upon a piece of slate has been found. This was in a cave in France,
and it, as well as the numbers of bones of these animals in the caves,
shows that the reindeer, which now only inhabits the Arctic regions,
must have been common then in France. You will see drawings of both
these on page 135.
These primeval people built no houses. They lived in natural caves, and
scattered the remains of their food about the floor, so that we know
what they ate. Among the animals they used for food were the horse,
the reindeer, the ox, the cave-lion and bear, the wolf, the hyena, the
goat, the hare and several others, besides salmon and other fish. They
were very fond of the marrow of the bones, which they cracked with
stone hammers, and had little spoons made of bone with which to pick it
out.
They had places for making flint weapons too. At Cissbury Camp, near
Worthing, there is one of their old workshops. There are galleries dug
into the chalk where they got the flints, and there are thousands of
chips of flint lying about, with half finished arrow-heads, and some
of the tools they dug with. They had no spades or pickaxes; but they
used the broad, flat, shoulder-blade bone of the ox as a spade, and the
sharp brow antler of a deer’s horn for a pickaxe, to get these flints
out with. It must have been very hard work for them, because bone
spades and horn pickaxes would soon wear out, and would not be nearly
so useful as ours made of iron.
[Illustration: XI.
_Picture of Mammoth Scratched on Ivory._
_Fight between Reindeer Scratched on Slate._]
It is difficult to be certain how these stone-age people cooked their
food. Of course they could have roasted it, and the half-burnt bones in
some caves show that they did so; but in some caves in France there is
not a single burnt bone to be found. In these French cave dwellings,
too, there are no pieces of earthenware, as there are in some
others; so that the people could not have boiled it, unless they had
wooden pots and dropped red-hot stones into the water in them until the
meat got boiled, as some savages do now. Or they might have cooked it
under the hot ashes.
The people who used earthenware must have made more progress. It is
easy to understand how they made this useful discovery. Suppose they
had lighted a fire upon a damp clay soil, the earth would get baked
hard and crack off in pieces, and they would see that this soil could
be worked in the hands while soft into the shape of pans and dishes,
which could be dried quite hard in the sun or baked in hot ashes, just
as boys make clay marbles now. They could live much more comfortably
even with these rough earthenware things, and cook their food more
conveniently; but they still used the stone and flint tools and
weapons, and iron was still unknown to them.
The people of whom I have been speaking are principally the men of the
First Stone Age, when the art of polishing tools and weapons had not
been found out. They simply chipped these things out of the flints and
left them very rough; but the men of the next, or Second Stone Age,
made great improvements. They ground their flint knives and axes with
other stones, and rubbed them down to sharp edges and points, so that
they must have been much more useful for killing and cutting up the
animals they hunted. All their bone and horn tools are much better
made, and sometimes ornamented prettily with marks cut upon them. The
Second Stone Age men evidently wore clothing, most probably made of the
skins of animals—for the long strips of bone with a hole at one end
which you see in the picture could not have been used for any other
purpose, except to draw threads through something. The threads were
very likely either the sinews of animals pulled out of the flesh, or
thin strips of their skins, or perhaps the inner bark of a tree twisted
into a kind of string. In the colder parts of Europe and America these
ancient people would need some protection from the weather. How then
did the people of the First Stone Age manage, if they had no bone
needles, as I think they had not, with which to make clothing? They
must have wrapped themselves in the skins just as they came from the
backs of the animals.
It is not easy to be always sure, when we find a cave and all these
relics of pre-historic man, whether the inhabitants belonged to the
First or the Second Stone Age. Sometimes there are signs of polishing
and grinding on the tools, and then we may suppose that men were
gradually getting more skilful, until they finished off all their
weapons beautifully. But there is such a very great difference in the
perfection of these useful articles found in some places and those
found in others that we have no doubt men made slow progress, from the
rough or First Stone Age, to the polished or Second Stone Age.
In neither the first nor second stone period had men yet learned to
build any kind of habitations. They lived in caves simply, like wild
animals. On the banks of the river Vezère in France, which has cut
its way deeply through the rock, there are some celebrated caves once
inhabited by pre-historic men, and some of them are very large.
They were most likely hollowed out in the cliff by water, and many
generations of men lived here. In one of them four human skeletons were
found, with plenty of stone and flint tools, besides the bones of the
mammoth and lion, reindeer and other animals. The mammoth then as well
as the reindeer lived at that time in the valley of the Vezère. There
is no doubt that these caves were inhabited at separate times by people
who used only the roughest and simplest stone tools, and by others
who had made some progress and could polish their tools and make them
of bone and could scratch pictures of animals upon slips of bone and
slate. It is curious that all these drawings are side-view drawings,
and they are only outlines, just like the drawings of children now,
and the Esquimaux of the Arctic regions; because these people,
although they were grown up, had not discovered the art of drawing in
perspective and shading the figures. Still the pictures are wonderfully
true to nature, and must have been copied from living animals. There is
no earthenware in any of these caves, so that the useful art of making
pottery had not been discovered, neither is there any in the caves in
Switzerland, where the bones of the mammoth, lion, and rhinoceros are
also found, and the tools and weapons are much the same as those in the
French caverns. It is impossible to say whether the cave-dwellers of
France and Switzerland lived at the same time exactly, but they were in
about the same condition of civilization, and they must both have been
quite familiar with the appearance of the mammoth and lion, and other
animals, which are not mentioned in any history, however old it may be,
as inhabitants of these countries.
A discovery has lately been made in France of a large cavern near
Belfort, in the limestone rock, which has been covered up for ages. The
quarrymen while cutting out the stone came upon a small opening leading
into a very large cave, in which there was a great quantity of human
skeletons and bones and some beautifully ornamented vases, polished
stone bracelets, and a mat of plaited rushes. To these people, then,
the arts of pottery and weaving were known, and this was probably one
of their burying-places. They were evidently much more civilized than
the ancient people of the valley of the Vezère; but this cave must also
be of a great age, and its inhabitants have left no record of their
history in any kind of writing.
Quite lately, too, we have learned something of the early races of man
in Colorado. Many of the caves in that country have been altered and
made more like regular houses, and some appear even to have been cut
out of the rock entirely by human hands; and in the plains there are
ruins of large cities.
Though still in the stone age, for all the weapons yet found among
these ruins are of stone, the Colorado people were more civilized than
the stone-age people of the Vezère caverns, because they had begun
to build and knew how to make pottery. It is strange, too, that the
present natives of Colorado are not so civilized as the early people,
and if they have descended from them they have not improved, but rather
the contrary. There are other caverns in various parts of the world
containing these curious relics of races long since passed away, but
some of the principal have been mentioned, enough perhaps to interest
you and show you that men were living in Europe together with the large
animals of the Tertiary period, and that they had made very little
progress in the arts and manufactures, and had not even begun to build
the roughest houses.
In many parts of the world even now there are savages nearly as
uncivilized as the cave-dwellers of Europe were then. When Captain
Cook visited New Zealand, more than a hundred years ago, the natives
there had nothing but stone and bone tools, very like those found in
the European caverns, and the inhabitants of some of the islands in the
Pacific Ocean still use stone axes and hammers and bone needles.[25]
Captain Moresby, too, who made a voyage to the south-east coast of New
Guinea a few years ago, tells us that the natives have beautiful stone
axes, but they were so ignorant of the use of iron that they refused
to give him one of their stone axes for a new iron hatchet which he
offered them. No doubt the stone weapon cost a great deal of labour and
patience to make, and perhaps the iron one was made by machinery in a
few minutes, and was really more useful, but the native had proved his
own axe and knew nothing of the iron one, so that it is no wonder that
he refused it. But what a history these two axes tell—the stone and the
iron! The stone shows us man in his childhood, and the iron man in his
manhood, and what an immensely long time there is between the two. How
much thought, and trial and failure, and patience and industry, were
spent by mankind before the stone axe grew into the iron!
In Europe man has long since grown out of his childhood, but in many
parts of the world he is no more civilized than the men who saw the
mammoth crashing through the forests of England and France, and heard
the lion roar at night on the banks of the Thames, and watched the
hippopotamus swimming across the river at Westminster. It is most
likely, then, that Europe and parts of Asia and America were inhabited
long before those places where men are even now in the stone age—such
as the islands in the Pacific Ocean, New Guinea, Australia, &c.
What a life the pre-historic men of Europe must have lived! Here
they were surrounded by huge dangerous animals, and had no means of
protecting themselves against them but with these rough stone weapons.
Where London now stands with its miles of streets and busy life there
was a mighty forest, and the mammoth and rhinoceros tramped through
it by day, and the lion and hyena hunted the deer at night. When the
pre-historic men came down to the banks of the Thames in the day-time
to spear salmon, they saw the hippopotamus plunging about in the water
among the rushes, sweeping the long grass into their wide mouths, and
swimming from side to side with their young ones perched upon their
necks. It must have been a grand sight, but a fearful one too, and it
is no wonder that men thought the caves the only safe places to live in.
Sometimes in India the elephants come into the villages at night and
throw down wooden houses and kill people, and they are very much
feared, so that we can suppose how much more terrible the mammoth might
have been to the uncivilized cave-dwellers. If they shot at him with
the flint-pointed arrows they could scarcely hurt him, and it is more
likely that they got out of his way as quickly as possible whenever
they met him, and took good care never to interfere with the lion and
rhinoceros.
THE LAKE-DWELLERS.
Among the earliest inhabitants of Europe, there were some who did not
live in caves; but I think they must have lived a long time after the
cave-dwellers, when they built their houses out in the middle of the
lakes. These houses were built in a very curious way, and the remains
of them have been discovered in Ireland and Scotland, Switzerland and
other countries. The people carried quantities of stones, and earth,
and sticks out into the lake and let them sink to the bottom. Then
when they had piled up enough to make an island, they laid wood across
and set up their huts, and lived there surrounded by water. These were
very poor houses of course; but when men had begun to build for
themselves, they would find how much more comfortable they were than in
damp and dark caves. They must have had some kind of boats or canoes,
or they could not have passed between their lake-dwellings and the land
unless they swam to them; but I do not think that any of these boats
have been found. Perhaps they were made of the dried skins of animals
stretched over wooden frames, as I have seen savages make boats.
[Illustration: XII.
_Lake-Dwellings._]
There was another way of building these lake-dwellings, and a better
way too. Long poles were driven into the earth at the bottom of the
water, and when the builders had got enough of these together they
laid other poles across them, and built their huts on this floor above
the water. People are living now in much the same way near the Orinoco
river in South America, in New Guinea, and in Central Africa.[26]
The land all round is covered with water from the overflowing of the
rivers, which are very large, and the huts are built up on these poles
out of the way of it. The lake-dwellers of Europe would thus be safer
in their houses from dangerous animals than if they were on land. They
were more civilized than the cave-dwellers, but still a great many of
their tools and weapons were of stone and bone; yet we know that they
had made wonderful progress, because they had learned to make pottery,
and even to weave cloths out of hemp or flax. They had most likely
begun to plant and cultivate the land, too, for corn is found about
these dwellings, and the bones of domestic animals are very numerous.
They had left the cave-dwellers a long way behind in many things, in
wearing artificial clothing, in cultivating the land, and in keeping
domestic animals; but their implements—that is, their weapons and
tools—were not much improved, and were very much like those of the
cave-dwellers, though better finished and more polished than some of
theirs.
But not all the articles used by the lake people were of stone and
bone. Some of those who lived in the Swiss lakes had ornaments, such
as bracelets and hair-pins, made of the metal called bronze, and no
doubt they made spear-heads of the metal, because they would look to
usefulness before ornament.
Now you see how these people seem to have lived: first the old stone
age men, then those of the newer or polished stone age, and lastly
the lake-dwellers. The people of both the first and second stone ages
certainly saw the mammoth, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, lion, and reindeer
alive in France, Switzerland, and England; but when the lake-dwellings
were built, all these animals, except perhaps the reindeer, had died,
and most of the animals were the same as they are now. None of these
people have left us any kind of history whatever, except that which
their simple works tell us, their flint and bone weapons, and their
dwellings. They have set up no gigantic monuments like the Egyptians or
the Druids. They thought of no men to come after them who would take an
interest in their ways; but it is fortunate that what they did make was
of such lasting materials as stone and flint, or we should have known
next to nothing about their lives.
It is impossible to say how many thousands of years may have passed
before the rough stone weapons were replaced by the polished stone, or
the cave was exchanged for an artificial house in a lake; but you must
feel in your minds that the time was immense, and the more we study the
ways and works of pre-historic man, the more certain we become that it
is longer than the whole time that has passed since men first began to
use any kind of writing.
KITCHEN-MIDDENS.
I dare say you have seen untidy people in country places, and even in
towns, throw oyster-shells and broken dishes and dirt outside their
doors until quite a heap is formed. This is called a “midden,” and the
habit of doing this is a very old one. We learn just a little more of
the history of man from great middens made by ancient people in several
countries. They were first discovered in Denmark, and since then
they have been found in Scotland, Brazil, and New Zealand. They are
sometimes very large, and must have been used by the whole village as
places to throw the refuse of their cookery in. When these heaps have
been dug into all sorts of things have been found in them—the shells
of oysters and mussels, bones of fishes, birds, and animals, pieces
of broken earthenware, little ornaments, stone axes, arrow-heads, wood
ashes, burnt bones, and other odds and ends. In Brazil many of these
kitchen-middens are on the sea shore, and it seems as if the people
who made them came there to live on the shell-fish, for the shells
are the same as those living in the sea close by now. In New Zealand
the middens contain many of the bones of the Moa, which was described
in “The Animal Part,” and has now perished, and these are cracked in
such a manner that the people evidently wanted to get at the marrow
in them, and it shows too that this gigantic bird was common in New
Zealand then. The midden makers seemed to have lived in the open air,
and wherever food was most plentiful. Perhaps they built huts of the
bark and small branches of trees like the Australian savages, but such
houses would not last. We only know of the life of the midden makers
from these heaps. Their weapons are of the same kind and pattern as
those of the Second Stone Age, but they had learned to make rough
earthenware dishes and basins, and some pieces of a woven material
have been found, and pieces of wood and bone worked with a little
skill. Whether they lived after or before the lake-dwellers I cannot
say, but I should think about the same time.
These pre-historic people, nevertheless, were not always thinking of
making things which were useful. They thought too of making ornaments,
many of which are found in their dwellings and graves. Like ourselves,
they had an idea that little trinkets improved their appearance. In
one grave a skeleton was found with a small pile of shells under its
neck, which no doubt had been strung together as a necklace, and when
the string rotted the shells parted and fell in a heap under the head,
to be a memorial of that ancient man or woman’s possession of the same
feelings as our own. Various little articles, too, found about the
lake-dwellings show that people liked to decorate themselves.
We shall never know what language they spoke, but they must have been
able to tell their thoughts to one another. It was most likely a simple
language with few words as names for things and a simple grammar, like
the language of savages, because they had not so many things to talk
about as we have. The names of animals would perhaps be imitated from
their cries and the noises they made. These cries would be among the
most familiar sounds to them, and when they wished to speak of some
animal the simplest way would be to imitate the noise it generally
makes. If we think of our own language, we shall see how very likely
this was. We have many such words. We teach our children the names of
animals by the sounds they make. The dog we call “bow-wow,” the cow
“moo-moo,” the duck “quack-quack,” and many other names of the same
kind which you will think of yourselves. At the present time even the
name by which the Egyptians call the donkey has almost exactly the
same sound as our “hee-haw.” This trick of doubling or repeating the
sound, too, is very common among savages, who are as far behind us as
the pre-historic men were. The natives of Australia give these double
names to a great many animals and things, and sometimes do the same
with English words. They call fish “ningy-ningy,” and a certain tree
the “bunya-bunya,” and their language is full of such words. But it is
not only the names of things which have been made in this way. Verbs as
well as nouns have grown up thus. When we whisper to one another, that
word imitates the low sound we make.
I shall leave you to trace the natural origin of the following words,
and think how much of man’s spoken language is taken from common
sounds. Thus we have roar, shriek, whistle, hiss, sigh, sing, ring,
thump, bump, clash, clang, bang, twang, clap, smack, slap, smash,
swish, swirl, gong, thong, boom, bellow, batter, chatter, clatter,
snap, snip, whip, gurgle, shiver, quiver, rumble, roll, rattle,
prattle, and a hundred more. Words thus derived from familiar sounds
abound in all languages, and they, no doubt, are the easy steps by
which men climbed to a more complicated speech. The earliest men must
have been obliged to pay great attention to animals and birds, which
have voices of their own; for to hunt and catch them was the principal
occupation of their lives; therefore, when speaking of them to one
another, they would naturally call them by names resembling the sounds
they made. Our verbs “to squeak” and “to squeal” are certainly taken
from the cries of animals when in pain; but I have said enough to show
you how language grew up among pre-historic people.
We do not know for certain that they had any musical instruments, but
they would hear the sighing of the wind among the trees, and it would
almost certainly be found out that blowing down a hollow stick or reed,
open at one end and closed at the other, would make a whistle; but if
they used any of these things they would not last like the stone tools,
and have decayed away; and we do know that they had begun to draw upon
such imperishable materials as bone and slate.
There is a very interesting specimen of a human fossil in the British
Museum, which you ought to go and see, if you can; but in case you are
not able there is a drawing of it on page 159.[27] This specimen was
brought to England about the year 1814. Others like it have since been
found imbedded in the hard breccia limestone rock at the same place on
the shore of the island of Guadaloupe. The skeleton most likely was
that of a woman, from the shape of some of the bones, and most probably
was of the race of Caribs, of whom there are none living now. Perhaps
this was originally a burying place of the ancient inhabitants of the
island, and when the sea washed the small broken pieces of shells and
corals over it (all of which contain lime) they hardened into breccia
rock, and the skeleton became completely imbedded in it. This must
have taken a very long time, at all events; but I do not think the
Guadaloupe fossils are as old as the people who lived in the caves in
France. Some little ornaments and articles of human workmanship are
found with these skeletons, which show that the people to whom they
belonged were still in the Stone Age. There is very little to judge
from when we wish to get some idea of the time these fossils have been
in this breccia: but at this particular place the rock is formed pretty
quickly, as we can see; and it is quite likely that these skeletons
were buried there long after the mammoth, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus
died out of Europe. However, they are the most complete specimens
we have of any fossil human beings. In looking at the drawing you will
see the leg bones and hips, part of the backbone, the ribs of one side,
and an arm bone; but you see no skull, because the bones of the skull
are very thin, and have become crushed down into the limestone. In one
of these fossils, which they have in Paris, taken from near the same
place, the bones are much more distinct, and part of the lower jaw with
some teeth in it can be seen. These fossil men no doubt lived before
the period of written human history began; but they are not considered
to be at all the oldest of pre-historic men.
[Illustration: XIII.
_The Guadaloupe Human Fossil._]