It must always be borne in mind that among its many other imperfections

the Geological Record necessarily contains abundant traces only of water

or marsh creatures or of creatures easily and frequently drowned. The

same reasons that make any traces of the ancestors of the mammals rare

and relatively unprocurable in the Mesozoic rocks, probably make the

traces of possible human ancestors rare and relatively unprocurable in

the Cainozoic rocks. Such knowledge as we have of the earliest men, for

example, is almost entirely got from a few caves, into which they went

and in which they left their traces. Until the hard Pleistocene times

they lived and died in the open, and their bodies were consumed or

decayed altogether.

But it is well to bear in mind also that the Record of the Rocks has

still to be thoroughly examined. It has been studied only for a few

generations, and by only a few men in each generation. Most men have

been too busy making war, making profits out of their neighbours,

toiling at work that machinery could do for them in a tenth of the time,

or simply playing about, to give any attention to these more interesting

things. There may be, there probably are, thousands of deposits still

untouched containing countless fragments and vestiges of man and his

progenitors. In Asia particularly, in India or the East Indies, there

may be hidden the most illuminating clues. What we know to-day of early

men is the merest scrap of what will presently be known.

The apes and monkeys already appear to have been differentiated at the

beginning of the Cainozoic Age, and there are a number of Oligocene and

Miocene apes whose relations to one another and to the human line have

still to be made out. Among these we may mention _Dryopithecus_ of the

Miocene Age, with a very human-looking jaw. In the Siwalik Hills of

northern India remains of some very interesting apes have been found, of

which _Sivapithecus_ and _Palæopithecus_ were possibly related closely

to the human ancestor. Possibly these animals already used implements.

Charles Darwin represents baboons as opening nuts by breaking them with

stones, using stakes to prize up rocks in the hunt for insects, and

striking blows with sticks and stones.[21] The chimpanzee makes itself a

sort of tree hut by intertwining branches. Stones apparently chipped for

use have been found in strata of Oligocene Age at Boncelles in Belgium.

Possibly the implement-using disposition was already present in the

Mesozoic ancestry from which we are descended.[22]

§ 2

Among the earliest evidences of some creature, either human or at least

more man-like than any living ape upon earth, are a number of flints and

stones very roughly chipped and shaped so as to be held in the hand.

These were probably used as hand-axes. These early implements

(“Eoliths”) are often so crude and simple that there was for a long time

a controversy whether they were to be regarded as natural or artificial

productions.[23] The date of the earliest of them is put by geologists

as Pliocene--that is to say, _before the First Glacial Age_. They occur

also throughout the First Interglacial period. We know of no bones or

other remains in Europe or America of the quasi-human beings of half a

million years ago, who made and used these implements. They used them to

hammer with, perhaps they used them to fight with, and perhaps they used

bits of wood for similar purposes.[24]

But at Trinil, in Java, in strata which are said to correspond either to

the later Pliocene or to the American and European First Ice Age, there

have been found some scattered bones of a creature, such as the makers

of these early implements may have been. The top of a skull, some teeth,

and a thigh-bone have been found. The skull shows a brain-case about

half-way in size between that of the chimpanzee and man, but the

thigh-bone is that of a creature as well adapted to standing and running

as a man, and as free, therefore, to use its hands. The creature was not

a man, nor was it an arboreal ape like the chimpanzee. It was a walking

ape. It has been named by naturalists _Pithecanthropus erectus_ (the

walking ape-man). We cannot say that it is a direct human ancestor, but

we may guess that the creatures who scattered these first stone tools

over the world must have been closely similar and kindred, and that our

ancestor was a beast of like kind. This little trayful of bony fragments

from Trinil is, at present, apart from stone implements, the oldest

relic of early humanity, or of the close blood relations of early

humanity, that is known.

While these early men or “sub-men” were running about Europe four or

five hundred thousand years ago, there were mammoths, rhinoceroses, a

huge hippopotamus, a giant beaver, and a bison and wild cattle in their

world. There were also wild horses, and the sabre-toothed tiger still

abounded. There are no traces of lions or true tigers at that time in

Europe, but there were bears, otters, wolves, and a wild boar. It may be

that the early sub-man sometimes played jackal to the sabre-toothed

tiger, and finished up the bodies on which the latter had gorged

itself.[25]

§ 3

After this first glimpse of something at least sub-human in the record

of geology, there is not another fragment of human or man-like bone yet

known from that record for an interval of hundreds of thousands of

years. It is not until we reach deposits which are stated to be of the

Second Interglacial period, 200,000 years later, 200,000 or 250,000

years ago, that another little scrap of bone comes to hand. Then we find

a jaw-bone.

This jaw-bone was found in a sandpit near Heidelberg, at a depth of

eighty feet from the surface,[26] and it is not the jaw-bone of a man as

we understand man, but it is man-like in every respect, except that it

has absolutely no trace of a chin; it is more massive than a man’s, and

its narrowness behind could not, it is thought, have given the tongue

sufficient play for articulate speech. It is not an ape’s jaw-bone; the

teeth are human. The owner of this jaw-bone has been variously named

_Homo Heidelbergensis_ and _Palæoanthropus Heidelbergensis_, according

to the estimate formed of its humanity or sub-humanity by various

authorities. He lived in a world not remotely unlike the world of the

still earlier sub-man of the first implements; the deposits in which it

is found show that there were elephants, horses, rhinoceroses, bison, a

moose, and so forth with it in the world, but the sabre-toothed tiger

was declining and the lion was spreading over Europe. The implements of

this period (known as the Chellean period) are a very considerable

advance upon those of the Pliocene Age. They are well made but _very

much bigger_ than any truly human implements. The Heidelberg man may

have had a very big body and large forelimbs. He may have been a woolly

strange-looking creature.

§ 4

We must turn over the Record for, it may be, another 100,000 years for

the next remains of anything human or sub-human. Then in a deposit

ascribed to the Third Interglacial period, which may have begun 100,000

years ago and lasted 50,000 years,[27] the smashed pieces of a whole

skull turn up. The deposit is a gravel which may have been derived from

the washing out of still earlier gravel strata and this skull fragment

may be in reality as old as the First Glacial period. The bony remains

discovered at Piltdown in Sussex display a creature still ascending only

very gradually from the sub-human.

The first scraps of this skull were found in an excavation for road

gravel in Sussex. Bit by bit other fragments of this skull were hunted

out from the quarry heaps until most of it could be pieced together. It

is a thick skull, thicker than that of any living race of men, and it

has a brain capacity intermediate between that of Pithecanthropus and

man. This creature has been named _Eoanthropus_, the dawn man. In the

same gravel-pits were found teeth of rhinoceros, hippopotamus, and the

leg-bone of a deer with marks upon it that may be cuts. A curious

bat-shaped instrument of elephant bone has also been found.[28]

There was, moreover, a jaw-bone among these scattered remains, which was

at first assumed naturally enough to belong to _Eoanthropus_, but which

it was afterwards suggested was probably that of a chimpanzee. It is

extraordinarily like that of a chimpanzee, but Dr. Keith, one of the

greatest authorities in these questions, assigns it, after an exhaustive

analysis in his _Antiquity of Man_ (1915), to the skull with which it is

found. It is, as a jaw-bone, far less human in character than the jaw of

the much more ancient _Homo Heidelbergensis_, but the teeth are in some

respects more like those of living men.

[Illustration: DIAGRAM TO ILLUSTRATE THE RIDDLE OF THE PILTDOWN

SUB-MAN.]

Dr. Keith, swayed by the jaw-bone, does not think that _Eoanthropus_, in

spite of its name, is a creature in the direct ancestry of man. Much

less is it an intermediate form between the Heidelberg man and the

Neanderthal man we shall presently describe. It was only related to the

true ancestor of man as the orang is related to the chimpanzee. It was

one of a number of sub-human running apes of more than ape-like

intelligence, and if it was not on the line royal, it was at any rate a

very close collateral.

After this glimpse of a skull, the Record for very many centuries gives

nothing but flint implements, which improve steadily in quality. A very

characteristic form is shaped like a sole, with one flat side stricken

off at one blow and the other side worked. The archæologists, as the

Record continues, are presently able to distinguish scrapers, borers,

knives, darts, throwing stones, and the like. Progress is now more

rapid; in a few centuries the shape of the hand-axe shows distinct and

recognizable improvements. And then comes quite a number of remains. The

Fourth Glacial Age is rising towards its maximum. Man is taking to

caves and leaving vestiges there; at Krapina in Croatia, at Neanderthal

near Düsseldorf, at Spy, human remains have been found, skulls and bones

of a creature that is certainly a man. Somewhere about 50,000 years ago,

if not earlier, appeared _Homo Neanderthalensis_ (also called _Homo

antiquus_ and _Homo primigenius_), a quite passable human being. His

thumb was not quite equal in flexibility and usefulness to a human

thumb, he stooped forward, and could not hold his head erect, as all

living men do, he was chinless and perhaps incapable of speech, there

were curious differences about the enamel and the roots of his teeth

from those of all living men, he was very thick-set, he was, indeed, not

quite of the human species; but there is no dispute about his

attribution to the genus _Homo_. He was certainly not descended from

Eoanthropus, but his jaw-bone is so like the Heidelberg jaw-bone as to

make it possible that the clumsier and heavier _Homo Heidelbergensis_, a

thousand centuries before him, was of his blood and race.

§ 5

Upon this question of the Piltdown jaw-bone, it may be of interest to

quote here a letter to the writer from Sir Ray Lankester, discussing the

question in a familiar and luminous manner. It will enable the reader to

gauge the extent and quality of the evidence that we possess at present

upon the nature of these early human and sub-human animals. Upon these

fragile Piltdown fragments alone more than a hundred books, pamphlets,

and papers have been written. These scraps of bone are guarded more

carefully from theft and wilful damage than the most precious jewels,

and in the museum cases one sees only carefully executed _fac-similes_.

“As to the Piltdown jaw-bone, the best study of it is that by Smith

Woodward, who first described it and the canine found later. The jaw is

imperfect in front, but has the broad, flat symphysis of the Apes. G. S.

Miller, an American anthropologist, has made a very good comparison of

it with a chimpanzee’s jaw, and concludes that it is a chimpanzee’s.

(His monograph is in the _Am. Jour. of Phys. Anthrop._, vol. i, no. 1.)

The one point in the Piltdown jaw itself against chimpanzee

identification is the smooth, flat, worn surface of the molars. This is

a human character, and is due to lateral movement of the jaw, and hence

rubbing down of the tubercles of the molars. This is not worth much. But

the serious question is, are we to associate this jaw with the cranium

found close by it? If so, it is certainly not chimpanzee nor close to

the Apes, but decidedly hominid. Two other small fragments of crania and

a few more teeth have been found in the gravel two miles from Piltdown,

which agree with the Piltdown cranium in having superciliary ridges

fairly strong for a human skull, but not anything like the great

superciliary ridges of Apes. The fact one has to face is this; here you

have an imperfect cranium, very thick-walled and of small cubical

contents (1100 or so), but much larger in that respect than any ape’s. A

few yards distant from it in the same layer of gravel is found a

jaw-bone having rather large pointed canines, a flat, broad symphysis,

and other points about the inner face of the ramus and ridges which

resemble those of the chimpanzee. Which is the more likely: (_a_) that

these two novel fragments tending apewards from man were parts of the

same individual; or (_b_), that the sweeping of the Wealden valley has

brought there together a half-jaw and a broken cranium _both_ more

ape-like in character than any known human corresponding bits, and yet

derived from two separate anthropoid beasts, one (the jaw) more simian,

and the other (the cranium) much less so? As to the probabilities, we

must remember that this patch of gravel at Piltdown, clearly and

definitely, is a wash-up of remains of various later tertiary and

post-tertiary deposits. It contains fragments of Miocene mastodon and

rhinoceros teeth. These latter differ entirely in mineral character from

the Eoanthropus jaw and the cranium. But (and this needs re-examination

and _chemical_ analysis) the Piltdown jaw and the Piltdown cranium do

not seem to me to be quite alike in their mineral condition. The jaw is

more deeply iron-stained, and I should say (but not confidently), harder

than the cranium. Now, it is easy to attribute too much importance to

that difference, since in a patch of iron-stained gravel, such as that

at Piltdown, the soaking of water and iron salts into bones embedded

may be much greater in one spot than in another only a yard off, or a

few inches deeper!

“So I think we are stumped and baffled! The most prudent way is to keep

the jaw and the cranium apart in all argument about them. On the other

hand, on the principle that hypotheses are not to be multiplied beyond

necessity, there is a case for regarding the two--jaw and cranium--as

having been parts of one beast--or man.”

To which Sir H. H. Johnston adds: “Against the chimpanzee hypothesis it

must be borne in mind that so far no living chimpanzee or fossil

chimpanzee-like remains have been found nearer England than north

equatorial Africa or North-west India, and no remains of great apes at

all nearer than Southern France and the upper Rhine--and those widely

different from the _Eoanthropus_ jaw.”

IX

THE NEANDERTHAL MEN, AN EXTINCT RACE

(The Early Palæolithic Age[29])

§ 1. _The World 50,000 Years Ago._ § 2. _The Daily Life of the

First Men._ § 3. _The Last Palæolithic Men._

§ 1

In the time of the Third Interglacial period the outline of Europe and

western Asia was very different from what it is to-day. Vast areas to

the west and northwest which are now under the Atlantic waters were then

dry land; the Irish Sea and the North Sea were river valleys. Over these

northern areas there spread and receded and spread again a great ice cap

such as covers central Greenland to-day (see Map, on page 77). This vast

ice cap, which covered both polar regions of the earth, withdrew huge

masses of water from the ocean, and the sea-level consequently fell,

exposing great areas of land that are now submerged again. The

Mediterranean area was probably a great valley below the general

sea-level, containing two inland seas cut off from the general ocean.

The climate of this Mediterranean basin was perhaps cold temperate, and

the region of the Sahara to the south was not then a desert of baked

rock and blown sand, but a well-watered and fertile country. Between the

ice sheets to the north and the Alps and Mediterranean valley to the

south stretched a bleak wilderness whose climate changed from harshness

to a mild kindliness and then hardened again for the Fourth Glacial Age.

Across this wilderness, which is now the great plain of Europe, wandered

a various fauna. At first there were hippopotami, rhinoceroses,

mammoths, and elephants. The sabre-toothed tiger was diminishing towards

extinction. Then, as the air chilled, the hippopotamus, and then other

warmth-loving creatures, ceased to come so far north, and the

sabre-toothed tiger disappeared altogether. The woolly mammoth, the

woolly rhinoceros, the musk ox, the bison, the aurochs, and the reindeer

became prevalent, and the temperate vegetation gave place to plants of a

more arctic type. The glaciers spread southward to the maximum of the

Fourth Glacial Age (about 50,000 years ago), and then receded again. In

the earlier phase, the Third Interglacial period, a certain number of

small family groups of men (_Homo Neanderthalensis_) and probably of

sub-men (_Eoanthropus_) wandered over the land, leaving nothing but

their flint implements to witness to their presence. They probably used

a multitude and variety of wooden implements also; they had probably

learnt much about the shapes of objects and the use of different shapes

from wood, knowledge which they afterwards applied to stone; but none of

this wooden material has survived; we can only speculate about its forms

and uses. As the weather hardened to its maximum of severity, the

Neanderthal men, already it would seem acquainted with the use of fire,

began to seek shelter under rock ledges and in caves--and so leave

remains behind them. Hitherto they had been accustomed to squat in the

open about the fire, and near their water supply. But they were

sufficiently intelligent to adapt themselves to the new and harder

conditions. (As for the sub-men, they seem to have succumbed to the

stresses of this Fourth Glacial Age altogether. At any rate, the rudest

type of Palæolithic implements presently disappears.)

[Illustration: THIS MAP REPRESENTS THE PRESENT STATE OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF

THE GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE AND WESTERN ASIA AT A PERIOD WHICH WE GUESS TO

BE ABOUT 50,000 YEARS AGO, THE NEANDERTHALER AGE.

Much of this map is of course speculative, but its broad outlines must

be fairly like those of the world in which men first became men.]

Not merely man was taking to the caves. This period also had a cave

lion, a cave bear, and a cave hyæna. These creatures had to be driven

out of the caves and kept out of the caves in which these early men

wanted to squat and hide; and no doubt fire was an effective method of

eviction and protection. Probably early men did not go deeply into the

caves, because they had no means of lighting their recesses. They got in

far enough to be out of the weather, and stored wood and food in odd

corners. Perhaps they barricaded the cave mouths. Their only available

light for going deeply into the caverns would be torches.

[Illustration: Neanderthal Man]

What did these Neanderthal men hunt? Their only possible weapons for

killing such giant creatures as the mammoth or the cave bear, or even

the reindeer, were spears of wood, wooden clubs, and those big pieces of

flint they left behind them, the “Chellean” and “Mousterian”

implements;[30] and probably their usual quarry was smaller game. But

they did certainly eat the flesh of the big beasts when they had a

chance, and perhaps they followed them when sick or when wounded by

combats, or took advantage of them when they were bogged or in trouble

with ice or water. (The Labrador Indians still kill the caribou with

spears at awkward river crossings.) At Dewlish in Dorset, an artificial

trench has been found which is supposed to have been a Palæolithic trap

for elephants.[31] We know that the Neanderthalers partly ate their kill

where it fell; but they brought back the big marrow bones to the cave to

crack and eat at leisure, because few ribs and vertebræ are found in the

caves, but great quantities of cracked and split long bones. They used

skins to wrap about them, and the women probably dressed the skins.

We know also that they were right-handed like modern men, because the

left side of the brain (which serves the right side of the body) is

bigger than the right. But while the back parts of the brain which deal

with sight and touch and the energy of the body are well developed, the

front parts, which are connected with thought and speech, are

comparatively small. It was as big a brain as ours, but different. This

species of _Homo_ had certainly a very different mentality from ours;

its individuals were not merely simpler and lower than we are, they were

on another line. It may be they did not speak at all, or very sparingly.

They had nothing that we should call a language.

§ 2

In Worthington Smith’s _Man the Primeval Savage_ there is a very vividly

written description of early Palæolithic life, from which much of the

following account is borrowed. In the original, Mr. Worthington Smith

assumes a more extensive social life, a larger community, and a more

definite division of labour among its members than is altogether

justifiable in the face of such subsequent writings as J. J. Atkinson’s

memorable essay on Primal Law.[32] For the little tribe Mr. Worthington

Smith described there has been substituted, therefore, a family group

under the leadership of one Old Man, and the suggestions of Mr. Atkinson

as to the behaviour of the Old Man have been worked into the sketch.

Mr. Worthington Smith describes a squatting-place near a stream, because

primitive man, having no pots or other vessels, must needs have kept

close to a water supply, and with some chalk cliffs adjacent from which

flints could be got to work. The air was bleak, and the fire was of

great importance, because fires once out were not easily relit in those

days. When not required to blaze it was probably banked down with ashes.

The most probable way in which fires were started was by hacking a bit

of iron pyrites with a flint amidst dry dead leaves; concretions of iron

pyrites and flints are found together in England where the gault and

chalk approach each other.[33] The little group of people would be

squatting about amidst a litter of fern, moss, and such-like dry

material. Some of the women and children would need to be continually

gathering fuel to keep up the fires. It would be a tradition that had

grown up. The young would imitate their elders in this task. Perhaps

there would be rude wind shelters of boughs on one side of the

encampment.

The Old Man, the father and master of the group, would perhaps be

engaged in hammering flints beside the fire. The children would imitate

him and learn to use the sharpened fragments. Probably some of the women

would hunt good flints; they would fish them out of the chalk with

sticks and bring them to the squatting-place.

There would be skins about. It seems probable that at a very early time

primitive men took to using skins. Probably they were wrapped about the

children, and used to lie upon when the ground was damp and cold. A

woman would perhaps be preparing a skin. The inside of the skin would be

well scraped free of superfluous flesh with trimmed flints, and then

strained and pulled and pegged out flat on the grass, and dried in the

rays of the sun.

[Illustration: EARLY STONE IMPLEMENTS.

The Mousterian Age implements, and all above it, are those of

Neanderthal men or, possibly in the case of the rostro-carinates,

of sub-men. The lower row (Reindeer Age) are the work of true men.

The student should compare this diagram with the time diagram

attached to Chapter VII, § 6, and he should note the relatively

_large size_ of the pre-human implements.

]

Away from the fire other members of the family group prowl in search of

food, but at night they all gather closely round the fire and build it

up, for it is their protection against the wandering bear and such-like

beasts of prey. The Old Man is the only fully adult male in the little

group. There are women, boys and girls, but so soon as the boys are big

enough to rouse the Old Man’s jealousy, he will fall foul of them and

either drive them off or kill them. Some girls may perhaps go off with

these exiles, or two or three of these youths may keep together for a

time, wandering until they come upon some other group, from which they

may try to steal a mate. Then they would probably fall out among

themselves. Some day, when he is forty years old perhaps or even older,

and his teeth are worn down and his energy abating, some younger male

will stand up to the Old Man and kill him and reign in his stead. There

is probably short shrift for the old at the squatting-place. So soon as

they grow weak and bad-tempered, trouble and death come upon them.

What did they eat at the squatting-place?

“Primeval man is commonly described as a hunter of the great hairy

mammoth, of the bear, and the lion, but it is in the highest degree

improbable that the human savage ever hunted animals much larger than

the hare, the rabbit, and the rat. Man was probably the hunted rather

than the hunter.

[Illustration: AUSTRALIA & the Western Pacific in the Glacial Age]

“The primeval savage was both herbivorous and carnivorous. He had for

food hazel-nuts, beech-nuts, sweet chestnuts, earth-nuts, and acorns. He

had crab-apples, wild pears, wild cherries, wild gooseberries, bullaces,

sorbs, sloes, blackberries, yewberries, hips and haws, water-cress,

fungi, the larger and softer leaf-buds, Nostoc (the vegetable substance

called ‘fallen stars’ by country-folk), the fleshy, juicy,

asparagus-like rhizomes or subterranean stems of the _Labiatæ_ and like

plants, as well as other delicacies of the vegetable kingdom. He had

birds’ eggs, young birds, and the honey and honeycomb of wild bees. He

had newts, snails, and frogs--the two latter delicacies are still highly

esteemed in Normandy and Brittany. He had fish, dead and alive, and

fresh-water mussels; he could easily catch fish with his hands and

paddle and dive for and trap them. By the seaside he would have fish,

mollusca, and seaweed. He would have many of the larger birds and

smaller mammals, which he could easily secure by throwing stones and

sticks, or by setting simple snares. He would have the snake, the

slow-worm, and the crayfish. He would have various grubs and insects,

the large larvæ of beetles and various caterpillars. The taste for

caterpillars still survives in China, where they are sold in dried

bundles in the markets. A chief and highly nourishing object of food

would doubtlessly be bones smashed up into a stiff and gritty paste.

“A fact of great importance is this--primeval man would not be

particular about having his flesh food over-fresh. He would constantly

find it in a dead state, and, if semi-putrid, he would relish it none

the less--the taste for high or half-putrid game still survives. If

driven by hunger and hard pressed, he would perhaps sometimes eat his

weaker companions or unhealthy children who happened to be feeble or

unsightly or burthensome. The larger animals in a weak and dying state

would no doubt be much sought for; when these were not forthcoming, dead

and half-rotten examples would be made to suffice. An unpleasant odour

would not be objected to; it is not objected to now in many continental

hotels.

“The savages sat huddled close together round their fire, with fruits,

bones, and half-putrid flesh. We can imagine the old man and his women

twitching the skin of their shoulders, brows, and muzzles as they were

annoyed or bitten by flies or other insects. We can imagine the large

human nostrils, indicative of keen scent, giving rapidly repeated sniffs

at the foul meat before it was consumed; the bad odour of the meat, and

the various other disgusting odours belonging to a haunt of savages,

being not in the least disapproved.

“Man at that time was not a _degraded_ animal, for he had never been

higher; he was therefore an exalted animal, and, low as we esteem him

now, he yet represented the highest stage of development of the animal

kingdom of his time.”

That is at least an acceptable sketch of a Neanderthal squatting-place.

But before extinction overtook them, even the Neanderthalers learnt much

and went far.

Whatever the older Palæolithic men did with their dead, there is reason

to suppose that the later _Homo Neanderthalensis_ buried some

individuals at least with respect and ceremony. One of the best-known

Neanderthal skeletons is that of a youth who apparently had been

deliberately interred. He had been placed in a sleeping posture, head on

the right fore-arm. The head lay on a number of flint fragments

carefully piled together “pillow fashion.” A big hand-axe lay near his

head, and around him were numerous charred and split ox bones, as though

there had been a feast or an offering.

To this appearance of burial during the later Neanderthal age we shall

return when we are considering the ideas that were inside the heads of

primitive men.

This sort of men may have wandered, squatted about their fires, and died

in Europe for a period extending over 100,000 years, if we assume, that

is, that the Heidelberg jaw-bone belongs to a member of the species, a

period so vast that all the subsequent history of our race becomes a

thing of yesterday. Along its own line this species of men was

accumulating a dim tradition, and working out its limited possibilities.

Its thick skull imprisoned its brain, and to the end it was low-browed

and brutish.

§ 3

When the Dutch discovered Tasmania, they found a detached human race not

very greatly advanced beyond this Lower Palæolithic stage. But over most

of the world the Lower Palæolithic culture had developed into a more

complicated and higher life twenty or thirty thousand years ago. The

Tasmanians were not racially Neanderthalers;[34] their brain-cases,

their neck-bones, their jaws and teeth, show that; they had no

Neanderthal affinities; they were of the same species as ourselves.

There can be little doubt that throughout the hundreds of centuries

during which the scattered little groups of Neanderthal men were all

that represented men in Europe, real men, of our own species, in some

other part of the world, were working their way along parallel lines

from much the same stage as the Neanderthalers ended at, and which the

Tasmanians preserved, to a higher level of power and achievement. The

Tasmanians, living under unstimulating conditions, remote from any other

human competition or example, lagged behind the rest of the human

brotherhood.[35]

About 200 centuries ago or earlier, real men of our own species, if not

of our own race, came drifting into the European area.

X

THE LATER POSTGLACIAL PALÆOLITHIC MEN, THE FIRST TRUE MEN

(Later Palæolithic Age)

§ 1. _The Coming of Men Like Ourselves._ § 2. _Subdivision of the

Later Palæolithic._ § 3. _The Earliest True Men Were Splendid

Savages._ § 4. _Hunters Give Place to Herdsmen._ § 5. _No Sub-men

in America._

§ 1

The Neanderthal type of man prevailed in Europe at least for tens of

thousands of years. For ages that make all history seem a thing of

yesterday, these nearly human creatures prevailed. If the Heidelberg jaw

was that of a Neanderthaler, and if there is no error in the estimate of

the age of that jaw, then the Neanderthal Race lasted out for more than

200,000 years! Finally, between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago, as the

Fourth Glacial Age softened towards more temperate conditions (see Map

on p. 89), a different human type came upon the scene, and, it would

seem, exterminated _Homo Neanderthalensis_.[36] This new type was

probably developed in South Asia or North Africa, or in lands now

submerged in the Mediterranean basin, and, as more remains are

collected and evidence accumulates, men will learn more of their early

stages. At present we can only guess where and how, through the slow

ages, parallel with the Neanderthal cousin, these first _true men_ arose

out of some more ape-like progenitor. For hundreds of centuries they

were acquiring skill of hand and limb, and power and bulk of brain, in

that still unknown environment. They were already far above the

Neanderthal level of achievement and intelligence, when first they come

into our ken, and they had already split into two or more very

distinctive races.

[Illustration: Cromagnon

Man]

These new-comers did not migrate into Europe in the strict sense of the

word, but rather, as century by century the climate ameliorated, they

followed the food and plants to which they were accustomed, as those

spread into the new realms that opened to them. The ice was receding,

vegetation was increasing, big game of all sorts was becoming more

abundant. Steppe-like conditions, conditions of pasture and shrub, were

bringing with them vast herds of wild horse. Ethnologists (students of

race) class these new human races in one same species as ourselves, and

with all human races subsequent to them, under one common specific name

of _Homo sapiens_. They had quite human brain-cases and hands. Their

teeth and their necks were anatomically as ours are.

Now here again, with every desire to be plain and explicit with the

reader, we have still to trouble him with qualified statements and notes

of interrogation. There is now an enormous literature about these

earliest true men, the men of the Later Palæolithic Age, and it is still

for the general reader a very confusing literature indeed. It is

confusing because it is still confused at the source. We know of two

distinct sorts of skeletal remains in this period, the first of these

known as the Cro-Magnon race, and the second the Grimaldi race; but the

great bulk of the human traces and appliances we find are either without

human bones or with insufficient bones for us to define their associated

physical type. There may have been many more distinct races than these

two. There may have been intermediate types. In the grotto of Cro-Magnon

it was that complete skeletons of one main type of these Newer

Palæolithic men, these true men, were first found, and so it is that

they are spoken of as Cro-Magnards.

[Illustration: MAP SHOWING EUROPE AND WESTERN ASIA ABOUT THE TIME THE

TRUE MEN WERE REPLACING THE NEANDERTHALERS IN WESTERN EUROPE]

[Illustration: Reindeer Age Articles

(_drawn to differing scales_)

_Bone points_

(_Azillian--pierced for thong_)

_Pebble cup mortar_

_Harpoons of reindeer horn_

_Bone needles_

_Arrow straighteners_

(_reindeer horn_)

_Australian natives’ method of using throwing-stick or spear-thrower_

_Throwing-stick_ (_reindeer horn_)]

These Cro-Magnards were a tall people with very broad faces, prominent

noses, and, all things considered, astonishingly big brains. The brain

capacity of the woman in the Cro-Magnon cave exceeded that of the

average male to-day. Her head had been smashed by a heavy blow. There

were also in the same cave with her the complete skeleton of an older

man, nearly six feet high, the fragments of a child’s skeleton, and the

skeletons of two young men. There were also flint implements and

perforated sea-shells, used no doubt as ornaments. Such is one sample of

the earliest true men. But at the Grimaldi cave, near Mentone, were

discovered two skeletons also of the Later Palæolithic period, but of a

widely contrasted type, with negroid characteristics that point rather

to the negroid type. There can be no doubt that we have to deal in this

period with at least two, and probably more, highly divergent races of

true men. They may have overlapped in time, or Cro-Magnards may have

followed the Grimaldi race, and either or both may have been

contemporary with the late Neanderthal men. Various authorities have

very strong opinions upon these points, but they are, at most, opinions.

The whole story is further fogged at present by our inability to

distinguish, in the absence of skeletons, which race has been at work in

any particular case. In what follows the reader will ask of this or

that particular statement, “Yes, but is this the Cro-Magnard or the

Grimaldi man or some other that you are writing about?” To which in most

cases the honest answer is, “As yet we do not know.” Confessedly our

account of the newer Palæolithic is a jumbled account. There are

probably two or three concurrent and only roughly similar histories of

these newer Palæolithic men as yet, inextricably mixed up together. Some

authorities appear to favour the Cro-Magnards unduly and to dismiss the

Grimaldi people with as little as possible of the record.

The appearance of these truly human postglacial Palæolithic peoples was

certainly an enormous leap forward in the history of mankind. Both of

these main races had a human fore-brain, a human hand, an intelligence

very like our own. They dispossessed _Homo Neanderthalensis_ from his

caverns and his stone quarries. And they agreed with modern

ethnologists, it would seem, in regarding him as a different species.

Unlike most savage conquerors, who take the women of the defeated side

for their own and interbreed with them, it would seem that the true men

would have nothing to do with the Neanderthal race, women or men. There

is no trace of any intermixture between the races, in spite of the fact

that the newcomers, being also flint users, were establishing themselves

in the very same spots that their predecessors had occupied. We know

nothing of the appearance of the Neanderthal man, but this absence of

intermixture seems to suggest an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a

repulsive strangeness in his appearance over and above his low forehead,

his beetle brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature. Or he--and

she--may have been too fierce to tame. Says Sir Harry Johnston, in a

survey of the rise of modern man in his _Views and Reviews_: “The dim

racial remembrance of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains,

shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibalistic

tendencies, may be the germ of the ogre in folklore....”

These true men of the Palæolithic Age, who replaced the Neanderthalers,

were coming into a milder climate, and although they used the caves and

shelters of their predecessors, they lived largely in the open. They

were hunting peoples, and some or all of them appear to have hunted the

mammoth and the wild horse as well as the reindeer, bison, and aurochs.

They ate much horse. At a great open-air camp at Solutré, where they

seem to have had animal gatherings for many centuries, it is estimated

that there are the bones of 100,000 horses, besides reindeer, mammoth,

and bison bones. They probably followed herds of horses, the little

bearded ponies of that age, as these moved after pasture. They hung

about on the flanks of the herd, and became very wise about its habits

and dispositions. A large part of these men’s lives must have been spent

in watching animals.

Whether they tamed and domesticated the horse is still an open question.

Perhaps they learnt to do so by degrees as the centuries passed. At any

rate, we find late Palæolithic drawings of horses with marks about the

heads that are strongly suggestive of bridles, and there exists a

carving of a horse’s head showing what is perhaps a rope of twisted skin

or tendon. But even if they tamed the horse, it is still more doubtful

whether they rode it or had much use for it when it was tamed. The horse

they knew was a wild pony with a beard under its chin, not up to

carrying a man for any distance. It is improbable that these men had yet

learnt the rather unnatural use of animal’s milk as food. If they tamed

the horse at last, it was the only animal they seem to have tamed. They

had no dogs, and they had little to do with any sort of domesticated

sheep or cattle.

It greatly aids us to realize their common humanity that these earliest

true men could draw. Both races, it would seem, drew astonishingly well.

They were by all standards savages, but they were artistic savages. They

drew better than any of their successors down to the beginnings of

history. They drew and painted on the cliffs and cave walls that they

had wrested from the Neanderthal men. And the surviving drawings come to

the ethnologist, puzzling over bones and scraps, with the effect of a

plain message shining through guesswork and darkness. They drew on bones

and antlers; they carved little figures.

These late Palæolithic people not only drew remarkably well for our

information, and with an increasing skill as the centuries passed, but

they have also left us other information about their lives in their

graves. They buried. They buried their dead, often with ornaments,

weapons, and food; they used a lot of colour in the burial, and

evidently painted the body. From that one may infer that they painted

their bodies during life. Paint was a big fact in their lives. They were

inveterate painters; they used black, brown, red, yellow, and white

pigments, and the pigments they used endure to this day in the caves of

France and Spain. Of all modern races, none have shown so pictorial a

disposition; the nearest approach to it has been among the American

Indians.

[Illustration: A Reindeer Age Masterpiece]

[Illustration:

Reindeer Age (_Aurignacian_)

Engravings & Carvings]

These drawings and paintings of the later Palæolithic people went on

through a long period of time, and present wide fluctuations in artistic

merit. We give here some early sketches, from which we learn of the

interest taken by these early men in the bison, horse, ibex, cave bear,

and reindeer. In its early stages the drawing is often primitive like

the drawing of clever children; quadrupeds are usually drawn with one

hindleg and one foreleg, as children draw them to this day. The legs on

the other side were too much for the artist’s technique. Possibly the

first drawings began as children’s drawings begin, out of idle

scratchings. The savage scratched with a flint on a smooth rock surface,

and was reminded of some line or gesture. But their solid carvings are

at least as old as their first pictures. The earlier drawings betray a

complete incapacity to group animals. As the centuries progressed, more

skilful artists appeared. The representation of beasts became at last

astonishingly vivid and like. But even at the crest of their artistic

time they still drew in profile as children do; perspective and the

fore-shortening needed for back and front views were too much for

them.[37] They rarely drew themselves. The vast majority of their

drawings represent animals. The mammoth and the horse are among the

commonest themes. Some of the people, whether Grimaldi people or

Cro-Magnon people, also made little ivory and soapstone statuettes, and

among these are some very fat female figures. These latter suggest the

physique of Grimaldi rather than of Cro-Magnon artists. They are like

Bushmen women. The human sculpture of the earlier times inclined to

caricature, and generally such human figures as they represent are far

below the animal studies in vigour and veracity.

Later on there was more grace and less coarseness in the human

representations. One little ivory head discovered is that of a girl with

an elaborate coiffure. These people at a later stage also scratched and

engraved designs on ivory and bone. Some of the most interesting groups

of figures are carved very curiously round bone, and especially round

rods of deer bone, so that it is impossible to see the entire design all

together. Figures have also been found modelled in clay, although no

Palæolithic people made any use of pottery.

Many of the paintings are found in the depths of unlit caves. They are

often difficult of access. The artists must have employed lamps to do

their work, and shallow soapstone lamps in which fat could have been

burnt have been found. Whether the seeing of these cavern paintings was

in some way ceremonial or under what circumstances they were seen, we

are now altogether at a loss to imagine.

§ 2

Archæologists distinguish at present three chief stages in the history

of these newer Palæolithic men in Europe, and we must name these stages

here. But it may be as well to note at the same time that it is a

matter of the utmost difficulty to distinguish which of two deposits in

different places is the older or newer. We may very well be dealing with

the work of more or less contemporary and different races when we think

we are dealing with successive ones. We are dealing, the reader must

bear in mind, with little disconnected patches of material, a few score

all together. The earliest stage usually distinguished by the experts is

the _Aurignacian_ (from the grotto of Aurignac); it is characterized by

very well-made flint implements, and by a rapid development of art and

more particularly of statuettes and wall paintings. The most esteemed of

the painted caves is ascribed to the latter part of this the first of

the three subdivisions of the newer Palæolithic. The second subdivision

of this period is called the _Solutrian_ (from Solutré), and is

distinguished particularly by the quality and beauty of its stone

implements; some of its razor-like blades are only equalled and not

surpassed by the very best of the Neolithic work. They are of course

unpolished, but the best specimens are as thin as steel blades and

almost as sharp. Finally, it would seem, came the _Magdalenian_ (from La

Madeleine) stage, in which the horse and reindeer were dwindling in

numbers and the red deer coming into Europe.[38] The stone implements

are smaller, and there is a great quantity of bone harpoons, spearheads,

needles, and the like. The hunters of the third and last stage of the

later Palæolithic Age appear to have supplemented a diminishing food

supply by fishing. The characteristic art of the period consists of deep

reliefs done upon bone and line engraving upon bone. It is to this

period that the designs drawn round bones belong, and it has been

suggested that these designs upon round bones were used to print

coloured designs upon leather. Some of the workmanship on bone was

extraordinarily fine. Parkyn quotes from de Mortillet, about the

Reindeer Age (Magdalenian) bone needles, that they “are much superior to

those of later, even historical, times, down to the Renaissance. The

Romans, for example, never had needles comparable to those of the

Magdalenian epoch.”

[Illustration: TIME DIAGRAM SHOWING THE ESTIMATED DURATION OF THE TRUE

HUMAN PERIODS.

This time diagram again is on a larger scale than its predecessors.

The time diagram on page 60, if it were on this scale, would be

nearly 4 feet long, and the diagram of the whole geological time on

page 14, between 500 and 5000 feet long (or perhaps even as much as

10,000 feet long).

]

It is quite impossible at present to guess at the relative lengths of

these ages. We are not even positive about their relative relationship.

Each lasted perhaps for four or five more thousand years, more than

double the time from the Christian Era to our own day.

At last it would seem that circumstances began to turn altogether

against these hunting Newer Palæolithic people who had flourished for so

long in Europe. They disappeared. New kinds of men appeared in Europe,

replacing them. These latter seem to have brought in bow and arrows;

they had domesticated animals and cultivated the soil. A new way of

living, the Neolithic way of living, spread over the European area; and

the life of the Reindeer Age and of the races of Reindeer Men, the Later

Palæolithic men, after a reign vastly greater than the time between

ourselves and the very earliest beginnings of recorded history, passed

off the European stage.

§ 3

There is a disposition on the part of many writers to exaggerate the

intellectual and physical qualities of these later Palæolithic men and

make a wonder of them.[39] Collectively considered, these people had

remarkable gifts, but a little reflection will show they had almost as

remarkable deficiencies. The tremendous advance they display upon their

Neanderthalian predecessors and their special artistic gift must not

blind us to their very obvious limitations. For all the quantity of

their brains, the quality was narrow and special. They had vivid

perceptions, an acute sense of animal form, they had the real artist’s

impulse to render; so far they were fully grown human beings. But that

disposition to paint and draw is shown to-day by the Bushmen, by

Californian Indians, and by Australian black fellows; it is not a mark

of all-round high intellectual quality. The cumulative effect of their

drawings and paintings is very great, but we must not make the mistake

of crowding all these achievements together in our minds as though they

had suddenly flashed out upon the world in a brief interval of time, or

as though they were all the achievements of one people. These races of

Reindeer Men were in undisturbed possession of western Europe for a

period at least ten times as long as the interval between ourselves and

the beginning of the Christian Era, and through all that immense time

they were free to develop and vary their life to its utmost

possibilities. Their art constitutes their one claim to be accounted

more than common savages.

They were in close contact with animals, but they never seemed to have

got to terms with any animal unless it was the horse. They had no dogs.

They had no properly domesticated animals at all. They watched and drew

and killed and ate. They do not seem to have cooked their food. Perhaps

they scorched and grilled it, but they could not have done much more,

because they had no cooking implements. Although they had clay

available, and although there are several Palæolithic clay figures on

record, they had _no pottery_. Although they had a great variety of

flint and bone implements, they never rose to the possibilities of using

timber for permanent shelters or such-like structures. They never made

hafted axes or the like that would enable them to deal with timber.

There is a suggestion in some of the drawings of a fence of stakes in

which a mammoth seems to be entangled. But here we may be dealing with

superimposed scratchings. They had _no buildings_. It is not even

certain that they had tents or huts. They may have had simple skin

tents. Some of the drawings seem to suggest as much. It is doubtful if

they knew of the bow. They left no good arrowheads behind them. Certain

of their implements are said to be “arrow-straighteners” by

distinguished authorities, but that is about as much evidence as we have

of arrows. They may have used sharpened sticks as arrows. They had _no

cultivation_ of grain or vegetables of any sort. Their women were

probably squaws, smaller than the men; the earlier statuettes represent

them as grossly fat, almost as the Bushmen women are often fat to-day.

(But this may not be true of the Cro-Magnards.)

They clothed themselves, it would seem, in skins, if they clothed

themselves at all. These skins they prepared with skill and elaboration,

and towards the end of the age they used bone needles, no doubt to sew

these pelts. One may guess pretty safely that they painted these skins,

and it has even been supposed, printed off designs upon them from bone

cylinders. But their garments were mere wraps; there are no clasps or

catches to be found. They do not seem to have used grass or such-like

fibre for textiles. Their statuettes are naked. They were, in fact,

except for a fur wrap in cold weather, naked painted savages.

These hunters lived on open steppes for two hundred centuries or so, ten

times the length of the Christian era. They were, perhaps, overtaken by

the growth of the European forests, as the climate became milder and

damper. When the wild horse and the reindeer diminished in Europe, and a

newer type of human culture, with a greater power over food supply, a

greater tenacity of settlement, and probably a larger social

organization, arose, the Reindeer Men had to learn fresh ways of living

or disappear. How far they learnt and mingled their strain with the new

European populations, and how far they went under we cannot yet guess.

Opinions differ widely. Wright lays much stress on the “great hiatus”

between the Palæolithic and Neolithic remains, while Osborn traces the

likeness of the former in several living populations. In the region of

the Doubs and of the Dordogne in France, many individuals are to be met

with to this day with skulls of the “Cro-Magnon” type. Apparently the

Grimaldi type of men has disappeared altogether from Europe. Whether the

Cro-Magnon type of men mingled completely with the Neolithic peoples, or

whether they remained distinct and held their own in favourable

localities to the north and west, following the reindeer over Siberia

and towards America, which at that time was continuous with Siberia, or

whether they disappeared altogether from the world, is a matter that can

be only speculated about at present. There is not enough evidence for a

judgment. Possibly they mingled to a certain extent. There is little to

prevent our believing that they survived without much intermixture for a

long time in north Asia, that “pockets” of them remained here and there

in Europe, that there is a streak of their blood in most European

peoples to-day, and that there is a much stronger streak, if not a

predominant strain, in the Mongolian and American races.[40]

§ 4

It was about 12,000 or fewer years ago that, with the spread of forests

and a great change of the fauna, the long prevalence of the hunting life

in Europe drew to its end. Reindeer vanished. Changing conditions

frequently bring with them new diseases. There may have been prehistoric

pestilences. For many centuries there may have been no men in Britain or

Central Europe (Wright). For a time there were in Southern Europe

drifting communities of some little known people who are called the

Azilians.[41] They may have been transition generations; they may have

been a different race. We do not know. Some authorities incline to the

view that the Azilians were the first wave of a race which, as we shall

see later, has played a great part in populating Europe, the dark-white

or Mediterranean or Iberian race. These Azilian people have left behind

them a multitude of pebbles, roughly daubed with markings of an unknown

purport (see illus., p. 94). The use or significance of these Azilian

pebbles is still a profound mystery. Was this some sort of token

writing? Were they counters in some game? Did the Azilians play with

these pebbles or tell a story with them, as imaginative children will do

with bits of wood and stone nowadays? At present we are unable to cope

with any of these questions.

We will not deal here with the other various peoples who left their

scanty traces in the world during the close of the New Palæolithic

period, the spread of the forests where formerly there had been steppes,

and the wane of the hunters, some 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. We will go

on to describe the new sort of human community that was now spreading

over the northern hemisphere, whose appearance marks what is called the

_Neolithic Age_. The map of the world was assuming something like its

present outlines, the landscape and the flora and fauna were taking on

their existing characteristics. The prevailing animals in the spreading

woods of Europe were the royal stag, the great ox, and the bison; the

mammoth and the musk ox had gone. The great ox, or aurochs, is now

extinct, but it survived in the German forests up to the time of the

Roman Empire. It was never domesticated.[42] It stood eleven feet high

at the shoulder, as high as an elephant. There were still lions in the

Balkan peninsula, and they remained there until about 1000 or 1200 B.C.

The lions of Württemberg and South Germany in those days were twice the

size of the modern lion. South Russia and Central Asia were thickly

wooded then, and there were elephants in Mesopotamia and Syria, and a

fauna in Algeria that was tropical African in character.

Hitherto men in Europe had never gone farther north than the Baltic Sea

or the English midlands, but now Ireland, the Scandinavian peninsula,

and perhaps Great Russia were becoming possible regions for human

occupation. There are no Palæolithic remains in Sweden or Norway, nor in

Ireland or Scotland. Man, when he entered these countries, was

apparently already at the Neolithic stage of social development.

§ 5

Nor is there any convincing evidence of man in America before the end of

the Pleistocene.[43] The same relaxation of the climate that permitted

the retreat of the reindeer hunters into Russia and Siberia, as the

Neolithic tribes advanced, may have allowed them to wander across the

land that is now cut by Bering Strait, and so reach the American

continent. They spread thence southward, age by age. When they reached

South America, they found the giant sloth (the _Megatherium_), the

glyptodon, and many other extinct creatures, still flourishing. The

glyptodon was a monstrous South American armadillo, and a human

skeleton has been found by Roth buried beneath its huge tortoise-like

shell.[44]

All the human remains in America, even the earliest, it is to be noted,

are of an Amer-Indian character. In America there does not seem to have

been any preceding races of sub-men. Man was fully man when he entered

America. The old world was the nursery of the sub-races of mankind.

XI

NEOLITHIC MAN IN EUROPE[45]

§ 1. _The Age of Cultivation Begins._ § 2. _Where Did the Neolithic

Culture Arise?_ § 3. _Everyday Neolithic Life._ § 4. _How Did

Sowing Begin?_ § 5. _Primitive Trade._ § 6. _The Flooding of the

Mediterranean Valley._

§ 1

THE Neolithic phase of human affairs began in Europe about 10,000 or

12,000 years ago. But probably men had reached the Neolithic stage

elsewhere some thousands of years earlier.[46] Neolithic men came slowly

into Europe from the south or south-east as the reindeer and the open

steppes gave way to forest and modern European conditions.

The Neolithic stage in culture is characterized by: (1) the presence of

polished stone implements, and in particular the stone _axe_, which was

perforated so as to be the more effectually fastened to a wooden handle,

and which was probably used rather for working wood than in conflict.

There are also abundant arrow heads. The fact that some implements are

polished does not preclude the presence of great quantities of

implements of unpolished stone. But there are differences in the make

between even the unpolished tools of the Neolithic and of the

Palæolithic Period. (2) The beginning of a sort of agriculture, and the

use of plants and seeds. But at first there are abundant evidences that

hunting was still of great importance in the Neolithic Age. Neolithic

man did not at first sit down to his agriculture. He took snatch crops.

He settled later. (3) Pottery and proper cooking. The horse is no longer

eaten. (4) Domesticated animals. The dog appears very early. The

Neolithic man had domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. He was a

huntsman turned herdsman of the herds he once hunted.[47] (5) Plaiting

and weaving.

These Neolithic people probably “migrated” into Europe, in the same way

that the Reindeer Men had migrated before them; that is to say,

generation by generation and century by century, as the climate changed,

they spread after their accustomed food. They were not “nomads.”

Nomadism, like civilization, had still to be developed. At present we

are quite unable to estimate how far the Neolithic peoples were

new-comers and how far their arts were developed or acquired by the

descendants of some of the hunters and fishers of the Later Palæolithic

Age.

Whatever our conclusions in that matter, this much we may say with

certainty; there is no great break, no further sweeping away of one kind

of man and replacement by another kind between the appearance of the

Neolithic way of living and our own time. There are invasions,

conquests, extensive emigrations and intermixtures, but the races as a

whole carry on and continue to adapt themselves to the areas into which

they began to settle in the opening of the Neolithic Age. The Neolithic

men of Europe were white men ancestral to the modern Europeans. They may

have been of a darker complexion than many of their descendants; of that

we cannot speak with certainty. But there is no real break in culture

from their time onward until we reach the age of coal, steam, and

power-driven machinery that began in the eighteenth century.

After a long time gold, the first known of the metals, appears among the

bone ornaments with jet and amber. Irish Neolithic remains are

particularly rich in gold. Then, perhaps 6000 or 7000 years ago in

Europe, Neolithic people began to use copper in certain centres, making

out of it implements of much the same pattern as their stone ones. They

cast the copper in moulds made to the shape of the stone implements.

Possibly they first found native copper and hammered it into shape.[48]

Later--we will not venture upon figures--men had found out how to get

copper from its ore. Perhaps, as Lord Avebury suggested, they discovered

the secret of smelting by the chance putting of lumps of copper ore

among the ordinary stones with which they built the fire pits they used

for cooking. In China, Hungary, Cornwall, and elsewhere copper ore and

tinstone occur in the same veins; it is a very common association, and

so, rather through dirtiness than skill, the ancient smelters, it may

be, hit upon the harder and better bronze, which is an alloy of copper

and tin.[49] Bronze is not only harder than copper, but the mixture of

tin and copper is more fusible and easier to reduce. The so-called

“pure-copper” implements usually contain a small proportion of tin, and

there are no tin implements known, nor very much evidence to show that

early men knew of tin as a separate metal.[50][51] The plant of a

prehistoric copper smelter has been found in Spain, and the material of

bronze foundries in various localities. The method of smelting revealed

by these finds carries out Lord Avebury’s suggestion. In India, where

zinc and copper ore occur together, brass (which is an alloy of the two

metals) was similarly hit upon.

So slight was the change in fashions and methods produced by the

appearance of bronze, that for a long time such bronze axes and so forth

as were made were cast in moulds to the shape of the stone implements

they were superseding.

[Illustration: Neolithic Implements]

Finally, perhaps as early as 3000 years ago in Europe, and even earlier

in Asia Minor, men began to smelt iron. Once smelting was known to men,

there is no great marvel in the finding of iron. They smelted iron by

blowing up a charcoal fire, and wrought it by heating and hammering.

They produced it at first in comparatively small pieces;[52] its

appearance worked a gradual revolution in weapons and implements; but

it did not suffice to change the general character of men’s

surroundings. Much the same daily life that was being led by the more

settled Neolithic men 10,000 years ago was being led by peasants in

out-of-the-way places all over Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth

century.[53]

People talk of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age in

Europe, but it is misleading to put these ages as if they were of equal

importance in history. Much truer is it to say that there was:

(1) An _Early Palæolithic Age_, of vast duration; (2) a _Later

Palæolithic Age_, that lasted not a tithe of the time; and (3) the Age

of Cultivation, the age of the white men in Europe, which began 10,000

or at most 12,000 years ago, of which the Neolithic Period was the

beginning, and which is still going on.

§ 2

We do not know yet the region in which the ancestors of the white and

whitish Neolithic peoples worked their way up from the Palæolithic stage

of human development. Probably it was somewhere about south-western

Asia, or in some region now submerged beneath the Mediterranean Sea or

the Indian Ocean, that, while the Neanderthal men still lived their hard

lives in the bleak climate of a glaciated Europe, the ancestors of the

white men developed the rude arts of _their_ Later Palæolithic period.

But they do not seem to have developed the artistic skill of their more

northerly kindred, the European Later Palæolithic races. And through the

hundred centuries or so while Reindeer Men were living under

comparatively unprogressive conditions upon the steppes of France,

Germany, and Spain, these more-favoured and progressive people to the

south were mastering agriculture, learning to develop their appliances,

taming the dog, domesticating cattle, and, as the climate to the north

mitigated and the equatorial climate grew more tropical, spreading

northward. All these early chapters of our story have yet to be

disinterred. They will probably be found in Asia Minor, Persia, Arabia,

India, or north Africa, or they lie beneath the Mediterranean waters.

Twelve thousand years ago, or thereabouts--we are still too early for

anything but the roughest chronology--Neolithic peoples were scattered

all over Europe, north Africa, and Asia. They were peoples at about the

level of many of the Polynesian islanders of the last century, and they

were the most advanced peoples in the world.

§ 3

It will be of interest here to give a brief account of the life of the

European Neolithic people before the appearance of metals. We get our

light upon that life from various sources. They scattered their refuse

about, and in some places (_e.g._ on the Danish coast) it accumulated in

great heaps, known as the kitchen middens. They buried some of their

people, but not the common herd, with great care and distinction, and

made huge heaps of earth over their sepulchres; these heaps are the

barrows or dolmens which contribute a feature to the European, Indian,

and American scenery in many districts to this day. In connection with

these mounds, or independently of them, they set up great stones

(megaliths), either singly or in groups, of which Stonehenge in

Wiltshire and Carnac in Brittany are among the best-known examples. In

various places their villages are still traceable.

One fruitful source of knowledge about Neolithic life comes from

Switzerland, and was first revealed by the very dry winter of 1854, when

the water level of one of the lakes, sinking to an unheard-of lowness,

revealed the foundations of prehistoric pile dwellings of the Neolithic

and early Bronze Ages, built out over the water after the fashion of

similar homes that exist to-day in Celebes and elsewhere. Not only were

the timbers of those ancient platforms preserved, but a great multitude

of wooden, bone, stone, and earthenware utensils and ornaments, remains

of food and the like, were found in the peaty accumulations below them.

Even pieces of net and garments have been recovered. Similar lake

dwellings existed in Scotland, Ireland, and elsewhere--there are

well-known remains at Glastonbury in Somersetshire; in Ireland lake

dwellings were inhabited from prehistoric times up to the days when

O’Neil of Tyrone was fighting against the English before the plantation

of Scotch colonists to replace the Irish in Ulster in the reign of James

I of England. These lake villages had considerable defensive value, and

there was a sanitary advantage in living over flowing water.

Probably these Neolithic Swiss pile dwellings did not shelter the

largest communities that existed in those days. They were the homes of

small patriarchal groups. Elsewhere upon fertile plains and in more open

country there were probably already much larger assemblies of homes than

in those mountain valleys. There are traces of such a large community of

families in Wiltshire in England, for example; the remains of the stone

circle of Avebury near Silbury mound were once the “finest megalithic

ruin in Europe.”[54] It consisted of two circles of stones surrounded by

a larger circle and a ditch, and covering all together twenty-eight and

a half acres. From it two avenues of stones, each a mile and a half

long, ran west and south on either side of Silbury Hill. Silbury Hill is

the largest prehistoric artificial mound in England. The dimensions of

this centre of a faith and a social life now forgotten altogether by men

indicate the concerted efforts and interests of a very large number of

people, widely scattered though they may have been over the west and

south and centre of England. Possibly they assembled at some particular

season of the year in a primitive sort of fair. The whole community

“lent a hand” in building the mounds and hauling the stones. The Swiss

pile-dwellers, on the contrary, seem to have lived in practically

self-contained villages.

[Illustration: Pottery from Lake Dwellings

J.F.H.

(after a drawing in Déchelette’s “Manuel d’Archéologie”)]

[Illustration: Restoration of a Lake dwelling]

These lake-village people were considerably more advanced in methods and

knowledge, and probably much later in time than the early Neolithic

people who accumulated the shell mounds, known as kitchen middens, on

the Danish and Scotch coasts. These kitchen midden folk may have been as

early as 10,000 B.C. or earlier; the lake dwellings were probably

occupied continuously from 5000 or 4000 B.C. down almost to historic

times. Those early kitchen-midden people were among the most barbaric of

Neolithic peoples, their stone axes were rough, and they had no

domesticated animal except the dog. The lake-dwellers, on the other

hand, had, in addition to the dog, which was of a medium-sized breed,

oxen, goats, and sheep. Later on, as they were approaching the Bronze

Age, they got swine. The remains of cattle and goats prevail in their

débris, and, having regard to the climate and country about them, it

seems probable that these beasts were sheltered in the buildings upon

the piles in winter, and that fodder was stored for them. Probably the

beasts lived in the same houses with the people, as the men and beasts

do now in Swiss chalets. The people in the houses possibly milked the

cows and goats, and milk perhaps played as important a part in their

economy as it does in that of the mountain Swiss of to-day. But of that

we are not sure at present. Milk is not a natural food for adults; it

must have seemed queer stuff to take at first; and it may have been only

after much breeding that a continuous supply of milk was secured from

cows and goats. Some people think that the use of milk, cheese, butter,

and other milk products came later into human life when men became

nomadic. The writer is, however, disposed to give the Neolithic men

credit for having discovered milking. The milk, if they did use it (and,

no doubt, in that case sour curdled milk also, but not well-made cheese

and butter), they must have kept in earthenware pots, for they had

pottery, though it was roughly hand-made pottery and not the shapely

product of the potter’s wheel. They eked out this food supply by

hunting. They killed and ate red deer and roe deer, bison and wild boar.

And they ate the fox, a rather high-flavoured meat, and not what any one

would eat in a world of plenty. Oddly enough, they do not seem to have

eaten the hare, although it was available as food. They are supposed to

have avoided eating it, as some savages are said to avoid eating it to

this day, because they feared that the flesh of so timid a creature

might make them, by a sort of infection, cowardly.[55]

Of their agricultural methods we know very little. No ploughs and no

hoes have been found. They were of wood and have perished. Neolithic men

cultivated and ate wheat, barley, and millet, but they knew nothing of

oats or rye. Their grain they roasted, ground between stones and stored

in pots, to be eaten when needed. And they made exceedingly solid and

heavy bread, because round flat slabs of it have been got out of these

deposits. Apparently they had no yeast. If they had no yeast, then they

had no fermented drink. One sort of barley that they had is the sort

that was cultivated by the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, and

they also had an Egyptian variety of wheat, showing that their ancestors

had brought or derived this cultivation from the south-east. The centre

of diffusion of wheat was somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean region.

A wild form is still found in the neighbourhood of Mt. Hermon (see

footnote to Ch. XVI, § 1). When the lake dwellers sowed their little

patches of wheat in Switzerland, they were already following the

immemorial practice of mankind. The seed must have been brought age by

age from that distant centre of diffusion. In the ancestral lands of the

south-east men had already been sowing wheat perhaps for thousands of

years.[56] Those lake dwellers also ate peas, and crab-apples--the only

apples that then existed in the world. Cultivation and selection had not

yet produced the apple of to-day.

They dressed chiefly in skins, but they also made a rough cloth of flax.

Fragments of that flaxen cloth have been discovered. Their nets were

made of flax; they had as yet no knowledge of hemp and hempen rope. With

the coming of bronze, their pins and ornaments increased in number.

There is reason to believe they set great store upon their hair, wearing

it in large shocks with pins of bone and afterwards of metal. To judge

from the absence of realistic carvings or engravings or paintings, they

either did not decorate their garments or decorated them with plaids,

spots, interlacing designs, or similar conventional ornament. Before the

coming of bronze there is no evidence of stools or tables; the Neolithic

people probably squatted on their clay floors. There were no cats in

these lake dwellings; no mice or rats had yet adapted themselves to

human dwellings; the cluck of the hen was not as yet added to the sounds

of human life, nor the domestic egg to its diet.[57]

The chief tool and weapon of Neolithic man was his axe; his next the bow

and arrow. His arrow heads were of flint, beautifully made, and he

lashed them tightly to their shafts. Probably he prepared the ground for

his sowing with a pole, or a pole upon which he had stuck a stag’s horn.

Fish he hooked or harpooned. These implements no doubt stood about in

the interior of the house, from the walls of which hung his

fowling-nets. On the floor, which was of clay or trodden cow-dung (after

the fashion of hut floors in India to-day), stood pots and jars and

woven baskets containing grain, milk, and such-like food. Some of the

pots and pans hung by rope loops to the walls. At one end of the room,

and helping to keep it warm in winter by their animal heat, stabled the

beasts. The children took the cows and goats out to graze, and brought

them in at night before the wolves and bears came prowling.

[Illustration: _Hut urns, the first probably representing a

lake-dwelling.... After Lubbock._]

Since Neolithic man had the bow, he probably also had stringed

instruments, for the rhythmic twanging of a bow-string seems almost

inevitably to lead to that. He also had earthenware drums across which

skins were stretched; perhaps also he made drums by stretching skins

over hollow tree stems.[58] We do not know when man began to sing, but

evidently he was making music, and since he had words, songs were no

doubt being made. To begin with, perhaps, he just let his voice loose as

one may hear Italian peasants now behind their ploughs singing songs

without words. After dark in the winter he sat in his house and talked

and sang and made implements by touch rather than sight. His lighting

must have been poor, and chiefly firelight, but there was probably

always some fire in the village, summer or winter. Fire was too

troublesome to make for men to be willing to let it out readily.

Sometimes a great disaster happened to those pile villages, the fire got

free, and they were burnt out. The Swiss deposits contain clear evidence

of such catastrophes.

All this we gather from the remains of the Swiss pile dwellings, and

such was the character of the human life that spread over Europe, coming

from the south and from the east with the forests as, 10,000 or 12,000

years ago, the reindeer and the Reindeer Men passed away. It is evident

that we have here a way of life already separated by a great gap of

thousands of years of invention from its original Palæolithic stage. The

steps by which it rose from that condition we can only guess at. From

being a hunter hovering upon the outskirts of flocks and herds of wild

cattle and sheep, and from being a co-hunter with the dog, man by

insensible degrees may have developed a sense of proprietorship in the

beasts and struck up a friendship with his canine competitor. He learnt

to turn the cattle when they wandered too far; he brought his better

brain to bear to guide them to fresh pasture. He hemmed the beasts into

valleys and enclosures where he could be sure to find them again. He fed

them when they starved, and so slowly he tamed them. Perhaps his

agriculture began with the storage of fodder. He reaped, no doubt,

before he sowed. The Palæolithic ancestor away in that unknown land of

origin to the south-east first supplemented the precarious meat supply

of the hunter by eating roots and fruits and wild grains. Man storing

graminiferous grasses for his cattle might easily come to beat out the

grain for himself.

§ 4

How did man learn to sow in order that he might reap?

We may hesitate here to guess at the answer to that question. But a very

great deal has been made of the fact that wherever sowing occurs among

primitive people in any part of the world, it is accompanied by a human

sacrifice or by some ceremony which may be interpreted as the mitigation

and vestige of an ancient sacrificial custom. This is the theme of Sir

J. G. Frazer’s _Golden Bough_. From this it has been supposed that the

first sowings were in connection with the burial of a human being,

either through wild grain being put with the dead body as food or

through the scattering of grain over the body. It may be argued that

there is only one reason why man should have disturbed the surface of

the earth before he took to agriculture, and that was to bury his dead;

and in order to bury a dead body and make a mound over it, it was

probably necessary for him to disturb the surface over a considerable

area. Neolithic man’s chief apparatus for mound-making consisted of

picks of deer’s horn and shovels of their shoulder-blades, and with this

he would have found great difficulty in making a deep excavation. Nor

do we find such excavations beside the barrows. Instead of going down

into tough sub-soil, the mound-makers probably scraped up some of the

surface soil and carried it to the mound. All this seems probable, and

it gives just that wide area of bared and turned-over earth upon which

an eared grass, such as barley, millet, or primitive wheat, might have

seeded and grown. Moreover, the mound-makers, being busy with the mound,

would not have time to hunt meat, and if they were accustomed to store

and eat wild grain, they would be likely to scatter grain, and the grain

would be blown by the wind out of their rude vessels over the area they

were disturbing. And if they were bringing up seed in any quantity in

baskets and pots to bury with the corpse, some of it might easily blow

and be scattered over the fresh earth. Returning later to the region of

the mound, they would discover an exceptionally vigorous growth of food

grain, and it would be a natural thing to associate it with the buried

person, and regard it as a consequence of his death and burial. He had

given them back the grain they gave him increased a hundredfold.

At any rate, there is apparently all over the world a traceable

association in ancient ceremonial and in the minds of barbaric people

between the death and burial of a person and the ploughing and sowing of

grain. From this it is assumed that there was once a world-wide

persuasion that it was necessary that some one should be buried before a

crop could be sown, and that out of this persuasion arose a practice and

tradition of human sacrifice at seedtime, which has produced profound

effects in the religious development of the race. There may have been

some idea of refreshing the earth by a blood draught or revivifying it

with the life of the sacrificed person. We state these considerations

here merely as suggestions that have been made of the way in which the

association of seedtime and sacrifice arose. They are, at the best,

speculations; they have a considerable vogue at the present time, and we

have to note them, but we have neither the space nor the time here to

examine them at length. The valuable accumulations of suggestions due to

the industry and ingenuity of Sir J. G. Frazer still await a thorough

critical examination, and to his works the reader must go for the

indefatigable expansion of this idea.

§ 5

All these early beginnings must have taken place far back in time, and

in regions of the world that have still to be effectively explored by

the archæologists. They were probably going on in Asia or Africa, in

what is now the bed of the Mediterranean, or in the region of the Indian

Ocean, while the Reindeer man was developing his art in Europe. The

Neolithic men who drifted over Europe and western Asia 12,000 or 10,000

years ago were long past these beginnings; they were already close, a

few thousand years, to the dawn of written tradition and the remembered

history of mankind. Without any very great shock or break, bronze came

at last into human life, giving a great advantage in warfare to those

tribes who first obtained it. Written history had already begun before

weapons of iron came into Europe to supersede bronze.

Already in those days a sort of primitive trade had sprung up. Bronze

and bronze weapons, and such rare and hard stones as jade, gold because

of its plastic and ornamental possibilities, and skins and flax-net and

cloth, were being swapped and stolen and passed from hand to hand over

great stretches of country. Salt also was probably being traded. On a

meat dietary men can live without salt, but grain-consuming people need

it just as herbivorous animals need it. Hopf says that bitter tribal

wars have been carried on by the desert tribes of the Soudan in recent

years for the possession of the salt deposits between Fezzan and Murzuk.

To begin with, barter, blackmail, tribute, and robbery by violence

passed into each other by insensible degrees. Men got what they wanted

by such means as they could.[59]

§ 6

So far we have been telling of a history without events, a history of

ages and periods and stages in development. But before we conclude this

portion of the human story, we must record what was probably an event of

primary importance and at first perhaps of tragic importance to

developing mankind, and that was the breaking in of the Atlantic waters

to the great Mediterranean valley.

The reader must keep in mind that we are endeavouring to give him plain

statements that he can take hold of comfortably. But both in the matter

of our time charts and the three maps we have given of prehistoric

geography there is necessarily much speculative matter. We have dated

the last Glacial Age and the appearance of the true men as about 40,000

or 35,000 years ago. Please bear that “about” in mind. The truth may be

60,000 or 20,000. But it is no good saying “a very long time” or “ages”

ago, because then the reader will not know whether we mean centuries or

millions of years. And similarly in these maps we give, they represent

not the truth, but something like the truth. The outline of the land was

“some such outline.” There were such seas and such land masses. But both

Mr. Horrabin, who has drawn these maps, and I, who have incited him to

do so, have preferred to err on the timid side.[60] We are not

geologists enough to launch out into original research in these matters,

and so we have stuck to the 40-fathom line and the recent deposits as

our guides for our post-glacial map and for the map of 12,000 to 10,000

B.C. But in one matter we have gone beyond these guides. It is

practically certain that at the end of the last Glacial Age the

Mediterranean was a couple of land-locked sea basins, not connected--or

only connected by a torrential overflow river. The eastern basin was the

fresher; it was fed by the Nile, the “Adriatic” river, the “Red-Sea”

river, and perhaps by a river that poured down amidst the mountains that

are now the Greek Archipelago from the very much bigger Sea of Central

Asia that then existed. Almost certainly human beings, and possibly even

Neolithic men, wandered over that now lost Mediterranean valley.

The reasons for believing this are very good and plain. To this day the

Mediterranean is a sea of evaporation. The rivers that flow into it do

not make up for the evaporation from its surface. There is a constant

current of water pouring into the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, and

another current streaming in from the Bosphorus and Black Sea. For the

Black Sea gets more water than it needs from the big rivers that flow

into it; it is an overflowing sea, while the Mediterranean is a thirsty

sea. From which it must be plain that when the Mediterranean was cut off

both from the Atlantic Ocean and the Black Sea it must have been a

shrinking sea with its waters sinking to a much lower level than those

of the ocean outside. This is the case of the Caspian Sea to-day. Still

more so is it the case with the Dead Sea.

But if this reasoning is sound, then where to-day roll the blue waters

of the Mediterranean there must once have been great areas of land, and

land with a very agreeable climate. This was probably the case during

the last Glacial Age, and we do not know how near it was to our time

when the change occurred that brought back the ocean waters into the

Mediterranean basin. Certainly there must have been Grimaldi people, and

perhaps even Azilian and Neolithic people going about in the valleys and

forests of these regions that are now submerged. The Neolithic Dark

Whites, the people of the Mediterranean race, may have gone far towards

the beginnings of settlement and civilization in that great lost

Mediterranean Valley.

Mr. W. B. Wright[61] gives us some very stimulating suggestions here. He

suggests that in the Mediterranean basin there were two lakes, “one a

fresh-water lake, in the eastern depression, which drained into the

other in the western depression. It is interesting to think what must

have happened when the ocean level rose once more as a result of the

dissipation of the ice-sheets, and its waters began to pour over into

the Mediterranean area. The inflow, small at first, must have ultimately

increased to enormous dimensions, as the channel was slowly lowered by

erosion and the ocean level slowly rose. If there were any

unconsolidated materials on the sill of the Strait, the result must have

been a genuine debacle, and if we consider the length of time which even

an enormous torrent would take to fill such a basin as that of the

Mediterranean, we must conclude that this result was likely to have

been attained in any case. Now, this may seem all the wildest

speculation, but it is not entirely so, for if we examine a submarine

contour map of the Straits of Gibraltar, we find there is an enormous

valley running up from the Mediterranean deep, right through the

Straits, and trenching some distance out on to the Atlantic shelf. This

valley or gorge is probably the work of the inflowing waters of the

ocean at the termination of the period of interior drainage.”

This refilling of the Mediterranean, which by the rough chronology we

are employing in this book may have happened somewhen between 30,000 and

10,000 B.C., must have been one of the greatest single events in the

pre-history of our race. If the later date is the truer, then, as the

reader will see plainly enough after reading the next two chapters, the

crude beginnings of civilization, the first lake dwellings and the first

cultivation, were probably round that eastern Levantine Lake into which

there flowed not only the Nile, but the two great rivers that are now

the Adriatic and the Red Sea. Suddenly the ocean waters began to break

through over the westward hills and to pour in upon these primitive

peoples--the lake that had been their home and friend became their

enemy; its waters rose and never abated; their settlements were

submerged; the waters pursued them in their flight. Day by day and year

by year the waters spread up the valleys and drove mankind before them.

Many must have been surrounded and caught by the continually rising salt

flood. It knew no check; it came faster and faster; it rose over the

treetops, over the hills, until it had filled the whole basin of the

present Mediterranean and until it lapped the mountain cliffs of Arabia

and Africa. Far away, long before the dawn of history, this catastrophe

occurred.

XII

EARLY THOUGHT[62]

§ 1. _Primitive Philosophy._ § 2. _The Old Man in Religion._ § 3.

_Fear and Hope in Religion._ § 4. _Stars and Seasons._ § 5.

_Story-telling and Myth-making._ § 6. _Complex Origins of

Religion._

§ 1

Before we go on to tell how 6000 or 7000 years ago men began to gather

into the first towns and to develop something more than the loose-knit

tribes that had hitherto been their highest political association,

something must be said about the things that were going on inside these

brains of which we have traced the growth and development through a

period of 500,000 years from the Pithecanthropus stage.

What was man thinking about himself and about the world in those remote

days?

At first he thought very little about anything but immediate things. At

first he was busy thinking such things as: “Here is a bear; what shall I

do?” Or “There is a squirrel; how can I get it?” Until language had

developed to some extent there could have been little thinking beyond

the range of actual experience, for language is the instrument of

thought as book-keeping is the instrument of business. It records and

fixes and enables thought to get on to more and more complex ideas. It

is the hand of the mind to hold and keep. Primordial man, before he

could talk, probably saw very vividly, mimicked very cleverly, gestured,

laughed, danced, and lived, without much speculation about whence he

came or why he lived. He feared the dark, no doubt, and thunderstorms

and big animals and queer things and whatever he dreamt about, and no

doubt he did things to propitiate what he feared or to change his luck

and please the imaginary powers in rock and beast and river. He made no

clear distinction between animate and inanimate things; if a stick hurt

him, he kicked it; if the river foamed and flooded, he thought it was

hostile. His thought was probably very much at the level of a bright

little contemporary boy of four or five. He had the same subtle

unreasonableness of transition and the same limitations. But since he

had little or no speech he would do little to pass on the fancies that

came to him, and develop any tradition or concerted acts about them.

The drawings even of Late Palæolithic man do not suggest that he paid

any attention to sun or moon or stars or trees. He was preoccupied only

with animals and men. Probably he took day and night, sun and stars,

trees and mountains, as being in the nature of things--as a child takes

its meal times and its nursery staircase for granted. So far as we can

judge, he drew no fantasies, no ghosts or anything of that sort. The

Reindeer Men’s drawings are fearless familiar things, with no hint about

them of any religious or occult feelings. There is scarcely anything

that we can suppose to be a religious or mystical symbol at all in his

productions. No doubt he had a certain amount of what is called

_fetishism_ in his life; he did things we should now think unreasonable

to produce desired ends, for that is all fetishism amounts to; it is

only incorrect science based on guess-work or false analogy, and

entirely different in its nature from religion. No doubt he was excited

by his dreams, and his dreams mixed up at times in his mind with his

waking impressions and puzzled him. Since he buried his dead, and since

even the later Neanderthal men seem to have buried their dead, and

apparently with food and weapons, it has been argued that he had a

belief in a future life. But it is just as reasonable to suppose that

early men buried their dead with food and weapons because they doubted

if they were dead, which is not the same thing as believing them to

have immortal spirits, and that their belief in their continuing

vitality was reinforced by dreams of the departed. They may have

ascribed a sort of were-wolf existence to the dead, and wished to

propitiate them.

The Reindeer man, we feel, was too intelligent and too like ourselves

not to have had some speech, but quite probably it was not very

serviceable for anything beyond direct statement or matter of fact

narrative. He lived in a larger community than the Neanderthaler, but

how large we do not know. Except when game is swarming, hunting

communities must not keep together in large bodies or they will starve.

The Indians who depend upon the caribou in Labrador must be living under

circumstances rather like those of the Reindeer men. They scatter in

small family groups, as the caribou scatter in search of food; but when

the deer collect for the seasonal migration, the Indians also collect.

That is the time for trade and feasts and marriages. The simplest

American Indian is 10,000 years more sophisticated than the Reindeer

man, but probably that sort of gathering and dispersal was also the way

of Reindeer men. At Solutré in France there are traces of a great

camping and feasting-place. There was no doubt an exchange of news

there, but one may doubt if there was anything like an exchange of

ideas. One sees no scope in such a life for theology or philosophy or

superstition or speculation. Fears, yes; but unsystematic fears; fancies

and freaks of the imagination, but personal and transitory freaks and

fancies.

Perhaps there was a certain power of suggestion in these encounters. A

fear really felt needs few words for its transmission; a value set upon

something may be very simply conveyed.

In these questions of primitive thought and religion, we must remember

that the lowly and savage peoples of to-day probably throw very little

light on the mental state of men before the days of fully developed

language. Primordial man could have had little or no tradition before

the development of speech. All savage and primitive peoples of to-day,

on the contrary, are soaked in tradition--the tradition of thousands of

generations. They may have weapons like their remote ancestors and

methods like them, but what were slight and shallow impressions on the

minds of their predecessors are now deep and intricate grooves worn

throughout the intervening centuries generation by generation.

§ 2

Certain very fundamental things there may have been in men’s minds long

before the coming of speech. Chief among these must have been fear of

the Old Man of the tribe. The young of the primitive squatting-place

grew up under that fear. Objects associated with him were probably

forbidden. Every one was forbidden to touch his spear or to sit in his

place, just as to-day little boys must not touch father’s pipe or sit in

his chair. He was probably the master of all the women. The youths of

the little community had to remember that. The idea of _something

forbidden_, the idea of things being, as it is called, _tabu_, not to be

touched, not to be looked at, may thus have got well into the human mind

at a very early stage indeed. J. J. Atkinson, in an ingenious analysis

of these primitive tabus which are found among savage peoples all over

the world, the tabus that separate brother and sister, the tabus that

make a man run and hide from his stepmother, traces them to such a

fundamental cause as this.[63] Only by respecting this primal law could

the young male hope to escape the Old Man’s wrath. And the Old Man must

have been an actor in many a primordial nightmare. A disposition to

propitiate him even after he was dead is quite understandable. One was

not sure that he _was_ dead. He might only be asleep or shamming. Long

after an Old Man was dead, when there was nothing to represent him but a

mound and a megalith, the women would convey to their children how awful

and wonderful he was. And being still a terror to his own little tribe,

it was easy to go on to hoping that he would be a terror to other and

hostile people. In his life he had fought for his tribe, even if he had

bullied it. Why not when he was dead? One sees that the Old Man idea was

an idea very natural to the primitive mind and capable of great

development.[64]

§ 3

Another idea probably arose early out of the mysterious visitation of

infectious diseases, and that was the idea of uncleanness and of being

accurst. From that, too, there may have come an idea of avoiding

particular places and persons, and persons in particular phases of

health. Here was the root of another set of tabus. Then man, from the

very dawn of his mental life, may have had a feeling of the sinister

about places and things. Animals, who dread traps, have that feeling. A

tiger will abandon its usual jungle route at the sight of a few threads

of cotton.[65] Like most young animals, young human beings are easily

made fearful of this or that by their nurses and seniors. Here is

another set of ideas, ideas of repulsion and avoidance, that sprang up

almost inevitably in men.

As soon as speech began to develop, it must have got to work upon such

fundamental feelings and begun to systematize them, and keep them in

mind. By talking together men would reinforce each other’s fears, and

establish a common tradition of tabus of things forbidden and of things

unclean. With the idea of uncleanness would come ideas of cleansing and

of removing a curse. The cleansing would be conducted through the advice

and with the aid of wise old men or wise old women, and in such

cleansing would lie the germ of the earliest priestcraft and witchcraft.

Speech from the first would be a powerful supplement to the merely

imitative education and to the education of cuffs and blows conducted by

a speechless parent. Mothers would tell their young and scold their

young. As speech developed, men would find they had experiences and

persuasions that gave them or seemed to give them power. They would make

secrets of these things. There is a double streak in the human mind, a

streak of cunning secretiveness and a streak perhaps of later origin

that makes us all anxious to tell and astonish and impress each other.

Many people make secrets in order to have secrets to tell. These secrets

of early men they would convey to younger, more impressionable people,

more or less honestly and impressively in some process of initiation.

Moreover, the pedagogic spirit overflows in the human mind; most people

like “telling other people not to.” Extensive arbitrary prohibitions for

the boys, for the girls, for the women, also probably came very early

into human history.

Then the idea of the sinister has for its correlative the idea of the

propitious, and from that to the idea of making things propitious by

ceremonies is an easy step.[66]

§ 4

Out of such ideas and a jumble of kindred ones grew the first

quasi-religious elements in human life. With every development of speech

it became possible to intensify and develop the tradition of tabus and

restraints and ceremonies. There is not a savage or barbaric race to-day

that is not held in a net of such tradition. And with the coming of the

primitive herdsman there would be a considerable broadening out of all

this sort of practice. Things hitherto unheeded would be found of

importance in human affairs. Neolithic man was nomadic in a different

spirit from the mere daylight drift after food of the primordial hunter.

He was a herdsman, upon whose mind a sense of direction and the lie of

the land had been forced. He watched his flock by night as well as by

day. The sun by day and presently the stars by night helped to guide his

migrations; he began to find after many ages that the stars are steadier

guides than the sun. He would begin to note particular stars and star

groups, and to distinguish any individual thing was, for primitive man,

to believe it individualized and personal. He would begin to think of

the chief stars as persons, very shining and dignified and trustworthy

persons looking at him like bright eyes in the night. His primitive

tillage strengthened his sense of the seasons. Particular stars ruled

his heavens when seedtime was due. The beginnings of agriculture were in

the sub-tropical zone, or even nearer the equator, where stars of the

first magnitude shine with a splendour unknown in more temperate

latitudes.

And Neolithic man was counting, and falling under the spell of numbers.

There are savage languages that have no word for any number above five.

Some peoples cannot go above two. But Neolithic man in the lands of his

origin in Asia and Africa even more than in Europe was already counting

his accumulating possessions. He was beginning to use tallies, and

wondering at the triangularity of three and the squareness of four, and

why some quantities like twelve were easy to divide in all sorts of

ways, and others, like thirteen, impossible. Twelve became a noble,

generous, and familiar number to him, and thirteen rather an outcast and

disreputable one.

[Illustration: A CARVED STATUE (“MENHIR”) OF THE NEOLITHIC PERIOD--A

CONTRAST TO THE FREEDOM AND VIGOUR OF PALÆOLITHIC ART.]

Probably man began reckoning time by the clock of the full and new

moons. Moonlight is an important thing to herdsmen who no longer merely

hunt their herds, but watch and guard them. Moonlight, too, was perhaps

his time for love-making, as indeed it may have been for primordial man

and the ground ape ancestor before him. But from the phases of the moon,

as his tillage increased, man’s attitude would go on to the greater

cycle of the seasons. Primordial man probably only drifted before the

winter as the days grew cold. Neolithic man knew surely that the winter

would come, and stored his fodder and presently his grain. He had to

fix a seedtime, a propitious seedtime, or his sowing was a failure. The

earliest recorded reckoning is by moons and by generations of men. The

former seems to be the case in the Book of Genesis, where, if one reads

the great ages of the patriarchs who lived before the flood as lunar

months instead of years, Methusaleh and the others are reduced to a

credible length of life. But with agriculture began the difficult task

of squaring the lunar month with the solar year; a task which has left

its scars on our calendar to-day. Easter shifts uneasily from year to

year, to the great discomfort of holiday-makers; it is now

inconveniently early and now late in the season because of this ancient

reference of time to the moon.

And when men began to move with set intention from place to place with

their animal and other possessions, then they would begin to develop the

idea of other places in which they were not, and to think of what might

be in those other places. And in any valley where they lingered for a

time, they would, remembering how they got there, ask, “How did this or

that other thing get here?” They would begin to wonder what was beyond

the mountains, and where the sun went when it set, and what was above

the clouds.

§ 5

The capacity for telling things increased with their vocabulary. The

simple individual fancies, the unsystematic fetish tricks and

fundamental tabus of Palæolithic man began to be handed on and made into

a more consistent system. Men began to tell stories about themselves,

about the tribe, about its tabus and why they had to be, about the world

and the why for the world. A tribal mind came into existence, a

tradition. Palæolithic man was certainly more of a free individualist,

more of an artist, as well as more of a savage, than Neolithic man.

Neolithic man was coming under prescription; he could be trained from

his youth and told to do things and not to do things; he was not so free

to form independent ideas of his own about things. He had thoughts given

to him; he was under a new power of suggestion. And to have more words

and to attend more to words is not simply to increase mental power;

words themselves are powerful things and dangerous things. Palæolithic

man’s words, perhaps, were chiefly just names. He used them for what

they were. But Neolithic man was thinking about these words, he was

thinking about a number of things with a great deal of verbal confusion,

and getting to some odd conclusions. In speech he had woven a net to

bind his race together, but also it was a net about his feet. Man was

binding himself into new and larger and more efficient combinations

indeed, but at a price. One of the most notable things about the

Neolithic Age is the total absence of that free direct artistic impulse

which was the supreme quality of later Palæolithic man. We find much

industry, much skill, polished implements, pottery with conventional

designs, co-operation upon all sorts of things, but no evidence of

personal creativeness.[67] Self-suppression is beginning for men. Man

has entered upon the long and tortuous and difficult path towards a life

for the common good, with all its sacrifice of personal impulse, which

he is still treading to-day.

Certain things appear in the mythology of mankind again and again.

Neolithic man was enormously impressed by serpents--and he no longer

took the sun for granted. Nearly everywhere that Neolithic culture went,

there went a disposition to associate the sun and the serpent in

decoration and worship. This primitive serpent worship spread ultimately

far beyond the regions where the snake is of serious practical

importance in human life.

§ 6

With the beginnings of agriculture a fresh set of ideas arose in men’s

minds. We have already indicated how easily and naturally men may have

come to associate the idea of sowing with a burial. Sir J. G. Frazer has

pursued the development of this association in the human mind, linking

up with it the conception of special sacrificial persons who are killed

at seedtime, the conception of a specially purified class of people to

kill these sacrifices, the first priests, and the conception of a

_sacrament_, a ceremonial feast in which the tribe eats portions of the

body of the victim in order to share in the sacrificial benefits.

Out of all these factors, out of the Old Man tradition, out of the

desire to escape infection and uncleanness, out of the desire for power

and success through magic, out of the sacrificial tradition of seedtime,

and out of a number of like beliefs and mental experiments and

misconceptions, a complex something was growing up in the lives of men

which was beginning to bind them together mentally and emotionally in a

common life and action. This something we may call _religion_ (Lat.

_religare_, to bind[68]). It was not a simple or logical something, it

was a tangle of ideas about commanding beings and spirits, about gods,

about all sorts of “musts” and “must-nots.” Like all other human

matters, religion has grown. It must be clear from what has gone before

that primitive man--much less his ancestral apes and his ancestral

Mesozoic mammals--could have had no idea of God or Religion; only very

slowly did his brain and his powers of comprehension become capable of

such general conceptions. Religion is something that has grown up with

and through human association, and God has been and is still being

discovered by man.

[Illustration: Bronze Age Implements

(drawn to differing scales)]

This book is not a theological book, and it is not for us to embark upon

theological discussion; but it is a part, a necessary and central part,

of the history of man to describe the dawn and development of his

religious ideas and their influence upon his activities. All these

factors we have noted must have contributed to this development, and

various writers have laid most stress upon one or other of them. Sir J.

G. Frazer we have already noted as the leading student of the derivation

of sacraments from magic sacrifices. Grant Allen, in his _Evolution of

the Idea of God_, laid stress chiefly on the posthumous worship of the

“Old Man.” Sir E. B. Tylor (_Primitive Culture_) gave his attention

mainly to the disposition of primitive man to ascribe a soul to every

object animate and inanimate. Mr. A. E. Crawley, in _The Tree of Life_,

has called attention to other centres of impulse and emotion, and

particularly to sex as a source of deep excitement. The thing we have to

bear in mind is that Neolithic man was still mentally undeveloped, he

could be confused and illogical to a degree quite impossible to an

educated modern person. Conflicting and contradictory ideas could lie in

his mind without challenging one another; now one thing ruled his

thoughts intensely and vividly and now another; his fears, his acts,

were still disconnected as children’s are.

[Illustration: TIME DIAGRAM SHOWING THE GENERAL DURATION OF THE

NEOLITHIC PERIOD IN WHICH EARLY THOUGHT DEVELOPED.]

Confusedly under the stimulus of the need and possibility of

co-operation and a combined life, Neolithic mankind was feeling out for

guidance and knowledge. Men were becoming aware that personally they

needed protection and direction, cleansing from impurity, power beyond

their own strength. Confusedly in response to that demand, bold men,

wise men, shrewd and cunning men were arising to become magicians,

priests, chiefs, and kings. They are not to be thought of as cheats or

usurpers of power, nor the rest of mankind as their dupes. All men are

mixed in their motives; a hundred things move men to seek ascendancy

over other men, but not all such motives are base or bad. The magicians

usually believed more or less in their own magic, the priests in their

ceremonies, the chiefs in their right. The history of mankind henceforth

is a history of more or less blind endeavours to conceive a common

purpose in relation to which all men may live happily, and to create and

develop a common consciousness and a common stock of knowledge which may

serve and illuminate that purpose. In a vast variety of forms this

appearance of kings and priests and magic men was happening all over the

world under Neolithic conditions. Everywhere mankind was seeking where

knowledge and mastery and magic power might reside; everywhere

individual men were willing, honestly or dishonestly, to rule, to

direct, or to be the magic beings who would reconcile the confusions of

the community.

In many ways the simplicity, directness, and detachment of a later

Palæolithic rock-painter appeal more to modern sympathies than does the

state of mind of these Neolithic men, full of the fear of some ancient

Old Man who had developed into a tribal God, obsessed by ideas of

sacrificial propitiation and magic murder. No doubt the reindeer hunter

was a ruthless hunter and a combative and passionate creature, but he

killed for reasons we can still understand; Neolithic man, under the

sway of talk and a confused thought process, killed on theory, he killed

for monstrous and now incredible ideas, he killed those he loved through

fear and under direction. Those Neolithic men not only made human

sacrifices at seedtime; there is every reason to suppose they sacrificed

wives and slaves at the burial of their chieftains; they killed men,

women, and children whenever they were under adversity and thought the

gods were athirst. They practised infanticide.[69] All these things

passed on into the Bronze Age.

Hitherto a social consciousness had been asleep and not even dreaming

in human history. Before it awakened it produced nightmares.

Away beyond the dawn of history, 3000 or 4000 years ago, one thinks of

the Wiltshire uplands in the twilight of a midsummer day’s morning. The

torches pale in the growing light. One has a dim apprehension of a

procession through the avenue of stone, of priests, perhaps

fantastically dressed with skins and horns and horrible painted

masks--not the robed and bearded dignitaries our artists represent the

Druids to have been--of chiefs in skins adorned with necklaces of teeth

and bearing spears and axes, their great heads of hair held up with pins

of bone, of women in skins or flaxen robes, of a great peering crowd of

shock-headed men and naked children. They have assembled from many

distant places; the ground between the avenues and Silbury Hill is

dotted with their encampments. A certain festive cheerfulness prevails.

And amidst the throng march the appointed human victims, submissive,

helpless, staring towards the distant smoking altar at which they are to

die--that the harvests may be good and the tribe increase.... To that

had life progressed 3000 or 4000 years ago from its starting-place in

the slime of the tidal beaches.

XIII

THE RACES OF MANKIND

_§1. Is Mankind Still Differentiating? §2. The Main Races of

Mankind. §3. Was There an Alpine Race? §4. The Brunet Peoples. §5.

How Existing Races may be Related to Each Other._

§ 1

It is necessary now to discuss plainly what is meant by a phrase, used

often very carelessly, “The Races of Mankind.”

It must be evident from what has already been explained in Chapter III

that man, so widely spread and subjected therefore to great differences

of climate, consuming very different food in different regions, attacked

by different enemies, must always have been undergoing considerable

local modification and differentiation. Man, like every other species of

living thing, has constantly been tending to differentiate into several

species; wherever a body of men has been cut off, in islands or oceans

or by deserts or mountains, from the rest of humanity, it must have

begun very soon to develop special characteristics, specially adapted to

the local conditions. But, on the other hand, man is usually a wandering

and enterprising animal, for whom there exist few insurmountable

barriers. Men imitate men, fight and conquer them, interbreed, one

people with another. Concurrently for thousands of years there have been

two sets of forces at work, one tending to separate men into a multitude

of local varieties, and another to remix and blend these varieties

together before a separate species has been established.

These two sets of forces may have fluctuated in this relative effect in

the past. Palæolithic man, for instance, may have been more of a

wanderer, he may have drifted about over a much greater area, than

later Neolithic man; he was less fixed to any sort of home or lair, he

was tied by fewer possessions. Being a hunter, he was obliged to follow

the migrations of his ordinary quarry. A few bad seasons may have

shifted him hundreds of miles. He may therefore have mixed very widely

and developed few varieties over the greater part of the world.

The appearance of agriculture tended to tie those communities of mankind

that took it up to the region in which it was most conveniently carried

on, and so to favour differentiation. Mixing or differentiation is not

dependent upon a higher or lower stage of civilization; many savage

tribes wander now for hundreds of miles; many English villagers in the

eighteenth century, on the other hand, had never been more than eight or

ten miles from their villages, neither they nor their fathers nor

grandfathers before them. Hunting peoples often have enormous range. The

Labrador country, for instance, is inhabited by a few thousand

Indians,[70] who follow the one great herd of caribou as it wanders

yearly north and then south again in pursuit of food. This mere handful

of people covers a territory as large as France. Nomad peoples also

range very widely. Some Kalmuck tribes are said to travel nearly a

thousand miles between summer and winter pasture.

It carries out this suggestion, that Palæolithic man ranged widely and

was distributed, thinly indeed but uniformly, throughout the world, that

the Palæolithic remains we find are everywhere astonishingly uniform. To

quote Sir John Evans,[71] “The implements in distant lands are so

identical in form and character with the British specimens that they

might have been manufactured by the same hands.... On the banks of the

Nile, many hundreds of feet above its present level, implements of the

European types have been discovered; while in Somaliland, in an ancient

river-valley at a great elevation above the sea, Sir H. W. Seton-Karr

has collected a large number of implements formed of flint and

quartzite, which, judging from their form and character, might have been

dug out of the drift-deposits of the Somme and the Seine, the Thames or

the ancient Solent.”

Phases of spreading and intermixture have probably alternated with

phases of settlement and specialization in the history of mankind. But

up to a few hundred years ago it is probable that since the days of the

Palæolithic Age at least mankind has on the whole been differentiating.

The species has differentiated in that period into a very great number

of varieties, many of which have reblended with others, which have

spread and undergone further differentiation or become extinct. Wherever

there has been a strongly marked local difference of conditions and a

check upon intermixture, there one is almost obliged to assume a variety

of mankind must have appeared. Of such local varieties there must have

been a great multitude.

In one remote corner of the world, Tasmania, a little cut-off population

of people remained in the early Palæolithic stage until the discovery of

that island by the Dutch in 1642. They are now, unhappily, extinct. The

last Tasmanian died in 1877. They may have been cut off from the rest of

mankind for 15,000 or 20,000 or 25,000 years.

But among the numerous obstacles and interruptions to intermixture there

have been certain main barriers, such as the Atlantic Ocean, the

highlands, once higher, and the now vanished seas of central Asia and

the like, which have cut off great groups of varieties from other great

groups of varieties over long periods of time. These separated groups of

varieties developed very early certain broad resemblances and

differences. Most of the varieties of men in eastern Asia and America,

but not all, have now this in common, that they have yellowish buff

skins, straight black hair, and often high cheek-bones. Most of the

native peoples of Africa south of the Sahara, but not all, have black or

blackish skins, flat noses, thick lips, and frizzy hair. In north and

western Europe a great number of peoples have fair hair, blue eyes, and

ruddy complexions; and about the Mediterranean there is a prevalence of

white-skinned peoples with dark eyes and black hair. The black hair of

many of these dark whites is straight, but never so strong and waveless

as the hair of the yellow peoples. It is straighter in the east than in

the west. In southern India we find brownish and darker peoples with

straight black hair, and these as we pass eastward give place to more

distinctly yellow peoples. In scattered islands and in Papua and New

Guinea we find another series of black and brownish peoples of a more

lowly type with frizzy hair.

[Illustration: Australoid types]

But it must be borne in mind that these are very loose-fitting

generalizations. Some of the areas and isolated pockets of mankind in

the Asiatic area may have been under conditions more like those in the

European area; some of the African areas are of a more Asiatic and less

distinctively African type. We find a wavy-haired, fairish,

hairy-skinned race, the Ainu, in Japan. They are more like the Europeans

in their facial type than the surrounding yellow Japanese. They may be a

drifted patch of the whites or they may be a quite distinct people. We

find primitive black people in the Andaman Islands far away from

Australia and far away from Africa. There is a streak of very negroid

blood traceable in south Persia and some parts of India. These are the

“Asiatic” negroids. There is little or no proof that all black people,

the Australians, the Asiatic negroids and the negroes, derive from one

origin, but only that they have lived for vast periods under similar

conditions. We must not assume that human beings in the eastern Asiatic

area were all differentiating in one direction and all the human beings

in Africa in another. There were great currents of tendency, it is true,

but there were also backwaters, eddies, admixtures, readmixtures, and

leakages from one main area to the other. A coloured map of the world to

show the races would not present just four great areas of colour; it

would have to be dabbed over with a multitude of tints and intermediate

shades, simple here, mixed and overlapping there.

In the early Neolithic Period in Europe--it may be 10,000 or 12,000

years ago or so--man was differentiating all over the world, and he had

already differentiated into a number of varieties, but he has never

differentiated into different _species_. A “species,” we must remember,

in biological language is distinguished from a “variety” by the fact

that varieties can interbreed, while species either do not do so or

produce offspring which, like mules, are sterile. All mankind can

interbreed freely, can learn to understand the same speech, can adapt

itself to co-operation. And in the present age, man is probably no

longer undergoing differentiation at all. Readmixture is now a far

stronger force than differentiation. Men mingle more and more. Mankind

from the view of a biologist is an animal species in a state of arrested

differentiation and possible readmixture.

§ 2

It is only in the last fifty or sixty years that the varieties of men

came to be regarded in this light, as a tangle of differentiations

recently arrested or still in progress. Before that time students of

mankind, influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the story of Noah

and the Ark and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, were inclined to

classify men into three or four great races, and they were disposed to

regard these races as having always been separate things, descended from

originally separate ancestors. They ignored the great possibilities of

blended races and of special local isolations and variations. The

classification has varied considerably, but there has been rather too

much readiness to assume that mankind _must_ be completely divisible

into three or four main groups. Ethnologists (students of race) have

fallen into grievous disputes about a multitude of minor peoples, as to

whether they were of this or that primary race or “mixed,” or strayed

early forms, or what not. But all races are more or less mixed. There

are, no doubt, four main groups, but each is a miscellany, and there are

little groups that will not go into any of the four main divisions.

[Illustration: Bushwoman]

Subject to these reservations, when it is clearly understood that when

we speak of these main divisions we mean not simple and pure races, but

groups of races, then they have a certain convenience in discussion.

Over the European and Mediterranean area and western Asia there are, and

have been for many thousand years, white peoples, usually called the

CAUCASIANS,[72] subdivided into two or three subdivisions, the northern

blonds, an alleged intermediate race about which many authorities are

doubtful, and the southern dark whites; over eastern Asia and America a

second group of races prevails, the MONGOLIANS, generally with yellow

skins, straight black hair, and sturdy bodies; over Africa the NEGROES,

and in the region of Australia and New Guinea the black, primitive

AUSTRALOIDS. These are convenient terms, provided the student bears in

mind that they are not exactly defined terms. They represent only the

common characteristics of certain main groups of races; they leave out a

number of little peoples who belong properly to none of these

divisions, and they disregard the perpetual mixing where the main groups

overlap.

§ 3

[Illustration: Negro types]

[Illustration: Mongolian Types]

Whether the “Caucasian” race is to be divided into two or three main

subdivisions depends upon the classificatory value to be attached to

certain differences in the skeleton and particularly to the shape of the

skull. The student in his further reading will meet with constant

references to round-skulled (Brachycephalic) and long-skulled peoples

(Dolichocephalic). No skull looked at from above is completely round,

but some skulls (the dolichocephalic) are much more oblong than others;

when the width of a skull is four-fifths or more of its length from back

to front, that skull is called brachycephalic; when the width is less

than four-fifths of the length, the skull is dolichocephalic. While some

ethnologists regard the difference between brachycephaly and

dolichocephaly as a difference of quite primary importance, another

school--which the writer must confess has entirely captured his

convictions--dismisses this as a mere secondary distinction. It seems

probable that the skull shapes of a people may under special

circumstances vary in comparatively few generations.[73]

We do not know what influences alter the shape of the skull, just as we

do not know why people of British descent in the Darling region of

Australia (“Cornstalks”) grow exceptionally tall, or why in New England

their jaw-bones seem to become slighter and their teeth in consequence

rather crowded. Even in Neolithic times dolichocephalic and

brachycephalic skulls are found in the same group of remains and often

buried together, and that is true of most peoples to-day. Some peoples,

such as the mountain people of central Europe, have more brachycephalic

individuals per cent. than others; some, as the Scandinavians, are more

prevalently dolichocephalic. In Neolithic Britain and in Scandinavia

the earliest barrows (= tomb mounds) are long grave-shaped barrows and

the late ones round, and the skulls found in the former are usually

dolichocephalic and in the latter most frequently brachycephalic. This

points perhaps to a succession of races in western Europe in the

Neolithic Period (see Chapter XLV), but it may also point to changes of

diet, habit, or climate.

[Illustration: Caucasian Types]

But it is this study of skull shapes which has led many ethnologists to

divide the Caucasian race, not, as it was divided by Huxley, into two,

the northern _blonds_ and the Mediterranean and North African _dark

whites_ or brunets, but into three. They split his blonds into two

classes. They distinguish a northern European type, blond and

dolichocephalic, the Nordic; a Mediterranean or Iberian race, Huxley’s

dark whites, which is dark-haired and dolichocephalic, and between

these two they descry this third race, their brachycephalic race, the

Alpine race. The opposite school would treat the alleged Alpine race

simply as a number of local brachycephalic varieties of Nordic or

Iberian peoples. The Iberian peoples were the Neolithic people of the

long barrows, and seem at first to have pervaded most of Europe and

western Asia.

[Illustration: Map of EUROPE, Western ASIA & Northern AFRICA in the

Forest (Pluvial) Period (about 15,000 or 12,000 years ago)

Showing probable range of the main races before the dawn of history.

Mountain barriers are indicated thus [symbol] Sea barriers [symbol]]

§ 4

This Mediterranean or Iberian race certainly had a wider range in early

times, and was a less specialized and distinctive race than the Nordic.

It is very hard to define its southward boundaries from the Negro, or to

mark off its early traces in central Asia from those of early Dravidians

or Mongolians. Wilfred Scawen Blunt[74] says that Huxley “had long

suspected a common origin of the Egyptians and the Dravidians of India,

perhaps a long belt of brown-skinned men from India to Spain in very

early days.” Across France and Great Britain these dark-white Iberian or

Mediterranean people were ousted by a round-barrow-making “Alpine” or

Alpine-Nordic race, and the dawn of history in Europe sees them being

pressed westward and southward everywhere by the expansion of the fairer

northern peoples.

It is possible that this “belt” of Huxley’s of dark-white and

brown-skinned men, this race of brunet-brown folk, ultimately spread

even farther than India; that they reached to the shores of the Pacific,

and that they were everywhere the original possessors of the Neolithic

culture and the beginners of what we call civilization. The Nordic and

the Mongolian peoples may have been but north-western and north-eastern

branches from this more fundamental stem. Or the Nordic race may have

been a branch, while the Mongolian, like the Negro, may have been

another equal and distinct stem with which the brunet-browns met and

mingled in South China. Or the Nordic peoples also may have developed

separately from a palæolithic stage.

[Illustration: The Swastika]

At some period in human history (see Elliot Smith’s _Migrations of Early

Culture_) there seems to have been a special type of Neolithic culture

widely distributed in the world which had a group of features so curious

and so unlikely to have been independently developed in different

regions of the earth, as to compel us to believe that it was in effect

one culture. It reached through all the regions inhabited by the brunet

Mediterranean race, and beyond through India, Further India, up the

Pacific coast of China, and it spread at last across the Pacific and to

Mexico and Peru. It was a coastal culture not reaching deeply inland.

(Here again we cover the ground of Huxley’s “belt of brown-skinned men,”

and extend it far to the east across the stepping-stones of Polynesia.

There are, we may note, some very striking resemblances between early

Japanese pottery and so forth and similar Peruvian productions.) This

peculiar development of the Neolithic culture, which, Elliot Smith

called the _heliolithic_[75] culture, included many or all of the

following odd practices: (1) circumcision, (2) the very queer custom of

sending the _father_ to bed when a child is born, known as the

_couvade_, (3) the practice of massage, (4) the making of mummies, (5)

megalithic monuments[76] (_e.g._ Stonehenge), (6) artificial deformation

of the heads of the young by bandages, (7) tattooing, (8) religious

association of the sun and the serpent, and (9) the use of the symbol

known as the swastika (see figure) for good luck. This odd little symbol

spins gaily round the world; it seems incredible that men would have

invented and made a pet of it twice over. Elliot Smith traces these

practices in a sort of constellation all over this great

Mediterranean-Indian Ocean-Pacific area. Where one occurs, most of the

others occur. They link Brittany with Borneo and Peru. But this

constellation of practices does not crop up in the primitive homes of

Nordic or Mongolian peoples, nor does it extend southward much beyond

equatorial Africa. For thousands of years, from 15,000 to 1000 B.C.,

such a heliolithic Neolithic culture and its brownish possessors may

have been oozing round the world through the warmer regions of the

world, drifting by canoes often across wide stretches of sea. And its

region of origin may have been, as Elliot Smith suggests, the

Mediterranean and North-African region. It must have been spreading up

the Pacific Coast and across the island stepping-stones to America, long

after it had passed on into other developments in its areas of origin.

Many of the peoples of the East Indies, Melanesia and Polynesia were

still in this heliolithic stage of development when they were discovered

by European navigators in the eighteenth century. The first

civilizations in Egypt and the Euphrates-Tigris valley probably

developed directly out of this widespread culture.[77] We will discuss

later whether the Chinese civilization had a different origin. The

Semitic nomads of the Arabian desert seem also to have had a heliolithic

stage.

§ 5

It may clear up the necessarily rather confused discussion of this

chapter to give a summary of the views expressed here in a diagram.

This, on page 149, should be compared later with the language diagram on

page 155.

We have put the Australoids as a Negroid branch, but many authorities

would set back the Australoid stem closer to the Tasmanian, and there

may even be sound reasons for transferring both Australoids and

Tasmanians as separate branches to the left of the “Later Palæolithic

Races.” To avoid crowding we have omitted the Hairy Ainu. They may be

the last vestiges of an ancient primitive Pre-Nordic Pre-Mongolian

strain from which the Nordic races are descended.

[Illustration: A Diagrammatic Summary of Current Ideas of the

RELATIONSHIP of HUMAN RACES

(It must be borne in mind that human races interbreed freely.)]

XIV

THE LANGUAGES OF MANKIND

§ 1. _No one Primitive Language._ § 2. _The Aryan Languages._ § 3.

_The Semitic Languages._ § 4. _The Hamitic Languages._ § 5. _The

Ural Altaic Languages._ § 6. _The Chinese Languages._ § 7. _Other

Language Groups._ § 8. _Submerged and Lost Languages._ § 9. _How

Languages may be Related._

§ 1

It is improbable that there was ever such a thing as a common human

language. We know nothing of the language of Palæolithic man; we do not

even know whether Palæolithic man talked freely.