LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. 481
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
The Stone Age
Clement Wood
HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY
GIRARD, KANSAS
Copyright, 1923,
Haldeman-Julius Company.
THE STONE AGE
THE STONE AGE
CHAPTER I
THE RECORD OF THE ROCKS
A few days ago, I was walking down the long field back of my house
in Hastings-on-Hudson with J. Otis Swift, the naturalist. He stooped
and picked up an odd-shaped fragment of quartz. “You could write a
volume,” he observed, “about that stone. Long ago, in all probability,
it appeared either in granite, a primal stone out of the warm crust of
the earth, or as one of the vast mineral group of silicates. The slow
seasons weathered it, water took it in solution, and it was deposited
afresh as quartz in the cavities of some old basic igneous rock. The
action of sea or river rounded it to this large pebble; these scratches
may have been made by the glacier that once scratched the top of the
Palisades yonder. But these chipped places—here, and here—these were
made by the hand of man. The Indians, anywhere from five hundred to
fifty thousand years ago, chipped off the flakes and made of it a
hammer stone, to shape their stone weapons and implements. You could
write a volume about that stone.”
And this monument of the slow fashioning of fire and weather, water,
ice, and man, is now a simple field stone, trodden under foot by the
careless passerby! I have handled more than five hundred of these
worked Indian stones, in the fields within four miles of my house.
We often think of stones as worthless things, unless perhaps as
material for building. Yet they are the skeleton that holds the earth
together. In the old Greek myth of the flood, Deucalion was told to
throw the bones of his mother behind him; and he rightly interpreted
this as meaning stones, the bones of Mother Earth. Much of man’s
achievement is graven on the stones: from the ancient wordless ruins of
Stonehenge to the great pyramids, from the masterpieces of architecture
and sculpture to the stone writings of Egypt, Babylon, and the nearest
cemetery. The hearthstone commemorates the earliest home, the millstone
an early industry. From a rock smitten by Moses’ hand water gushed for
the thirsty wanderers; from a stone flung by the sling of David death
came to the giant foe of Israel. Commercial products of the stone range
from the salt that seasons each meal to the precious metals and the
more precious stones called gems. Lastly, the observant men called
scientists show us how to read stones like a printed book, in order to
understand the early history of the lifeless earth, the beginnings of
life upon it, and the forgotten days of the awkward ape-like ancestors
of man, and of the earliest man himself.
We do not know how old the earth is, or even how old the earliest rocks
are. Estimates by geologists and astronomers, based upon painstaking
study, vary between 3,000,000,000 and 25,000,000 years. Carroll Lane
Fenton, in “The Building of the Earth” (No. 275) in this series of
books, has chosen the conservative figure of 800,000,000 years. In any
case, the time occupied by man and his immediate ancestors, the apemen,
hardly exceeded one sixteen-hundredth of this, or 500,000 years. A
table may make this clearer:
GEOLOGIC TIME TABLE
_Years Ago_ _Era_ _Period_ _Life_
25,000 Recent Man
475,000 Pleistocene Rise of man
(Ice Age)
Cenozoic Pliocene Rise of ape-man
(Recent Life)
40,000,000 Miocene Development of mammals,
Oligocene grass, land forests, etc.
Eocene
140,000,000 Mesozoic Great reptiles
(Middle Life)
360,000,000 Paleozoic Early marine life, fishes,
(Ancient Life) amphibia, swamp forests
600,000,000 Proterozoic No visible trace of life.
(Primordial Life) Primitive forms, jelly fish,
etc.
800,000,000 Azoic (Lifeless) or No life, or one-celled life
Archeozoic (First Life)
Man’s immediate ancestors emerge from the vast geologic history
of the earth at the end of the Pliocene and the beginning of the
Pleistocene, the Ice or Glacial Age, immediately following. In this,
as in all of the tables, the order is stratigraphic, or following
the strata of the rocks. Thus the most recent age is at the top, the
oldest at the bottom. The Glacial Age, which reached from 475,000 to
perhaps 50,000 years ago, was supposed until recently to consist of
one great advance and retreat of the ice-fields from various centers.
The last forty years has established that there were at least four
chief glacial periods, with three interglacial periods, each with its
corresponding cold and warm climates. The terraces on either bank of
such European rivers as the River Inn, in Austria; the Rhine above
Basle, Switzerland, and the Thames, near London, establish a different
type of deposit for each glacial period, with different and advancing
forms of animal life and human remains. The successive coverings of
loam and earth, which washed down from the original sand and gravel
terraces left by the glaciers, indicate the same series of glacial
and interglacial periods. This loam was retransported in the form of
dust by the winds and laid down afresh in layers of varying thickness
known as “loess,” a process that still continues in certain districts;
this points to the same succession of glacial and interglacial epochs.
Finally, the different types of human relics and remains found in the
limestone shelters and caverns of Europe point to the same succession
of divisions of the Ice Age. The time since the Pliocene may thus be
divided as follows:
RECENT GEOLOGIC TIME TABLE
_Years Ago_ _Period_ _Culture_ _Division_ _Life_
9,000-12,000 Neolithic Recent races of men
(Polished
Stone)
25,000 Recent Upper Paleo- Post Glacial Man, or _Homo_
lithic _sapiens_
(Chipped Grenelle race
Stone) Cro-Magnon race
Grimaldi race
Lower Paleo- 4th Glacial _Pre-Homo sapiens_
lithic Neanderthal race
75,000 3rd Inter- Piltdown race
glacial (“dawn” men)
125,000 3rd Glacial
250,000 Pleistocene Eolithic 2nd Inter- Heidelberg race
(Ice or Gla- glacial
cial Age) 2nd Glacial
1st Inter-
glacial
1st Glacial
475,000 Pliocene Eolithic Ape-man (_Pithecan-
thropos_ _erectus_)
There is a common belief that primitive man had to contend with the
dinosaurs and pterodactyls of the Great Reptile Age, the Mesozoic. As
the first table indicates, this is entirely in error. These reptiles
disappeared suddenly from the earth millions of years before the first
ape-man appeared. The earliest mammal, a direct transition from the
reptile, may have hastened the disappearance of the great saurians by
his habit of feeding upon the eggs of the reptiles. Much later came the
earliest ape-man; he was contemporaneous with the hairy mammoth, the
sabre-tooth tiger, and the rhinoceros—unpleasant enough neighbors. When
it came to these monsters, he was less a hunter than the hunted; when
he took to the chase, it was after much smaller game.
Science has discovered many facts about the immediate ancestors of
man, and the earliest men. Yet all that has been discovered is but
a fraction of what is contained in the Record of the Rocks. A few
isolated spots on the earth’s surface have been examined; how much of
the surface has not even been scratched! Localities in France, England,
Germany, parts of Spain, the United States, Java, and elsewhere, have
been examined with some care; but there are thousands of miles in these
countries where secrets are unrevealed. Whole continents have been
hardly touched; South America, Africa, even Asia, perhaps the land in
which the races of men originated, are still to be searched. And if all
the remains hidden today were uncovered, we would have only a small
fraction of the story of the ancient life. Of one race we have found
only two teeth, a thigh bone, and the top of a skull; of another, we
have only one jaw. Why are there not more fragments? Certain of man’s
ancestors were perhaps tree-dwellers; these leave few remains. Their
bones are light, brittle, easily destructible; they were crushed in
a fall, consumed by beasts, or decayed and disappeared with the dead
leaves and wood of the early forests. The apemen and the first men were
ground dwellers, hiding among trees and, especially, rocks. It is not
such creatures that the Geological Record preserves, as a rule; that
record holds chiefly traces of water or marsh creatures, or creatures
easily and frequently drowned. When early man, during the harsh Ice
Age, took to the caves, he left more traces of his stay. More than
this, it has been only seventy years that such prehistoric human
fossils have been found; the Gibraltar skull of the Neanderthal race,
found in 1848, was practically the first of the long series. Seventy
years is not a long period, in which to read the mysteries of five
hundred thousand years. We will learn much more in the future.
If the remains of bones are scanty, there is another record of the
rocks that yields more: the stone implements of man. Some scientists
hold that wooden implements came first, and shell implements second;
whether these preceded the use of stones as tools, or came with them,
wood and shell have decayed and disappeared. But tools of flint, agate
and quartz may not decay in a million years; and men have found every
stage of implement widely scattered over the earth. The important
thing always is to trace the stages in the development of man—not the
exact date when he reached these stages. With different localities,
the rate of progress differs enormously. Today, the white races are
in the age of the radio and the airplane; backward races still use
stone implements; South Sea Islanders and certain African Negroes and
bushmen still make use of wood and the sharp-edged shells of land and
water molluscs as tools. When Europe was in the age of Shakespeare
and Elizabeth, the twin continents of America were largely in the
Stone Age. But the order of development, as revealed by the tools, is
always similar. There was first a period whose tool remains cannot
be identified: because the stones and wooden clubs were used without
any shaping changes. Then came the Eolithic Age, or dawn stone age;
scientists are still disputing its remains. The tools of this age,
called eoliths, have only the rudest working. After this came the
Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age—the age of chipped stone. This varies
from the crudest flaking to the exquisite laurel-leaf pattern of the
Solutrean stage of tool-making (named from the implement station of
Solutre, near the Saone River, in France). This Old Stone Age is the
period, stretching over more than a hundred thousand years, that we
will study here. Next came the Neolithic, or New Stone Age—the age of
polished stone. After this came the Bronze Age, and then the Iron Age,
blending into the Steel Age. We are still in the last-named period. It
is convenient to remember these thus:
THE AGES OF TOOL CULTURE
Iron, and later Steel, Age.
Bronze Age.
Neolithic (New Stone) Age, of polished stones.
Paleolithic (Old Stone) Age, of chipped stones.
Eolithic (Dawn Stone) Age, of stones slightly chipped.
It is now time to answer the questions, who were the immediate
ancestors of men, and what can we find out about them.