from what they are at the present time. Europe for example was covered
with ice reaching as far south as the Thames and into Central Germany
and Russia; there was no Channel separating Britain from France; the
Mediterranean and the Red Sea were great valleys, with perhaps a chain
of lakes in their deeper portions, and a great inland sea spread from
the present Black Sea across South Russia and far into Central Asia.
Spain and all of Europe not actually under ice consisted of bleak
uplands under a harder climate than that of Labrador, and it was only
when North Africa was reached that one would have found a temperate
climate. Across the cold steppes of Southern Europe with its sparse
arctic vegetation, drifted such hardy creatures as the woolly mammoth,
and woolly rhinoceros, great oxen and reindeer, no doubt following the
vegetation northward in spring and southward in autumn.
Map: Possible Outline of Europe and Western Asia at the Maximum of the
Fourth Ice Age (about 50,000 years ago)
Such was the scene through which the Neanderthaler wandered, gathering
such subsistence as he could from small game or fruits and berries and
roots. Possibly he was mainly a vegetarian, chewing twigs and roots.
His level elaborate teeth suggest a largely vegetarian dietary. But we
also find the long marrow bones of great animals in his caves, cracked
to extract the marrow. His weapons could not have been of much avail
in open conflict with great beasts, but it is supposed that he attacked
them with spears at difficult river crossings and even constructed
pitfalls for them. Possibly he followed the herds and preyed upon any
dead that were killed in fights, and perhaps he played the part of
jackal to the sabre-toothed tiger which still survived in his day.
Possibly in the bitter hardships of the Glacial Ages this creature had
taken to attacking animals after long ages of vegetarian adaptation.
We cannot guess what this Neanderthal man looked like. He may have been
very hairy and very unhuman-looking indeed. It is even doubtful if he
went erect. He may have used his knuckles as well as his feet to hold
himself up. Probably he went about alone or in small family groups. It
is inferred from the structure of his jaw that he was incapable of
speech as we understand it.
For thousands of years these Neanderthalers were the highest animals
that the European area had ever seen; and then some thirty or
thirty-five thousand years ago as the climate grew warmer a race of
kindred beings, more intelligent, knowing more, talking and
co-operating together, came drifting into the Neanderthaler’s world
from the south. They ousted the Neanderthalers from their caves and
squatting places; they hunted the same food; they probably made war
upon their grisly predecessors and killed them off. These newcomers
from the south or the east—for at present we do not know their region
of origin—who at last drove the Neanderthalers out of existence
altogether, were beings of our own blood and kin, the first True Men.
Their brain-cases and thumbs and necks and teeth were anatomically the
same as our own. In a cave at Cro-Magnon and in another at Grimaldi, a
number of skeletons have been found, the earliest truly human remains
that are so far known.
So it is our race comes into the Record of the Rocks, and the story of
mankind begins.
COMPARISON OF (1) MODERN SKULL AND (2) RHODESIAN SKULL
COMPARISON OF (1) MODERN SKULL AND (2) RHODESIAN SKULL
_Nat. Hist. Mus._
The world was growing liker our own in those days though the climate
was still austere. The glaciers of the Ice Age were receding in
Europe; the reindeer of France and Spain presently gave way to great
herds of horses as grass increased upon the steppes, and the mammoth
became more and more rare in southern Europe and finally receded
northward altogether ....
We do not know where the True Men first originated. But in the summer
of 1921, an extremely interesting skull was found together with pieces
of a skeleton at Broken Hill in South Africa, which seems to be a relic
of a third sort of man, intermediate in its characteristics between the
Neanderthaler and the human being. The brain-case indicates a brain
bigger in front and smaller behind than the Neanderthaler’s, and the
skull was poised erect upon the backbone in a quite human way. The
teeth also and the bones are quite human. But the face must have been
ape-like with enormous brow ridges and a ridge along the middle of the
skull. The creature was indeed a true man, so to speak, with an ape-
like, Neanderthaler face. This Rhodesian Man is evidently still closer
to real men than the Neanderthal Man.
This Rhodesian skull is probably only the second of what in the end may
prove to be a long list of finds of sub-human species which lived on
the earth in the vast interval of time between the beginnings of the
Ice Age and the appearance of their common heir, and perhaps their
common exterminator, the True Man. The Rhodesian skull itself may not
be very ancient. Up to the time of publishing this book there has been
no exact determination of its probable age. It may be that this
sub-human creature survived in South Africa until quite recent times.
XI
THE FIRST TRUE MEN
The earliest signs and traces at present known to science, of a
humanity which is indisputably kindred with ourselves, have been found
in western Europe and particularly in France and Spain. Bones, weapons,
scratchings upon bone and rock, carved fragments of bone, and paintings
in caves and upon rock surfaces dating. it is supposed. from 30,000
years ago or more, have been discovered in both these countries. Spain
is at present the richest country in the world in these first relics of
our real human ancestors.
Of course our present collections of these things are the merest
beginnings of the accumulations we may hope for in the future, when
there are searchers enough to make a thorough examination of all
possible sources and when other countries in the world, now
inaccessible to archæologists, have been explored in some detail. The
greater part of Africa and Asia has never even been traversed yet by a
trained observer interested in these matters and free to explore, and
we must be very careful therefore not to conclude that the early true
men were distinctively inhabitants of western Europe or that they first
appeared in that region.
In Asia or Africa or submerged beneath the sea of to-day there may be
richer and much earlier deposits of real human remains than anything
that has yet come to light. I write in Asia or Africa, and I do not
mention America because so far there have been no finds at all of any
of the higher Primates, either of great apes, sub-men, Neanderthalers
nor early true men. This development of life seems to have been an
exclusively old world development, and it was only apparently at the
end of the Old Stone Age that human beings first made their way across
the land connexion that is now cut by Behring Straits, into the
American continent.
ONE OF THE MARVELLOUS CAVE PAINTINGS OF ALTAMIRA, NORTH SPAIN
ONE OF THE MARVELLOUS CAVE PAINTINGS OF ALTAMIRA, NORTH SPAIN
The Walls of the Caves are covered in these representations of Bulls,
etc., painted in the soft tones of red shaded to black. They may be
fifteen or twenty thousand years old
These first real human beings we know of in Europe appear already to
have belonged to one or other of at least two very distinct races. One
of these races was of a very high type indeed; it was tall and big
brained. One of the women’s skulls found exceeds in capacity that of
the average man of to-day. One of the men’s skeletons is over six feet
in height. The physical type resembled that of the North American
Indian. From the Cro-Magnon cave in which the first skeletons were
found these people have been called Cro-Magnards. They were savages,
but savages of a high order. The second race, the race of the Grimaldi
cave remains, was distinctly negroid in its characters. Its nearest
living affinities are the Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa. It
is interesting to find at the very outset of the known human story,
that mankind was already racially divided into at least two main
varieties; and one is tempted to such unwarrantable guesses as that the
former race was probably brownish rather than black and that it came
from the East or North, and that the latter was blackish rather than
brown and came from the equatorial south.
BONE CARVINGS OF THE PALÆOLITHIC PERIOD
BONE CARVINGS OF THE PALÆOLITHIC PERIOD
(1 and 2) Mammoth tusk carved to shape of Reindeer, (3) Dagger Handle
representing Mammoth, and (4) Bone engraved with Horses’ Heads
_Brit. Mus._
And these savages of perhaps forty thousand years ago were so human
that they pierced shells to make necklaces, painted themselves, carved
images of bone and stone, scratched figures on rocks and bones, and
painted rude but often very able sketches of beasts and the like upon
the smooth walls of caves and upon inviting rock surfaces. They made a
great variety of implements, much smaller in scale and finer than those
of the Neanderthal men. We have now in our museums great quantities of
their implements, their statuettes, their rock drawings and the like.
The earliest of them were hunters. Their chief pursuit was the wild
horse, the little bearded pony of that time. They followed it as it
moved after pasture. And also they followed the bison. They knew the
mammoth, because they have left us strikingly effective pictures of
that creature. To judge by one rather ambiguous drawing they trapped
and killed it.
They hunted with spears and throwing stones. They do not seem to have
had the bow, and it is doubtful if they had yet learnt to tame any
animals. They had no dogs. There is one carving of a horse’s head and
one or two drawings that suggest a bridled horse, with a twisted skin
or tendon round it. But the little horses of that age and region could
not have carried a man, and if the horse was domesticated it was used
as a led horse. It is doubtful and improbable that they had yet learnt
the rather unnatural use of animal’s milk as food.
They do not seem to have erected any buildings though they may have had
tents of skins, and though they made clay figures they never rose to
the making of pottery. Since they had no cooking implements their
cookery must have been rudimentary or nonexistent. They knew nothing
of cultivation and nothing of any sort of basket work or woven cloth.
Except for their robes of skin or fur they were naked painted savages.
These earliest known men hunted the open steppes of Europe for a
hundred centuries perhaps, and then slowly drifted and changed before a
change of climate. Europe, century by century, was growing milder and
damper. Reindeer receded northward and eastward, and bison and horse
followed. The steppes gave way to forests, and red deer took the place
of horse and bison. There is a change in the character of the
implements with this change in their application. River and lake
fishing becomes of great importance to men, and fine implements of bone
increased. “The bone needles of this age,” says de Mortillet, “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 this epoch.”
THE RUTOT BUST OF A CRO-MAGNON MAN
THE RUTOT BUST OF A CRO-MAGNON MAN
Almost fifteen or twelve thousand years ago a fresh people drifted into
the south of Spain, and left very remarkable drawings of themselves
upon exposed rock faces there. These were the Azilians (named from the
Mas d’Azil cave). They had the bow; they seem to have worn feather
headdresses; they drew vividly; but also they had reduced their
drawings to a sort of symbolism—a man for instance would be represented
by a vertical dab with two or three horizontal dabs—that suggest the
dawn of the writing idea. Against hunting sketches there are often
marks like tallies. One drawing shows two men smoking out a bees’ nest.
FIGHT OF BOWMEN
Among the most recent discoveries of Palæolithic Art are these
specimens found in 1920 in Spain. They are probably ten or twelve
thousand years old
These are the latest of the men that we call Palæolithic (Old Stone
Age) because they had only chipped implements. By ten or twelve
thousand years a new sort of life has dawned in Europe, men have learnt
not only to chip but to polish and grind stone implements, and they
have begun cultivation. The Neolithic Age (New Stone Age) was
beginning.
It is interesting to note that less than a century ago there still
survived in a remote part of the world, in Tasmania, a race of human
beings at a lower level of physical and intellectual development than
any of these earliest races of mankind who have left traces in Europe.
These people had long ago been cut off by geographical changes from the
rest of the species, and from stimulation and improvement. They seem
to have degenerated rather than developed. They lived a base life
subsisting upon shellfish and small game. They had no habitations but
only squatting places. They were real men of our species, but they had
neither the manual dexterity nor the artistic powers of the first true
men.
XII
PRIMITIVE THOUGHT
And now let us indulge in a very interesting speculation; how did it
feel to be a man in those early days of the human adventure? How did
men think and what did they think in those remote days of hunting and
wandering four hundred centuries ago before seed time and harvest
began. Those were days long before the written record of any human
impressions, and we are left almost entirely to inference and guesswork
in our answers to these questions.
The sources to which scientific men have gone in their attempts to
reconstruct that primitive mentality are very various. Recently the
science of psycho-analysis, which analyzes the way in which the
egotistic and passionate impulses of the child are restrained,
suppressed, modified or overlaid, to adapt them to the needs of social
life, seems to have thrown a considerable amount of light upon the
history of primitive society; and another fruitful source of suggestion
has been the study of the ideas and customs of such contemporary
savages as still survive. Again there is a sort of mental
fossilization which we find in folk-lore and the deep-lying irrational
superstitions and prejudices that still survive among modern civilized
people. And finally we have in the increasingly numerous pictures,
statues, carvings, symbols and the like, as we draw near to our own
time, clearer and clearer indications of what man found interesting and
worthy of record and representation.
Primitive man probably thought very much as a child thinks, that is to
say in a series of imaginative pictures. He conjured up images or
images presented themselves to his mind, and he acted in accordance
with the emotions they aroused. So a child or an uneducated person
does to-day. Systematic thinking is apparently a comparatively late
development in human experience; it has not played any great part in
human life until within the last three thousand years. And even to-day
those who really control and order their thoughts are but a small
minority of mankind. Most of the world still lives by imagination and
passion.
Probably the earliest human societies, in the opening stages of the
true human story, were small family groups. Just as the flocks and
herds of the earlier mammals arose out of families which remained
together and multiplied, so probably did the earliest tribes. But
before this could happen a certain restraint upon the primitive
egotisms of the individual had to be established. The fear of the
father and respect for the mother had to be extended into adult life,
and the natural jealousy of the old man of the group for the younger
males as they grew up had to be mitigated. The mother on the other
hand was the natural adviser and protector of the young. Human social
life grew up out of the reaction between the crude instinct of the
young to go off and pair by themselves as they grew up, on the one
hand, and the dangers and disadvantages of separation on the other. An
anthropological writer of great genius, J. J. Atkinson, in his _Primal
Law_, has shown how much of the customary law of savages, the _Tabus_,
that are so remarkable a fact in tribal life, can be ascribed to such a
mental adjustment of the needs of the primitive human animal to a
developing social life, and the later work of the psycho- analysts has
done much to confirm his interpretation of these possibilities.
Some speculative writers would have us believe that respect and fear of
the Old Man and the emotional reaction of the primitive savage to older
protective women, exaggerated in dreams and enriched by fanciful mental
play, played a large part in the beginnings of primitive religion and
in the conception of gods and goddesses. Associated with this respect
for powerful or helpful personalities was a dread and exaltation of
such personages after their deaths, due to their reappearance in
dreams. It was easy to believe they were not truly dead but only
fantastically transferred to a remoteness of greater power.
The dreams, imaginations and fears of a child are far more vivid and
real than those of a modern adult, and primitive man was always
something of a child. He was nearer to the animals also, and he could
suppose them to have motives and reactions like his own. He could
imagine animal helpers, animal enemies, animal gods. One needs to have
been an imaginative child oneself to realize again how important,
significant, portentous or friendly, strangely shaped rocks, lumps of
wood, exceptional trees or the like may have appeared to the men of the
Old Stone Age, and how dream and fancy would create stories and legends
about such things that would become credible as they told them. Some
of these stories would be good enough to remember and tell again. The
women would tell them to the children and so establish a tradition. To
this day most imaginative children invent long stories in which some
favourite doll or animal or some fantastic semi-human being figures as
the hero, and primitive man probably did the same—with a much stronger
disposition to believe his hero real.
RELICS OF THE STONE AGE
RELICS OF THE STONE AGE
Chert implements from Somaliland. In general form they are similar to
those found in Western and Northern Europe
_Brit. Mus._
For the very earliest of the true men that we know of were probably
quite talkative beings. In that way they have differed from the
Neanderthalers and had an advantage over them. The Neanderthaler may
have been a dumb animal. Of course the primitive human speech was
probably a very scanty collection of names, and may have been eked out
with gestures and signs.
There is no sort of savage so low as not to have a kind of science of
cause and effect. But primitive man was not very critical in his
associations of cause with effect; he very easily connected an effect
with something quite wrong as its cause. “You do so and so,” he said,
“and so and so happens.” You give a child a poisonous berry and it
dies. You eat the heart of a valiant enemy and you become strong.
There we have two bits of cause and effect association, one true one
false. We call the system of cause and effect in the mind of a savage,
Fetish; but Fetish is simply savage science. It differs from modern
science in that it is totally unsystematic and uncritical and so more
frequently wrong.
WIDESPREAD SIMILARITY OF MEN OF THE STONE AGE
WIDESPREAD SIMILARITY OF MEN OF THE STONE AGE
On the left is a flint implement excavated in Gray’s Inn Lane, London;
on the right one of similar form chipped by primitive men of Somaliland
_Brit. Mus._
In many cases it is not difficult to link cause and effect, in many
others erroneous ideas were soon corrected by experience; but there was
a large series of issues of very great importance to primitive man,
where he sought persistently for causes and found explanations that
were wrong but not sufficiently wrong nor so obviously wrong as to be
detected. It was a matter of great importance to him that game should
be abundant or fish plentiful and easily caught, and no doubt he tried
and believed in a thousand charms, incantations and omens to determine
these desirable results. Another great concern of his was illness and
death. Occasionally infections crept through the land and men died of
them. Occasionally men were stricken by illness and died or were
enfeebled without any manifest cause. This too must have given the
hasty, emotional mind of primitive man much feverish exercise. Dreams
and fantastic guesses made him blame this, or appeal for help to that
man or beast or thing. He had the child’s aptitude for fear and panic.
Quite early in the little human tribe, older, steadier minds sharing
the fears, sharing the imaginations, but a little more forceful than
the others, must have asserted themselves, to advise, to prescribe, to
command. This they declared unpropitious and that imperative, this an
omen of good and that an omen of evil. The expert in Fetish, the
Medicine Man, was the first priest. He exhorted, he interpreted
dreams, he warned, he performed the complicated hocus pocus that
brought luck or averted calamity. Primitive religion was not so much
what we now call religion as practice and observance, and the early
priest dictated what was indeed an arbitrary primitive practical
science.
XIII
THE BEGINNINGS OF CULTIVATION
We are still very ignorant about the beginnings of cultivation and
settlement in the world although a vast amount of research and
speculation has been given to these matters in the last fifty years.
All that we can say with any confidence at present is that somewhen
about 15,000 and 12,000 B.C. while the Azilian people were in the south
of Spain and while the remnants of the earlier hunters were drifting
northward and eastward, somewhere in North Africa or Western Asia or in
that great Mediterranean valley that is now submerged under the waters
of the Mediterranean sea, there were people who, age by age, were
working out two vitally important things; they were beginning
cultivation and they were domesticating animals. They were also
beginning to make, in addition to the chipped implements of their
hunter forebears, implements of polished stone. They had discovered the
possibility of basketwork and roughly woven textiles of plant fibre,
and they were beginning to make a rudely modelled pottery.
They were entering upon a new phase in human culture, the Neolithic
phase (New Stone Age) as distinguished from the Palæolithic (Old Stone)
phase of the Cro-Magnards, the Grimaldi people, the Azilians and their
like. [1] Slowly these Neolithic people spread over the warmer parts
of the world; and the arts they had mastered, the plants and animals
they had learnt to use, spread by imitation and acquisition even more
widely than they did. By 10,000 B.C., most of mankind was at the
Neolithic level.
Now the ploughing of land, the sowing of seed, the reaping of harvest,
threshing and grinding, may seem the most obviously reasonable steps to
a modern mind just as to a modern mind it is a commonplace that the
world is round. What else could you do? people will ask. What else
can it be? But to the primitive man of twenty thousand years ago
neither of the systems of action and reasoning that seem so sure and
manifest to us to-day were at all obvious. He felt his way to
effectual practice through a multitude of trials and misconceptions,
with fantastic and unnecessary elaborations and false interpretations
at every turn. Somewhere in the Mediterranean region, wheat grew wild;
and man may have learnt to pound and then grind up its seeds for food
long before he learnt to sow. He reaped before he sowed.