of 1859, Lyell had obtained seventy specimens of these stone tools
from the chief of them. The tools were all of flint, which occurs in
abundance in the chalk of the district, and is still obtained and
worked for technical purposes at the present day. The worked stones
that Boucher found were termed flint or silex tools, according to the
material of which they were made. They occurred in the particular beds,
as Lyell expressed it, in wonderful quantities. The famous geologist
distinguished three chief forms. The first is the spear-head form, and
varies in length from six to eight inches. The second is the oval form,
not unlike many stone implements and weapons that are still used as
axes and tomahawks at the present day--for instance, by the aborigines
of Australia. The only difference is that the edge of the Australian
stone axes, like that of the European implements of later periods of
civilisation known as thunderbolts or lightning-stones, is mostly
produced by grinding, whereas on the stone axes from the drift of the
Somme valley it has always been obtained by simply chipping the stone,
and by repeated, skilfully directed blows. According to Tylor the stone
implements of the old Tasmanians were entirely of Drift form and make,
all without traces of grinding, being simply angular stones whose
cutting-edge had been sharpened by being worked with a second stone.
Some of these stone implements of Drift Man may have been simply used
in the hand when the natural form of the stone offered a convenient
end, but the majority were certainly fastened in a handle in some way
or other, to serve as weapons--spear-heads or daggers--both for war and
the chase. Lyell’s second chief form would have been used as an axe for
such purposes as digging up roots, felling trees, and hollowing out
canoes, or to cut holes in the ice for fishing and for getting drinking
water in the winter. In the hand of the hunter and warrior the stone
axe also became a weapon. As the third form of stone implements Lyell
distinguished knife-shaped flakes, some pointed, others of oval form
or trimmed evenly at one end, obviously intended partly as knives and
arrow-heads, and partly as scrapers for technical purposes.
[Illustration: HOW PREHISTORIC MANKIND IS REVEALED
Most of our knowledge of the earliest life of man has been revealed
by the excavator. When at a certain depth below the earth’s surface
the skeleton of a man is found, surrounded with rude stone weapons,
ornaments, and the remains of domestic animals, a whole chapter in the
life of Prehistoric Man stands revealed at one glance. Our photograph
shows an actual skeleton and grave of the Stone Age, as discovered in
the year 1875 near Mentone.]
Although there are many variations between the first two chief forms,
yet the typical difference indicating the different purpose of their
use is always easily recognised in well-finished examples. A large
number of very rude specimens have also been found, of which many
may have been thrown away as spoiled in the making, and others may
have been only rubbish produced in the working. Evans has practically
proved that it is possible to produce such stone implements in their
remarkable agreement of form without the use of metal hammers. He made
a stone hammer by fastening a flint in a wooden handle, and worked
another piece of flint with this until it had assumed the shape of the
axe form--the second, oval form--of the Drift implements.
[Sidenote: Lyell’s Find in the Somme Valley]
Lyell draws attention to the fact that, in spite of the relatively
great frequency of stone implements, it would be a great mistake to
rely on finding a single specimen, even if one occupied himself for
weeks together in examining the Somme valley. Only a few lay on the
surface, the rest not coming to light until after removing enormous
masses of sand, loam, and gravel. As we may presume with Lyell that the
larger number of the Drift stone implements of Abbeville and Amiens
were brought into their position by the action of the river, this
sufficiently explains why so many were found at great depths below the
surface; for they must naturally have been buried in the gravel with
the other stones in places where the stream had still sufficient force
or rapidity to wash stones away. They can, therefore, not be found in
deposits from still water, in fine sediment and overflow mud.
Bones of Drift Man are absent from the deposits of the Somme valley,
in spite of the wonderful abundance of stone implements. The “lower
jaw from Moulin-Quignon, near Abbeville,” had been fraudulently placed
there by workmen. But proof of the existence of man is undeniably
assured by the objects, so unpretentious in themselves, that have been
recognised as the work of his hands.
When once the recognition of Drift Man, founded on the authority of
Lyell, was achieved, search for further relic-beds was made in England
and France with success. Yet scarcely one of the newly discovered
stations was to be compared to those of the Somme valley as regards
purity of stratification and conditions of discovery. The relics of the
“earliest Stone Age” or “Palæolithic Period,” as the period of Drift
Man was called, frequently came from caves and grottos, whose primary
conclusiveness Boucher had rightly doubted.
Under these circumstances it was of the greatest importance that in
Germany Drift Man was discovered in two places, where not only was the
geological stratification just as clear as at Abbeville and Amiens,
but where also the relics of Drift Man were found, not in a secondary
_situs_, as they were then, but in a primary one. In addition to this
the two German relic-beds may be safely assigned to the last two great
divisions of the Drift Period, to the warmer Interglacial Period, and
to the cold Glacial Period proper, with its Postglacial Period; and
their climatic conditions were made clear from the remains of plants
and animals found in them.
[Illustration:
Mercier
A WORKER IN THE STONE AGE
Making an axehead of flint, like that photographed on the opposite
page. From the painting by F. Cormon.
]
From the occurrence, in the deposits of the Somme, of reindeer that
contain the stone implements of Drift Man, we can not, as we saw,
exactly settle in what part of the Drift Era man lived there, whether
in the Interglacial Period, to which numerous animal remains found
there doubtless belong, or not until the “Reindeer” Period, as the last
Glacial and early Postglacial Periods were called, when the reindeer
was most largely distributed over France and Central Europe. One is
inclined to date man’s habitation of the Somme valley back to the
Interglacial Period; but it is certain that the relic-bed near Taubach
is the first, and, as far as I can see, the only one hitherto, that
has given sure proof of Interglacial Man in Europe. There the oldest
vestiges of man in Europe were found that have yet been absolutely
proved. We have not hitherto succeeded in Europe in tracing man farther
back than the Interglacial Period. Relics of him are hitherto as absent
in the older Drift as they are in the Tertiary.
[Illustration: A WORKMAN’S TOOL IN THE STONE AGE
Flint implement found in Gray’s Inn, London; now in British Museum.
]
The Taubach relic-bed also furnished no bones of Drift Man among all
the parts of skeletons of Drift animals that we have mentioned. Here,
too, as in the Somme valley, the proof of the presence of man is
based on the works of his hand and mind. Here, too, stone implements
and stone weapons are the chief things to be mentioned. But whereas,
in the chalk district of France, flints of every size were to be had
in the greatest abundance for the preparation of weapons and tools,
corresponding stones are not exactly wanting at the two standard
German places, though they occur in limited number and size. It is
due to this that the larger forms of flint implements, which are
most in evidence in the Somme valley, are absent at Taubach. On the
other hand, smaller “knives and flakes”--Lyell’s third form of Drift
flint implements--occur here with comparative frequency and variety
of form. Next to the usual lancet-shaped knife, worked flint flakes,
of triangular prismatic form, with sharp corners, are most numerous
at Taubach, and scrapers, chisels, awls, and the chipping-stones with
which the stone implements were produced may also be distinguished
among other things. The material for the implements was supplied by
the older Drift débris of the valley--namely, flint, flinty slate, and
quartz porphyry.
Besides the stone implements which alone were observed in the Somme
valley, still further important relics were found here in their primary
_situs_. Above all, numerous finds of charcoal and burnt bones prove
that the Drift Men of Taubach not only knew how to kindle fire, but
were also accustomed to roast the flesh of the animals they killed
in the chase. Stones and pieces of shell limestone also occur which
have become reddish and hard from the action of heat. These are to be
regarded as the floors and side-walls of the fireplaces on which the
food was then and there prepared. The animal bones, especially those
that were taken up from around the fireplace, appear in most cases to
be remains of meals. This is shown at once by the fact that bones of
young representatives of the large beasts of the chase--such as the
rhinoceros, elephant, and bear--are very frequent as compared with the
rare occurrence of full-grown animals.
[Sidenote: Hunters of the Stone Age]
[Sidenote: How Drift Man Killed the Great Animals]
It appears that in the hunting and capture of animals the young
ones were most easily killed, and therefore served chiefly as food.
Whenever a large animal was killed, it was probably cut up on the spot
by the fortunate hunters, who consumed at once part of its flesh;
the trunk was then left at the scene of the killing, while the head,
neck, and fore and hind legs, on which was the most muscular flesh,
and which were at the same time easier to carry away, were taken to
the settlement. This may explain why, among the many large bones of
the rhinoceros that have hitherto been found, the ribs and the dorsal
and lumbar vertebræ are almost entirely absent. Some of the bones of
the beasts of the chase bear the unmistakable traces of man. They
are broken in the manner characteristic of “savages” of all ages and
climes--for the sake of the marrow, one of the greatest dainties of men
living chiefly on animal fare. The broken-off heads of the metatarsal
bones of the bison still show particularly clearly the method of
breaking. They are broken off transversely exactly where the marrow
canal ends, and on all these bones there is a roundish depression,
or hole, at the same place--namely, in the middle of their front or
back surface, and just where the end of the marrow canal is, therefore
about in the centre of the break of the broken-off piece. The hole is
a “blow-mark” of one inch in diameter, evidently driven in by force
from without, as several well-preserved specimens still show the edges
and splinters of bone pressed inward. These splinters and all the
breaks are old, and have on the surface the same greasy coating, full
of the sand in which they lay, as the bones themselves. The instrument
used for breaking the bones in this way might very well have been the
lower jaw of a bear with its large canine tooth, as Oscar Fraas has
ascertained to have been the case in other places where Drift Man has
been found. Such lower jaws were found at Taubach, and the nature and
size of the hole and its edges agree with this assumption. The long
bones of the elephant and rhinoceros were whole. Drift Man did not
succeed in breaking these huge pieces, and where such bones are found
broken they are accidental fractures. On the other hand, almost all
bones of the bear and bison are intentionally split--in almost all
cases transversely, and seldom lengthways.
[Sidenote: Drift Man at his Meals]
In the Somme valley we have only the flint implements--which, although
rude, are very regularly and uniformly made for different recognisable
purposes--to tell us of the life and state of Drift Man; but the finds
at Taubach afford us a rather closer insight into the conditions of
his life and culture. What we had suspected from the first finds is
confirmed here. During the Interglacial Period we see near Taubach, on
the old watercourse of the Ilm, which had there at that time become
dammed up into a kind of pond, a human settlement. This was occupied
for a long period, as is proved by the large number of bones, evidently
remains of meals, and by the quantity of charcoal. Immediately on the
bank were the fireplaces--rude hearths built of the stones obtained
without trouble in the neighbourhood. Here the flesh of the beasts
of the chase, the bison and the bear, and also the elephant and
rhinoceros, was broiled in a crude manner in the hot ashes, as is still
done by savages on the level of the Fuegians and primitive tribes of
Central Brazil at the present day. For this no utensils are required,
a sharpened rod or thin pointed stick being sufficient for turning
and taking out the pieces of meat. The ashes that the gravy causes to
adhere supply the place of salt and other seasoning. The meat was cut
up with the stone knives, and many traces of cuts on the bones may also
be attributable to these instruments. For cutting out larger portions a
powerful and very suitable instrument was at hand, in the lower jaw of
the bear, with its strong canine tooth, which also served for breaking
bones to obtain the marrow. In spite of the apparent meanness of the
weapons, remains of which we have found, the Drift Men of Taubach were
yet able, as their kitchen refuse proves, not only to kill the bison
and bear, but also the gigantic elephant and rhinoceros, both young and
full grown.
[Illustration: REINDEER HUNTING IN THE LATER ICE AGE. After a picture
by W. Kranz
The reindeer was the most familiar animal of the Later Ice Age, its
body supplying food, clothing, and implements for Glacial Man.
]
[Illustration: WEAPONS OF THE CHASE USED BY PREHISTORIC MAN
A collection of neolithic lance and arrow heads found in Ireland,
now to be seen in the British Museum.
]
[Sidenote: Drift Man after the Hunt]
This shows man to have been then, as he is to-day, master even of
the gigantic animal forms which so far surpass him in mechanical
strength. It is the mind of man that shows itself superior to the
most powerful brute force, even where we meet him for the first time.
From the finds in the Somme valley it appears that Drift Man already
possessed spear, dagger, and axe, besides the knife, as weapons. There
the blades were of stone. The relatively small blades of the Taubach
stone implements are, it is true, of the same character as the stone
implements of Abbeville and Amiens, but they are chiefly, as we have
said, merely knife-like articles, very suitable as blades for knives,
scrapers, and daggers, and as arrow-heads, but not strong enough as
hunting-weapons for such big game. The hunt must, therefore, have
been more a matter of capture in pits and traps, as practised at the
present day where similar large types of animals are hunted by tribes
armed only with defective weapons. The kitchen refuse also proves
that the settlement by the Ilm pond, near Taubach, was a permanent
one, to which the hunters returned after their expeditions, bringing
their game and trophies so far as they were easily transportable. But
there is no trace of domestic animals. They could not have completely
disappeared, any more than remains of clay vessels, which are still
less destructible than bones, and in this respect may be compared to
stone implements. There was no trace of potsherds either.
[Sidenote: The Best “Find” of the Ice Age]
The finds in the Somme valley and near Taubach are of incalculable
importance as sure, indisputable proofs of Drift Man in Europe; but as
regards the wealth of information to be derived from them respecting
man’s psychical condition in that first period in which we can prove
his existence, they are far and away surpassed by the find at the
source of the Schussen, which Oscar Fraas, the celebrated geologist,
has personally inventoried and described. Fraas has rightly given to
his description of this find of Glacial Man--the most important and
best examined hitherto--the title “Contributions to the History of
Civilisation During the Glacial Period.”
The geognostic stratification of the relic-bed on one of the farthest
advanced moraines of the Upper Swabian plateau proves that it
belongs to the Glacial Period, and that this had already pushed its
glacier-moraines to the farthest limit ever reached. In point of time
the finds are, therefore, to be placed at the end of the Glacial
Period, as it was passing into the Postglacial Period; everything still
points to Far Northern conditions of life. The finds at the source of
the Schussen are thus decidedly more recent, geologically, than those
made at Taubach. They are a typical, or, better, _the_ typical example
of the so-called “Reindeer Period” of the end of the Drift.
[Illustration: IMPLEMENTS OF THE STONE AGE AND THEIR MAKING
The methods of holding a hammer-stone and of making a flint by
pressure are illustrated at the top, those of using a chopping tool
at the bottom, of this plate. The other objects are spear-heads,
axes, and hammers of stone and flint, and javelin-heads of horn,
the latter being smooth and barbed. The method of tying a flint
chisel to a wooden handle is shown at the right (×). Most of these
objects are to be seen in the British Museum.
]
From Fraas’s description there seems to be no doubt whatever that the
relic-bed, with its remains of civilisation, was perfectly undisturbed,
and its palæontological contents plainly show its great geological
age. It was perfectly protected by Nature. On the top lies peat, the
same that covers the lowlands of the whole neighbourhood for miles,
and forms the extensive moorlands of Upper Swabia, on which no other
formations are to be seen than the gravel drift-walls thrown up by
glaciers of the Drift Period. Under the peat lies a layer of calc-tufa,
four to five feet thick, a fresh-water formation from the water-courses
that now unite with the source of the Schussen. Under this protecting
cover of tufa were the remains of the Glacial Period and Glacial Man.
The tufa covered a bed of moss of a dark brown colour, inclining to
green, the moss still splendidly preserved. Under this bed of moss was
the glacier drift. The moss was dripping full of and intermingled with
moist sand. In it were the relics of Glacial Man--all lying in heaps as
fresh and firm as if they had been only recently collected. A sticky,
dark-brown mud filled the moss and sand and the smallest hollow spaces
of antlers and bones, and emitted a musty smell.
[Illustration: EARLY DRINKING VESSEL
Reindeer’s skull used as drinking vessel by men of the Stone Age.
British Museum collection.
]
[Illustration: TREASURE-STORES OF PRIMEVAL KNOWLEDGE
Such to-day are the mounds of prehistoric rubbish accumulated by
the people of the Stone Age. These Danish “kitchen middens” have
vastly enriched our knowledge of the remote past.
]
Glacial Man had used the place as a refuse-pit. Among the bones and
splinters of bone of animals that had been slaughtered and consumed by
man, among ashes and charred remains, among smoke-stained hearthstones
and the traces of fire, there lay here, one upon the other, numerous
knives, arrow-heads, and lance-heads of flint, and the most varied
kinds of hand-made articles of reindeer horn. All this was in a shallow
pit about seven hundred square yards in extent, and only four to
five feet deep in the purest glacier drift, clearly showing that the
excellent preservation of the bones and bone implements was solely due
to the water having remained in the moss and sand. The bank of moss was
like a saturated sponge; it closed up its contents hermetically from
the air, and preserved in its ever-damp bosom what had been entrusted
to it thousands of years before.
Under the peat and tufa at the source of the Schussen we find only the
type of a purely Northern climate, with Northern flora and Northern
fauna. There are no remains of domestic animals--not even of the
dog, nor any bones of the stag, roe, chamois, or ibex. Everything
corresponds to a Northern climate, such as begins to-day at 70° north
latitude. We see Upper Swabia traversed by moraines and melting
glaciers, whose waters wash the glacier-sand into moss-grown pools. We
find a Greenland moss covering the wet sands in thick banks; between
the moraines of the glaciers we have to imagine wide green pastures,
rich enough to support herds of reindeer, which roved about there as
they do in Greenland, or on the forest borders of Norway and Siberia,
at the present day. Here, also, are the regions of the carnivora
dangerous to the reindeer--the glutton and the wolf, and, in the second
rank, the bear and Arctic fox.
[Illustration: A FAMILY GROUP IN THE STONE AGE
It was thus that the Danish kitchen middens illustrated on the
opposite page were created. Each family group cast its refuse,
in the shape of shells, bones, wood, etc., on the midden near at
hand, and these heaps of rubbish in process of time became valuable
records of the people’s life, in which the archæologist can read
for us the story of the past.
]
[Sidenote: History in a Rubbish Heap]
According to Fraas, it is on this scene that man of the Glacial Period
appears; in all probability, a hunter, invited by the presence of the
reindeer to spend some time--probably only the better portion of the
year--on the borders of ice and snow. It is true that the relic-bed
that tells of his life and doings is only a refuse-pit, which contains
nothing good in the way of art productions, but only broken or spoiled
articles and refuse from the manufacture of implements. The bulk of the
material consists of kitchen refuse, such as, besides charcoal and
ashes, opened marrow-bones and broken skulls of game. Not one of the
bones found here shows a trace of any other instrument than a stone. It
was on a stone that the bone was laid, and it was with a stone that the
blow was struck. Such breaking-stones came to light in large numbers.
They were merely field stones collected on the spot, particular
preference being given to finely rolled quartz boulders of about the
size of a man’s fist. Others were rather rudely formed into the shape
of a club, with a kind of handle, such as is produced half accidentally
and half intentionally in splitting large pieces. Larger stones were
also found--gneiss slabs, from one to two feet square, slaty Alpine
limes, and rough blocks of one stone or another, which had probably
represented slaughtering-blocks, or done duty as hearthstones, as on
many of them traces of fire were visible. Where these stones had stood
near the fire they were scaled, and all were more or less blackened
by charcoal. Smaller pieces of slate and slabs of sandstone blackened
by fire may have supplied the place of clay pottery in many respects;
for, with all the blackened stones, not a fragment of a clay vessel was
found in the layers of charcoal and ashes of the relic-bed.
[Sidenote: Making Drift Man’s Tools]
The flint implements are of the form familiar to us from Taubach and
the Somme valley, being simply chipped, not ground or polished. At
the source of the Schussen, also, only comparatively small pieces of
the precious raw material were found for the manufacture of stone
implements. So that here, too, as at Taubach, Lyell’s third form, the
knife or flake, was practically the only one represented. They fall
into two groups--pointed lancet-shaped knives and blunt saw-shaped
stones. The former served as knife-blades and dagger-blades, and
lance-heads and arrow-heads; the latter represented the blades of the
tools required for working reindeer horn. The larger implements are
between one and a quarter and one and a half inches broad and three
to three and a half inches long; but the majority of them are far
smaller, being about one and a half inches long and only three-eighths
of an inch broad. The various flint blades appear to have been used
in handles and hafts of reindeer horn. Numerous pieces occur which
can only be explained as such handles, either ready or in course of
manufacture.