instruments, and implements were carved from reindeer horn and bone
for use in the chase and in daily life. Fraas has ascertained exactly
the technical process employed in producing articles of reindeer horn,
and we see with wonder how the Glacial men of Swabia handled their
defective carving-knives and saws on the very principle of modern
technics. They are principally weapons--for example, long pointed
bone daggers, otherwise mostly punchers, awls, plaiting-needles (of
wood), and arrow-heads with notched grooves. These may possibly be
poison-grooves; other transverse grooves may have served partly for
fastening the arrow-head by means of some thread-like binding material,
probably twisted from reindeer sinews, as is done by the Reindeer Lapps
at the present day; other scratches occur as ornaments.
[Sidenote: The Skilled Workman of the Drift]
The forms of the bone implements show generally a decided sense
of symmetry and a certain taste. For instance, a dagger, with a
perforated knob for suspension, and a large carefully-carved fish-hook.
Groove-like or hollow spoon-shaped pieces of horn were explained by
Fraas to be cooking and eating utensils; probably they also served
for certain technical purposes--as for dressing skins for clothing
and tents, like the stone scrapers found in the Somme valley. A
doubly perforated piece of a young reindeer’s antler appears to be an
arrow-stretching apparatus, like those generally finely ornamented,
used by the Esquimaux for the same purpose. A branch of a reindeer’s
antlers, with deep notches filed in, is declared by the discoverer to
be a “tally.” The notches are partly simple strokes filed in to the
depth of a twelfth of an inch, and partly two main strokes connected by
finer ones. “The strokes,” says Fraas, “are plainly numerical signs--a
kind of note, probably, of reindeer or bears killed, or some other
memento.” Among the objects found were also pieces of red paint of the
size of a nut--clearly fabrications of clayey ironstone, ground and
washed, and probably mixed with reindeer fat and kneaded into a paste.
The paint crumbled between the fingers, felt greasy, and coloured the
skin an intense red. It may have been used in the first instance for
painting the body. The Glacial men at the source of the Schussen were,
according to the results of these finds, fishermen and hunters, without
dogs or domestic animals and without any knowledge of agriculture and
pottery. But they understood how to kindle fire, which they used for
cooking their food. They knew how to kill the wild reindeer, bear,
and other animals of the district they hunted over; their arrows hit
the swan, and their fish-hooks drew fish from the deep. They were
artists in the chipping of flint into tools and weapons; with the
former they worked reindeer horn in the most skilful manner. Traces of
binding material indicate the use of threads, probably prepared from
reindeer sinews; the plaiting-needle may have been employed for making
fishing-lines. Threads and finely-pointed pricking instruments indicate
the art of sewing; clothing probably consisted of the skins of the
animals killed.
[Illustration:
Mercier
HUNTING FOR FOOD IN THE LATER ICE AGE
From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon
]
To this material concerning Drift Man, scientifically vouched for,
coming from Drift strata that have certainly never been disturbed,
other countries have hitherto made no equal contributions really
enlarging our view. Yet the numerous places where palæolithic--that
is, only rudely chipped--implements of flint, such as were doubtless
used by Drift Man, have been found must not remain unmentioned here. We
know of them in Northern, Central, and Southern France, in the South of
England, in the loess at Thiede, near Brunswick, and in Lower Austria,
Moravia, Hungary, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, North Africa, and
Russia.
[Illustration: IMPLEMENTS OF THE STONE AGE
The upper illustrations show handles of celt or stone-cutting
instruments and method of hafting; the lower picture is that of a
handmill of sandstone.
]
[Illustration: A HUT-CIRCLE OF THE BRONZE AGE
One of the earliest forms of habitation in Britain. From the
British Museum “Guide to the Bronze Age.”
]
It is of special importance to note that similar flint tools have also
been found along with extinct land mammalia in the stratified drift
of the Nerbudda valley, in South India, as the supposition more than
suggests itself that Drift Man came to our continent with the Drift
fauna that immigrated from Asia. The possibility that man also got
from North Asia to North America with the mammoth during the Drift
Period can no longer be dismissed after the results of palæontological
research. It explains at once the close connection between the build of
the American and the great Asiatic (Mongolian) races.
[Illustration: REMAINS OF A STONE AGE MANSION
These remains of a large pile hut discovered in Germany show that
Stone Age Man had made good progress in building. The lower diagram
shows a transverse section.
]
[Illustration: THE EARLIEST EFFORTS AT BOAT-BUILDING
The dug-out canoe, hollowed from a single trunk, was the far-off
parent of the ocean-going ship. The upper picture represents a
prehistoric canoe found in Sussex and the lower example is taken
from a German specimen.
]
Stone implements of palæolithic form have been found in Drift strata
in North America, and the same applies also, as we have seen, to South
America. The best finds there were those made by Ameghino in the
pampas formation of Argentina. Here marrow-bones, split, worked, and
burnt, and jaws of the stag, glyptodon, mastodon, and toxodon have
been repeatedly found along with flint tools of palæolithic stamp;
and Santiago Roth, who took part in these researches, supposes that
fossil man in South America occasionally used the coats of mail of
the gigantic armadillos as dwellings. But the civilisation of South
American man is doubtless identical with that of European fossil
man--tools and weapons of the stone types familiar in Europe, the
working of bones, the use of fire for cooking, and animal food, with
the consequent special fondness for fat and marrow.
[Illustration:
THE WORLD
BEFORE
HISTORY--IV
Professor
JOHANNES
RANKE
]
PRIMITIVE MAN IN THE PAST & THE PRESENT
To the picture of Drift Man that has been drawn for us by the
discoveries of human activity in deposits of uniform character and
sharply defined age, the much richer but far less reliable finds in the
bone caves add scarcely any entirely new touches. Von Zittel says:
The evidence of the caves is unfortunately shaken by the
uncertainty that, as a rule, prevails with regard to the manner in
which their contents were washed into them or otherwise introduced,
and also with regard to the beginning and duration of their
occupation; moreover, later inhabitants have frequently mixed up
their relics with the heritage of previous occupants.
[Sidenote: First Dwellers in Caves]
This doubt strikes us particularly forcibly as regards man’s
co-existence with the extinct animals of the earlier periods of the
Drift, the Preglacial and Interglacial Periods. On the other hand, the
habitation of the caves by man during the Reindeer Period appears in
many cases to be perfectly established, and, according to Von Zittel,
the oldest human dwellings in caves, rock-niches, and river-plains in
Europe belong for the most part to the Reindeer Period--that is, the
second Glacial and, in particular, the Postglacial Period.
In the caves there is also no domestic animal, and no pottery or
trace of potsherds, in the best-defined strata where Drift Man has
been found. In the Hohlefels cave, in the Ach valley in Swabia, a new
utensil was found in the form of a cup for drinking purposes or for
drawing water, made out of the back part of a reindeer’s skull. Also
a new tool in the form of a fine sewing-needle with eye, from the
long bone of a swan, such as have also been found in the caves of the
Périgord. Teeth of the wild horse and lower jaws of the wildcat, which
are found in the caves, perforated for suspending either as ornaments
or amulets, are also hitherto unknown, it appears, in the stratified
Drift. As both animals are at a later period connected with the deity
and with witchcraft, one could imagine that similar primitive religious
ideas existed among the old cave-dwellers. In the stratum of the
Reindeer Period at the Schweizerbild, near Schaffhausen, Nüesch found a
musical instrument, “a reindeer whistle,” and shells pierced for use as
ornaments.
[Sidenote: Drift Man’s Working Materials]
The finds in the French cave districts prove that man was able to
develop certain higher refinements of life, even during the Drift in
the real flint districts--where a very suitable material was at man’s
disposal in the flint that lay about everywhere or was easily dug up;
which was worked with comparative ease into much more perfect and
efficient weapons and implements than those supplied by the wilder
stretches of moor and fen of Germany, with their scarcity of flint.
If we compare the small, often tiny, knives and flint flakes from the
German places with the powerful axes and lance-heads of those regions,
it is self-evident how much more laborious life must have been for the
man who used the former. What labour he must have expended in carving
weapons and implements out of bone and horn, while flint supplied the
others with much better and more lasting ones with less expenditure
of time and trouble! In this light a wealth of flint was a civilising
factor of that period which is not to be under-estimated. In the flint
districts not only are the stone implements better worked, answering in
a higher degree the purpose of the weapon and the tool, but delight in
ornament and decoration is also more prominent.
[Sidenote: The Life in the Caves]
[Sidenote: Drift Man as Artist]
Life in the caves and grottos and under the rock shelters in the
neighbourhood of rivers was by no means quite wretched. The remains
left in the caves by their former inhabitants give almost as clear an
idea of the life of man in those primeval times as the buried cities of
Herculaneum and Pompeii do of the manners and customs of the Italians
in the first century of the Christian era. The floors of these caves
in which men formerly lived appear to consist entirely of broken bones
of animals killed in the chase, intermixed with rude implements and
weapons of bone and unpolished stone, and also charcoal and large burnt
stones, indicating the position of fireplaces. Flints and chips without
number, rough masses of stone, awls, lance-heads, hammers, and saws of
flint and chert lie in motley confusion beside bone needles, carved
reindeer antlers, arrow-heads and harpoons, and pointed pieces of horn
and bone; in addition to which are also the broken bones of the animals
that served as food, such as reindeer, bison, horse, ibex, saiga
antelope, and musk-ox. The reindeer supplied by far the greater part of
the food, and must at that time have lived in Central France in large
herds and in a wild state, all trace of the dog being absent.
[Sidenote: Pictures from the Drift World]
Among these abundant remains of culture archæologists were surprised
to find real objects of art from the hand of Drift Man, proving that
thinking about his surroundings had developed into the ability to
reproduce what he saw in drawing and modelling. The first objects of
this kind were found in the caves of the Périgord. They are, on the one
hand, drawings scratched on stones, reindeer bones, or pieces of horn,
mostly very naïve, but sometimes really lifelike, chiefly representing
animals, but also men; on the other hand imitations plastically carved
out of pieces of reindeer horn, bones, or teeth. Such engravings also
occurred on pieces of ivory, and plastic representations in this
material have been preserved. On a cylindrical piece of reindeer horn
from the cave excavations in the Dordogne is the representation of
a fish, and on the shovel-piece of a reindeer’s horn are the head
and breast of an animal resembling the ibex. Illustrations of horses
give faithful reproductions of the flowing mane, unkempt tail, and
disproportionately large head of the large-headed wild horse of
the Drift. The most important among these representations are such
as endeavour to reproduce an historical event. An illustration of
this kind represents a group consisting of two horses’ heads and an
apparently naked male figure; the latter bears a long staff or spear
in his right hand, and stands beside a tree, which is bent down almost
in coils in order to accommodate itself to the limited space, and
whose boughs, indicated by parallel lines, show it to be a pine or
fir. Connected with the tree is a system of vertical and horizontal
lines, apparently representing a kind of hurdlework. On the other
side of the same cylindrical piece are two bisons’ heads. Doubtless
this picture tells a tale; it is picture-writing in exactly the same
sense as that of the North American Indians. Our picture already
shows the transition to abbreviated picture-writing, as, instead of
the whole animals--horses and bisons--only the heads are given. The
message-sticks of the Australians bear certain resemblances; Bastian
has rightly described them as the beginnings of writing.
If we have interpreted them aright, the finds that have been made, with
the tally from the source of the Schussen and the message-stick from
the caves of the Dordogne, place the art of counting, the beginnings of
writing, the first artistic impulses, and other elements of primitive
culture right back in the Drift period.
[Sidenote: The Emerging of the Human Mind]
“None of the animals whose remains lie in the Drift strata,” says
Oscar Fraas, “were tamed for the service of man.” On the contrary, man
stood in hostile relation to all of them and only knew how to kill
them, in order to support himself with their flesh and blood and the
marrow of their bones. It was not so much his physical strength which
helped man in his fight for existence, for with few exceptions the
animals he killed were infinitely superior to him in strength; indeed
it is not easy, even with the help of powder and lead, to kill the
elephant, rhinoceros, grizzly bear, and bison, or to hunt down the
swift horse and reindeer. It was a question of finding out, with his
mental superiority, the beast’s unguarded moments, and of surprising it
or bringing it down in pits and snares. All the more wonderful does the
savage of the European Drift Period appear to us, “for we see that he
belongs to the first who exercised the human mind in the hard battle of
life, and thereby laid the foundation of all later developments in the
sense of progress in culture.” And yet, in the midst of this poor life,
a sense of the little pleasures and refinements of existence already
began to develop, as proved by the elegantly carved and decorated
weapons and implements, and there were even growing a sense of the
beauty of Nature and the power of copying it. The bone needles with
eyes and the fine awls are evidences of the art of sewing, and the
numerous scrapers of flint and bone teach us that Drift Man knew how to
dress skins for clothing purposes, and did it according to the method
still used among the Esquimaux and most northern Indians at the present
day. Spinning does not seem to have been known. On the other hand Drift
Man knew how to twist cords, impressions and indentations of which are
conspicuous on the bone and horn implements; on which also thread-marks
were imitated as a primitive ornament. Pottery was unknown to Drift
Man. Indeed, even to-day the production of pottery is not a commonly
felt want of mankind. The leather bottle, made of the skin of some
small animal stripped off whole without a seam, turned inside out as
it were, takes the place of the majority of the larger vessels; on the
other hand, liquids can also be kept for some time in a tightly-made
wicker basket.
[Illustration:
Mercier
PRIMITIVE NATURE FOLK ENGAGED IN FISHING
From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon.
]
The art of plaiting was known to Drift Man. This is shown by the
ornaments on weapons and implements, the plaiting-needle from the find
at the source of the Schussen, and the hurdlework represented on the
message-stick mentioned above, which may be either a hurdle made of
boughs and branches or a summer dwelling house. To these acquirements,
based chiefly on an acquaintance with serviceable weapons and
implements, is added the art of representing natural objects by drawing
and carving. This results in the attempt to retain historical _momenta_
in the form of abridged illustrations for the purpose of communicating
them to others--incipient picture-writing. The tally shows the method
of representing numbers--generally only one stroke each, but also
two strokes connected by a line to form a higher unit. Of the art of
building not a trace is left to us apart from the laying together of
rough stones for fireplaces; nor have tombs of that period of ancient
times been discovered.
[Illustration:
Mercier
EARLY AGRICULTURISTS, WITH IMPLEMENTS OF BONE, STONE, AND BRONZE
From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon.
]
The civilisation of Drift Man and his whole manner of life do not
confront the present human race as something strange, but fit perfectly
into the picture exhibited by mankind at the present day. Drift
Man nowhere steps out of this frame. If a European traveller were
nowadays to come upon a body of Drift men on the borders of eternal
ice, towards the north or south pole of our globe, nothing would
appear extraordinary and without analogy to him; indeed it would be
possible for him to come to an understanding with them by means of
picture-writing, and to do business with them by means of the tally.
[Illustration:
Mercier
AN EMIGRATION OF THE GAULS IN THE BRONZE AGE
From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon.
]
The manner of life led by man beyond the borders of higher
civilisation, especially under extreme climatic conditions, depends
almost exclusively on his outward surroundings and the possibility of
obtaining food. The Esquimaux, who, like Drift Man of Central Europe
in former times, live on the borders of eternal ice with the Drift
animals that emigrated thither,--the reindeer, musk-ox, bear, Arctic
fox, etc.--are restricted, like him, to hunting and fishing, and to
a diet consisting almost entirely of flesh and fat; corn-growing and
the keeping of herds of domestic animals being self-prohibitive. Their
kitchen refuse exactly resembles that from the Drift. Before their
acquaintance with the civilisation of modern Europe they used stone
and bone besides driftwood for making their weapons and implements,
as they still do to a certain extent at the present day, either
from preference or from superstitious ideas. Their binding material
consisted of threads twisted from reindeer sinews, with which they
sewed their clothes and fastened their harpoons and arrows, the latter
resembling in form those of Drift Man. They knew no more than he the
arts of spinning and weaving, their clothes being made from the skins
of the animals they hunted; pots were unknown and unnecessary to them.
[Illustration: PRIMITIVE ART OF OUR OWN DAY
The picture-writing of the American Indians in our own day offers
an interesting parallel to that of the primitive peoples of the
remotest past. The Pawnees decorate their buffalo robes with such
drawings as these, representing a procession of medicine men, the
foremost giving freedom to his favourite horse as a sacrifice to
the Great Spirit.
]
It has often been thought that we should have a definite criterion of
the period if it could be proved that fresh mammoth ivory was employed
at the particular time for making implements and weapons, or ornaments,
carvings, and drawings. There can be no doubt that when Drift Man
succeeded in killing a mammoth he used the tusks for his purposes.
But on the borders of eternal ice, where alone we could now expect to
find a frozen Drift Man, no conclusion could be drawn from objects
of mammoth ivory being in the possession of a corpse to determine
the great age of the latter. For the many mammoth tusks which have
been found and used from time immemorial in North Siberia, on the New
Siberian Islands, and in other places, are absolutely fresh, and are
even employed in the arts of civilised countries in exactly the same
way as fresh ivory. Under the name of “mammoth ivory” the fossil tusks
dug up by ivory-seekers, or mammoth-hunters, form an important article
of commerce.
The same conditions as many parts of Northern Siberia still exhibit
at the present day prevailed over the whole of Central Europe at
the end of the Glacial Period and the beginning of the Postglacial
Period. Here man lived on frozen ground on the borders of ice-fields
with the reindeer and its companions, as he does to-day in Northern
Asia, and here, too--as he does there to-day--he must have found the
woolly-haired mammoth preserved by the cold in the ice and frozen
ground. The Drift reindeer-men of Central Europe presumably searched
for mammoth tusks just as much as the present reindeer-men in North
Asia. The great field of mammoth carrion at Predmost was, therefore, a
very powerful attraction, not only for the beasts of prey--chief among
them wolves--but also for man.
[Illustration: THE EARLIEST ART: MANKIND’S FIRST EFFORTS IN
PICTURE-MAKING
These illustrations are of engravings on stone and bone and
scratchings on rocks made by prehistoric man, chiefly in France.
The figures of the reindeer and those of the mammoth and the bison,
the two latter found at Dordogne, are astonishingly good, and
indicate genuine power of draughtsmanship at a remote period of
human life.
]
[Sidenote: Drift Man Compared with Modern Man]
In France especially many primitive works of art of the “Ivory Epoch”
have been found, and even the nude figure of woman is not wanting;
but no proof is given that these carvings belong to the time when the
mammoth still lived. Much sensation has been caused by an engraving
on a piece of mammoth ivory representing a hairy mammoth with its
mane and strongly-curved tusks. This illustration has been taken as
unexceptionable proof that the artist of the Drift Period who did it
saw and portrayed the mammoth alive. But could the mammoth hunter
Schumachow--the Tunguse who, in 1799, discovered, in the ice of the
peninsula of Tumys Bykow at the mouth of the Lena, the mammoth now
erected in the collection at the St. Petersburg Academy [see page
123]--have pictured the animal otherwise when it was freshly melted out
of the ice? And the Madelaine cave in the Périgord, where the piece
of ivory with the picture of the mammoth was found, certainly belongs
to the Reindeer Period. Had we not independent proofs that Drift
Man lived in Central Europe--for instance, at Taubach--with the great
extinct pachydermata, neither the finds in the “loess” near Predmost,
nor the articles of ivory, nor the illustration of the mammoth itself,
could prove it. They furnish absolute proof of the existence of Drift
Man only back to the Reindeer Period. To decide whether a corpse
frozen in the stone-ice belonged to a Drift Man, the examination of
the corpse itself, its skull, bones, and soft parts, would no more
suffice than clothing, implements, and ornament. For at least so much
is confidently asserted by many palæontologists, that all the skulls
and bones hitherto known to have been ascribed to Drift Man by the
most eminent palæontologists, geologists, and anthropologists, cannot
be distinguished from those of men of the present day. Von Zittel, the
foremost scholar in the field of palæontology in Germany, says: