but not always within the same thousand years or so, we see
as we go still farther back, the use of metal giving place to the use of
stone. In Europe we see a highly-developed material civilisation from
three to seven thousand years ago. The people till the land, sow crops,
keep herds, build houses (of wood), make pottery, combs for the hair,
necklaces of amber and of shells, and other ornaments, but they have no
metal weapons or implements. They sometimes use native gold to make
decorative ornaments; but their knives, daggers, swords, saws, and
hammers are all of stone, either flint or dense greenstone. We reach
this purely Stone Age in Europe at 2000 B.C.; in Egypt we do not get
back to it so soon, but, about 5000 B.C., we there come upon a
pre-Pharaonic population which made use of beautifully-finished stone
knives in place of metal. The first people we come upon in Europe as we
pass from the Bronze to the Stone Age had a great deal of skill and an
elaborate social organisation. Their stone weapons were beautifully
chipped and often highly polished (Figs. 66 and 67). We find the slabs
of grit upon which they rubbed the chipped flint adzes in order to make
them smooth. But soon we find, as we go back, that polishing is unknown,
and that the chipped flint adzes are used in a rough state. On entering
the Stone Age we find that we are only on the fringe of an immense
period of “stone-weaponed humanity,” extending back for tens of
thousands of generations of men, when stone (and in Europe especially,
that stone which we call “flint”) was the one great stand-by of the
human race—the one hard cutting material which man learnt to shape and
apply to his own purposes—so as to make holes with it, saw with it,
scrape with it, cut with it, kill with it. On account of its prodigious
range in time it is found necessary to divide the Stone Age into two
periods—a later, called the “Neolithic” (the new stone period), and an
older, stretching back until the traces of it are lost in geologic
changes of the earth, which is called the “Palæolithic” (the old stone
period).
Thus if we start on a time-journey to explore the earliest traces of man
in Europe, we pass along the centuries back, through the Iron and the
Bronze Ages of humanity, and arrive at the vast Stone Age, which
stretches away into the obscurity of more than a hundred thousand,
probably of many hundred thousand, years. The later or newer fringe of
the Stone Age is called the “Neolithic,” or newer Stone Age, or Age of
Polished Stone, because the men of that period polished their stone
implements after chipping them into shape. That which we dimly see
beyond is the “Palæolithic,” or older period of “stone-weaponed”
humanity, when polishing was unknown.
The Neolithic civilisation comprised the Swiss and Glastonbury
lake-dwellers, who built houses on piles in the water: also the makers
of the kitchen-middens of Denmark, and the builders of the great stone
avenues, circles, and cromlechs, and the elevators of the solitary big
stones called “menhirs”—most of them rougher and probably two thousand
or three thousand years older than the big stones of Stonehenge. Our
journey has now brought us into the full darkness of prehistoric times.
We cannot tell how far back this “Neolithic” period reaches, but there
are things found which make it certain that it reaches to 7000 B.C., and
probably a good deal farther. We are now far in time behind the most
ancient Greeks and the more ancient Egyptians. Europe is a rich, moist
pasture-land, peat bogs are abundant and luxuriant woodlands; the
climate is mild; the wild animals are those which to-day inhabit Central
Europe, but more abundant. The domesticated animals kept by the men are
those which we have to-day, and many of the crops and cultivated plants
are those of our own time, such as wheat, barley, oats, and rye. We know
also by their remains that the Neolithic men fed on chestnuts, hazel
nuts, walnuts, plums, apples, pears, and strawberries, and cultivated
the vine, the pale opium-poppy, and the narrow-leaved flax. Hemp was not
known to them.
As we push back still farther into the night of antiquity—we cannot say
at how many thousand years from to-day, whether ten, twenty, or fifty
thousand—the climate becomes very cold, the glaciers extend far down
the valleys, and we note that the level of sea and land has changed.
Great Britain and Ireland are part of the Continent of Europe. There are
strange animals in the south of what was England, and there, as well as
in France, reindeer abound, wild horses, the bison, the Siberian saiga
antelope, the great ox, bears, gluttons, and wolves; and there are men
living in caves—the natural caverns which form in limestone rock. These
men are chipping flints (but do not polish them) and carving bones, but
now have no herds, nor cultivated fields, nor pottery (some very rough
fragments have been found), nor buildings, nor earthworks. They are like
some modern savages, Nature’s gentlemen, “who toil not, neither do they
spin,” but they hunt and fish. They live entirely on the produce of the
chase and on fish, wild fruits, and roots.
They wear undressed skins and furs, and paint or tattoo their faces.
They make twisted ropes (probably of skin) which they fix as a halter
round the head and jaw of the wild horse, as shown by their own carvings
(Figs. 8 and 9). Probably they ride him. They certainly eat him. At
Solutré, near Mâcon, the bones of no less than a hundred thousand horses
were found piled up as a sort of kitchen-midden round a camp of
Palæolithic men! They have the art of making fire, and have a wonderful
artistic skill in carving and drawing on bone and ivory and on stones,
and in painting on the walls of their caves, the animals which surround
them and are hunted by them (Fig. 71). They make great numbers of carved
harpoons or toothed spear-heads (Fig. 68) from bone, and also needles
for sewing skins; whilst from flint they chip spear-heads, knives,
hand-hatchets, and saws. They decorate their carvings with spirals,
lozenges, and circles cut in low relief (Fig. 69). But their truly
astonishing skill and mental development is shown in their carvings and
engravings of animals and fish (Fig. 70), which are executed either on
bones or stones, or on pieces of the ivory of the mammoth. Besides the
reindeer, horses, goats, saiga antelope, rhinoceros, mammoth, and seal,
their carvings include statuettes and drawings of men and women (Fig.
7).
[Illustration: FIG. 68.—_A._ Perforated harpoon of the transition
period (Azilian or Red Deer period), between Palæolithic and Neolithic,
made from antler of red deer, found in quantity in the upper layers of
deposit in the cavern of the Mas d’Azil (Ariège). _B_ and _C_.
Imperforate harpoons or lance heads made from reindeer antler of the
Magdalenian period (Reindeer epoch). _B_ from Bruniquel Cave
(Tarn-et-Garonne). _C_ from a cavern in the Hautes Pyrenées. Same size
as the objects.]
At the best period some of these carvings show a mastery of the
material, a directness and a simplicity and beauty of essential line,
together with true observation of characteristic form, which separate
these works from those of the ordinary savage of modern times, and have
caused living artists of authority to declare that these craftsmen had
those definite gifts which entitle them to be recognised as brother
artists—an assurance which confirms my own impression based on a long
study of large series of the actual specimens. The best works of their
later period (for their skill took time to develop, and follows the laws
of growth of all art) represent animals, such as deer, in movement and
often turning round or foreshortened (Fig. 70); some of their carvings
of horses’ heads are worthy of the Parthenon (Fig. 9). On the other
hand, as is often observed in primitive art, their representations of
the human face and figure are very inferior, and tend to caricature.
[Illustration: FIG. 69.—A piece of mammoth ivory carved with spirals
and scrolls from the cave of Arudy (Hautes Pyrenées). Same size as the
object.]
We are now in the Palæolithic period, and, what is more, we have quitted
what geologists call the recent or modern epoch, and have entered on
“geologic” times; this is the Pleistocene or Quaternary epoch. It is a
legitimate and useful thing thus to draw a strong line between the
Neolithic and the Palæolithic portions of the Stone Age. The Neolithic
men belong, so to speak, to our own days. They were, even seven thousand
years ago, only a little rougher in their tools than were the peasants
of the remoter parts of Central Europe a few hundred years ago. They had
not even as much tendency to or gift for artistic work as the ploughmen
of our own days, and have left none behind them. Excepting that they
used stone axes and knives instead of steel ones, they really led the
life of mediæval country-folk. But once you pass them in your journey
backwards—once you enter the Pleistocene circle—you find that climate,
land surface, animals, plants, mode of life are as utterly changed as
were you suddenly transferred from the English countryside to Terra del
Fuego or to an Eskimo village. The Palæolithic men and their whole
surroundings and arts of life have no touch of familiarity for the
modern inhabitants of Europe.
[Illustration: FIG. 70.—Carving on an antler of a group of three red
deer and four fishes, remarkable for the attitude and movement of the
deer: _a_, hind legs of front deer, the rest broken away: _bf_, second
deer: _c_, third deer looking back: _d_, lozenge marks, supposed to be
the artist’s signature: _bh_, the hind legs of the second deer,
wonderfully true to nature in their “hanging” pose. From the cavern of
Lorthet, near Lourdes (Hautes Pyrenées), deposit of the Reindeer epoch.
The carving runs all round a cylindrical rod of bone (as very many of
these carvings do), and is here represented as “un-rolled” or
“developed,” that is to say, laid out flat. The drawing is a little
reduced as compared with the actual carving.]
When we explore this Palæolithic, Pleistocene, or Quaternary epoch—the
last of the geologists’ long series of epochs and deposits—we find that
it represents by no means a trivial episode in the world’s long change.
It is true that compared to geologic periods which follow on below
it—namely, the Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene of the Tertiary, the Chalk
and the vast ages below that white sea-sediment, indicated by the sixty
thousand feet of stratified rock (Jurassic, Triassic, Carboniferous,
Devonian, Silurian, Cambrian!), the Pleistocene exhibits but a small
thickness of deposit (amounting to but two or three hundred feet of sand
and gravel) as its contribution to the earth’s crust.
[Illustration: FIG. 71.—Painting of a bison in orange-brown, grey,
black, and white, the outline partly engraved, from the roof of the cave
of Altamira, near Santander, in the north of Spain, upon which many
others as well as wild-boar, horses, and deer are depicted. The original
is about two and a half feet long. These drawings were executed by the
Reindeer Men in the period of the Upper or Post-Glacial Pleistocene.]
Yet, on account of the nearness to our own times of the events which
took place in the Pleistocene period, geologists and prehistorians have
studied its details with minute care, and have accumulated an immense
array of facts and specimens by digging and carefully collecting in
Western and Central Europe. They have divided up this Pleistocene period
and the deposits in river-valley and cave which have occurred within its
limits into three great consecutive ages. These are distinguished from
one another by the distinctive wild animals which flourished in each,
by the climate which is indicated, and by the progressive development of
the art and workmanship of the Palæolithic men discovered in successive
layers of deposit. Let me here refer the reader to the tabular statement
on page 384 _bis_.
These ages of the Pleistocene are:—No. 1. The Upper or Post-Glacial
Pleistocene, or =Epoch of the Reindeer=. The climate was cold and dry,
like that of the Russian steppes. The contents of the celebrated cave of
La Madeleine, in the Dordogne, and the upper layers of deposit in a
whole series of caves (including Kent’s Cavern and the Creswell Cave in
England) belong to this age. This was the period in which the caves were
inhabited by the artistic race “who came no one knows whence, and went
no one knows whither,” accompanied by the reindeer. Before them there
was no carving in the caves, or only very rough work, and we are
justified in concluding that the men who inhabited the caves before this
period belonged to a totally distinct and inferior race. The “Reindeer
Men” must have developed their art by gradual steps before they arrived
in the caves of Western Europe—where we do not know. At the end of this
period the climate became much milder, and the red deer of our own day
took the place of the reindeer, during a long transition in which the
“Reindeer Men” and their art disappeared, and the pastoral,
land-tilling, stone-building, pottery-making communities of the
Neolithic Age came into existence, showing no trace of the art of their
predecessors. The mammoth and rhinoceros, bison, and aurochs, and, in
fact, all the commoner animals of an earlier period were present nearly
all through the Reindeer period (they disappear in the late “transition
period” of the red deer, called “Azilian”), and were known to the
“Reindeer Men,” but great herds of reindeer and of horses occupied the
grassy lands in this age, which were not abundant previously. These
herds probably were to some extent protected by the men, whilst the
lion, bear, hyæna, mammoths, and rhinoceroses were diminishing in
number, and were kept at a distance.
[Illustration: FIG. 72.—Back and front view of a flint implement of the
Moustier type (period of the Neander Men or Middle Pliocene), half the
size (linear) of the object. Observe the bulb of percussion at _b_, and
the completion of one face by a single blow. Note also the fine edge and
point of the weapon.]