Recapitulation of Results arrived at in the earlier Chapters.
Ages of Stone and Bronze.
Danish Peat and Kitchen-Middens.
Swiss Lake-Dwellings.
Local Changes in Vegetation and in the wild and domesticated
Animals and in Physical Geography coeval with the Age of
Bronze and the later Stone Period.
Estimates of the positive Date of some Deposits of the later
Stone Period.
Ancient Division of the Age of Stone of St. Acheul and Aurignac.
Migrations of Man in that Period from the Continent to England
in Post-Glacial Times.
Slow Rate of Progress in barbarous Ages.
Doctrine of the superior Intelligence and Endowments of the
original Stock of Mankind considered.
Opinions of the Greeks and Romans, and their Coincidence with
those of the Modern Progressionist.
The ages of stone and bronze, so called by archaeologists, were spoken
of in the earlier chapters of this work. That of bronze has been traced
back to times anterior to the Roman occupation of Helvetia, Gaul, and
other countries north of the Alps. When weapons of that mixed metal were
in use, a somewhat uniform civilisation seems to have prevailed over
a wide extent of central and northern Europe, and the long duration
of such a state of things in Denmark and Switzerland is shown by the
gradual improvement which took place in the useful and ornamental arts.
Such progress is attested by the increasing variety of the forms,
and the more perfect finish and tasteful decoration of the tools and
utensils obtained from the more modern deposits of the bronze age, those
from the upper layers of peat, for example, as compared to those found
in the lower ones. The great number also of the Swiss lake-dwellings of
the bronze age (about seventy villages having been already discovered),
and the large population which some of them were capable of containing,
afford indication of a considerable lapse of time, as does the thickness
of the stratum of mud in which in some of the lakes the works of art
are entombed. The unequal antiquity, also, of the settlements is
occasionally attested by the different degrees of decay which the wooden
stakes or piles have undergone, some of them projecting more above the
mud than others, while all the piles of the antecedent age of stone have
rotted away quite down to the level of the mud, such part of them
only as was originally driven into the bed of the lake having escaped
decomposition.*
(* Troyon, "Habitations lacustres" Lausanne 1860.)
Among the monuments of the stone period, which immediately preceded that
of bronze, the polished hatchets called celts are abundant, and were
in very general use in Europe before metallic tools were introduced. We
learn, from the Danish peat and shell-mounds, and from the older Swiss
lake-settlements, that the first inhabitants were hunters who fed almost
entirely on game, but their food in after ages consisted more and more
of tamed animals and still later a more complete change to a pastoral
state took place, accompanied as population increased by the cultivation
of some cereals.
Both the shells and quadrupeds belonging to the later stone period
and to the age of bronze consist exclusively of species now living in
Europe, the fauna being the same as that which flourished in Gaul at the
time when it was conquered by Julius Caesar, even the Bos primigenius,
the only animal of which the wild type is lost, being still represented,
according to Cuvier, Bell, and Rutimeyer, by one of the domesticated
races of cattle now in Europe.
These monuments, therefore, whether of stone or bronze, belong to what I
have termed geologically the Recent period, the definition of which
some may think rather too dependent on negative evidence, or on the
non-discovery hitherto of extinct mammalia, such as the mammoth, which
may one day turn up in a fossil state in some of the oldest peaty
deposits, as indeed it is already said to have done at some spots,
though I have failed as yet to obtain authentic evidence of the fact.*
(* A molar of E. primigenius, in a very fresh state, in the
museum at Torquay, believed to have been washed up by the
waves of the sea out of the submerged mass of vegetable
matter at the extremity of the valley in which Tor Abbey
stands, is the best case I have seen. See above, Chapter
18.)
No doubt some such exceptional cases may be met with in the course of
future investigations, for we are still imperfectly acquainted with
the entire fauna of the age of stone in Denmark as we may infer from an
opinion expressed by Steenstrup, that some of the instruments exhumed by
antiquaries from the Danish peat are made of the bones and horns of
the elk and reindeer. Yet no skeleton or uncut bone of either of those
species has hitherto been observed in the same peat.
Nevertheless, the examination made by naturalists of the various Danish
and Swiss deposits of the Recent period has been so searching, that the
finding in them of a stray elephant or rhinoceros, should it ever occur,
would prove little more than that some few individuals lingered on, when
the species was on the verge of extinction, and such rare exceptions
would not render the classification above proposed inappropriate.
At the time when many wild quadrupeds and birds were growing scarce and
some of them becoming locally extirpated in Denmark, great changes were
taking place in the vegetation. The pine, or Scotch fir, buried in
the oldest peat, gave place at length to the oak, and the oak, after
flourishing for ages, yielded in its turn to the beech, the periods
when these three forest trees predominated in succession tallying pretty
nearly with the ages of stone, bronze, and iron in Denmark. In the same
country also, during the stone period, various fluctuations, as we have
seen, occurred in physical geography. Thus, on the ocean side of certain
islands, the old refuse-heaps, or "kitchen-middens," were destroyed
by the waves, the cliffs having wasted away, while on the side of the
Baltic, where the sea was making no encroachment or where the land was
sometimes gaining on the sea, such mounds remained uninjured. It was
also shown that the oyster, which supplied food to the primitive people,
attained its full size in parts of the Baltic where it cannot now
exist owing to a want of saltness in the water, and that certain marine
univalves and bivalves, such as the common periwinkle, mussel, and
cockle, of which the castaway shells are found in the mounds, attained
in the olden time their full dimensions, like the oysters, whereas the
same species, though they still live on the coast of the inland sea
adjoining the mounds, are dwarfed and never half their natural size, the
water being rendered too fresh for them by the influx of so many rivers.
Some archaeologists and geologists of merit have endeavoured to
arrive at positive dates, or an exact estimate of the minimum of time
assignable to the later age of stone. These computations have been
sometimes founded on changes in the level of the land, or on the
increase of peat, as in the Danish bogs, or on the conversion of water
into land by alluvial deposits, since certain lake-settlements in
Switzerland were abandoned. Alterations also in the geographical
distribution or preponderance of certain living species of animals and
plants have been taken into account in corroboration, as have the signs
of progress in human civilisation, as serving to mark the lapse of time
during the stone and bronze epochs.
M. Morlot has estimated with care the probable antiquity of three
superimposed vegetable soils cut open at different depths in the delta
of the Tiniere, each containing human bones or works of art, belonging
successively to the Roman, bronze, and later stone periods. According
to his estimate, an antiquity of 7000 years at least must be assigned
to the oldest of these remains, though believed to be long posterior in
date to the time when the mammoth and other extinct mammalia flourished
together with Man in Europe. Such computations of past time must be
regarded as tentative in the present state of our knowledge and much
collateral evidence will be required to confirm them; yet the results
appear to me already to afford a rough approximation to the truth.
Between the newer or Recent division of the stone period and the older
division, which has been called the Pleistocene, there was evidently a
vast interval of time--a gap in the history of the past, into which many
monuments of intermediate date will one day have to be intercalated. Of
this kind are those caves in the south of France, in which M. Lartet
has lately found bones of the reindeer, associated with works of art
somewhat more advanced in style than those of St. Acheul or of Aurignac.
In the valley of the Somme we have seen that peat exists of great
thickness, containing in its upper layers Roman and Celtic memorials,
the whole of which has been of slow growth, in basins or depressions
conforming to the present contour and drainage levels of the country,
and long posterior in date to older gravels, containing bones of the
mammoth and a large number of flint implements of a very rude and
antique type. Some of those gravels were accumulated in the channels
of rivers which flowed at higher levels by 100 feet than the present
streams, and before the valley had attained its present depth and form.
No intermixture has been observed in those ancient river beds of any of
the polished weapons, called "celts," or other relics of the more modern
times, or of the second or Recent stone period, nor any interstratified
peat; and the climate of those Pleistocene ages, when Man was a denizen
of the north-west of France and of southern and central England, appears
to have been much more severe in winter than it is now in the
same region, though far less cold than in the glacial period which
immediately preceded.
We may presume that the time demanded for the gradual dying out or
extirpation of a large number of wild beasts which figure in the
Pleistocene strata and are missing in the Recent fauna was of protracted
duration, for we know how tedious a task it is in our own times, even
with the aid of fire-arms, to exterminate a noxious quadruped, a wolf,
for example, in any region comprising within it an extensive forest or a
mountain chain. In many villages in the north of Bengal, the tiger still
occasionally carries off its human victims, and the abandonment of late
years by the natives of a part of the Sunderbunds or lower delta of the
Ganges, which they once peopled, is attributed chiefly to the ravages of
the tiger. It is probable that causes more general and powerful than the
agency of Man, alterations in climate, variations in the range of
many species of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, and of plants,
geographical changes in the height, depth, and extent of land and sea,
some or all of these combined, have given rise in a vast series of
years to the annihilation, not only of many large mammalia, but to the
disappearance of the Cyrena fluminalis, once common in the rivers of
Europe, and to the different range or relative abundance of other shells
which we find in the European drifts.
That the growing power of Man may have lent its aid as the destroying
cause of many Pleistocene species, must, however, be granted; yet,
before the introduction of fire-arms, or even the use of improved
weapons of stone, it seems more wonderful that the aborigines were able
to hold their own against the cave-lion, hyaena, and wild bull, and
to cope with such enemies, than that they failed to bring about their
speedy extinction.
It is already clear that Man was contemporary in Europe with two species
of elephant, now extinct, E. primigenius and E. antiquus, two also of
rhinoceros, R. tichorhinus and R. hemitoechus (Falc.), at least one
species of hippopotamus, the cave-bear, cave-lion, and cave-hyaena,
various bovine, equine, and cervine animals now extinct, and many
smaller Carnivora, Rodentia, and Insectivora. While these were slowly
passing away, the musk ox, reindeer, and other arctic species which have
survived to our times were retreating northwards from the valleys of the
Thames and Seine to their present more arctic haunts.
The human skeletons of the Belgian caverns of times coeval with the
mammoth and other extinct mammalia do not betray any signs of a marked
departure in their structure, whether of skull or limb, from the
modern standard of certain living races of the human family. As to
the remarkable Neanderthal skeleton (Chapter 5), it is at present too
isolated and exceptional, and its age too uncertain, to warrant us
in relying on its abnormal and ape-like characters, as bearing on the
question whether the farther back we trace Man into the past, the more
we shall find him approach in bodily conformation to those species of
the anthropoid quadrumana which are most akin to him in structure.
In the descriptions already given of the geographical changes which
the British Isles have undergone since the commencement of the glacial
period (as illustrated by several maps, Figures 39 to 41), it has been
shown that there must have been a free communication by land between the
Continent and these islands, and between the several islands themselves,
within the Pleistocene epoch, in order to account for the Germanic fauna
and flora having migrated into every part of the area, as well as for
the Scandinavian plants and animals to have retreated into the
higher mountains. During some part of the Pleistocene ages, the large
pachyderms and accompanying beasts of prey, now extinct, wandered from
the Continent to England; and it is highly probable that France was
united with some part of the British Isles as late as the period of the
gravels of St. Acheul and the era of those engulfed rivers which, in
the basin of the Meuse near Liege, swept into many a rent and cavern
the bones of Man and of the mammoth and cave-bear. There have been vast
geographical revolutions in the times alluded to, and oscillations of
land, during which the English Channel, which can be shown by the Pagham
erratics and the old Brighton beach (Chapter 14), to be of very ancient
origin, may have been more than once laid dry and again submerged.
During some one of these phases, Man may have crossed over, whether by
land or in canoes, or even on the ice of a frozen sea (as Mr. Prestwich
has hinted), for the winters of the period of the higher-level gravels
of the valley of the Somme were intensely cold.
The primitive people, who co-existed with the elephant and rhinoceros
in the valley of the Ouse at Bedford, and who made use of flint tools of
the Amiens type, certainly inhabited part of England which had already
emerged from the waters of the glacial sea and the fabricators of
the flint tools of Hoxne, in Suffolk, were also, as we have seen,
post-glacial. We may likewise presume that the people of Pleistocene
date, who have left their memorials in the valley of the Thames, were of
corresponding antiquity, posterior to the boulder clay but anterior to
the time when the rivers of that region had settled into their present
channels.
The vast distance of time which separated the origin of the higher and
lower gravels of the valley of the Somme, both of them rich in flint
implements of similar shape (although those of oval form predominate in
the newer gravels), leads to the conclusion that the state of the arts
in those early times remained stationary for almost indefinite periods.
There may, however, have been different degrees of civilisation and in
the art of fabricating flint tools, of which we cannot easily detect the
signs in the first age of stone, and some contemporary tribes may have
been considerably in advance of others. Those hunters, for example, who
feasted on the rhinoceros and buried their dead with funeral rites at
Aurignac may have been less barbarous than the savages of St. Acheul,
as some of their weapons and utensils have been thought to imply. To
a European who looks down from a great eminence on the products of the
humble arts of the aborigines of all times and countries, the stone
knives and arrows of the Red Indian of North America, the hatchets
of the native Australian, the tools found in the ancient Swiss
lake-dwellings or those of the Danish kitchen-middens and of St. Acheul,
seem nearly all alike in rudeness and very uniform in general character.
The slowness of the progress of the arts of savage life is manifested
by the fact that the earlier instruments of bronze were modelled on the
exact plan of the stone tools of the preceding age, although such shapes
would never have been chosen had metals been known from the first. The
reluctance or incapacity of savage tribes to adopt new inventions has
been shown in the East by their continuing to this day to use the same
stone implements as their ancestors, after that mighty empires, where
the use of metals in the arts was well known, had flourished for three
thousand years in their neighbourhood.
We see in our own times that the rate of progress in the arts and
sciences proceeds in a geometrical ratio as knowledge increases, and so
when we carry back our retrospect into the past, we must be prepared to
find the signs of retardation augmenting in a like geometrical ratio; so
that the progress of a thousand years at a remote period may correspond
to that of a century in modern times, and in ages still more remote Man
would more and more resemble the brutes in that attribute which causes
one generation exactly to imitate in all its ways the generation which
preceded it.
The extent to which even a considerably advanced state of civilisation
may become fixed and stereotyped for ages, is the wonder of Europeans
who travel in the East. One of my friends declared to me, that whenever
the natives expressed to him a wish "that he might live a thousand
years," the idea struck him as by no means extravagant, seeing that if
he were doomed to sojourn for ever among them, he could only hope to
exchange in ten centuries as many ideas, and to witness as much progress
as he could do at home in half a century.
It has sometimes happened that one nation has been conquered by another
less civilised though more warlike, or that during social and political
revolutions, people have retrograded in knowledge. In such cases, the
traditions of earlier ages, or of some higher and more educated caste
which has been destroyed, may give rise to the notion of degeneracy from
a primaeval state of superior intelligence, or of science supernaturally
communicated. But had the original stock of mankind been really endowed
with such superior intellectual powers and with inspired knowledge and
had possessed the same improvable nature as their posterity, the point
of advancement which they would have reached ere this would have been
immeasurably higher. We cannot ascertain at present the limits,
whether of the beginning or the end, of the first stone period when Man
co-existed with the extinct mammalia, but that it was of great duration
we cannot doubt. During those ages there would have been time for
progress of which we can scarcely form a conception, and very different
would have been the character of the works of art which we should now
be endeavouring to interpret--those relics which we are now disinterring
from the old gravel-pits of St. Acheul, or from the Liege caves. In
them, or in the upraised bed of the Mediterranean, on the south coast of
Sardinia, instead of the rudest pottery or flint tools so irregular
in form as to cause the unpractised eye to doubt whether they afford
unmistakable evidence of design, we should now be finding sculptured
forms surpassing in beauty the masterpieces of Phidias or Praxiteles;
lines of buried railways or electric telegraphs from which the
best engineers of our day might gain invaluable hints; astronomical
instruments and microscopes of more advanced construction than any known
in Europe, and other indications of perfection in the arts and sciences
such as the nineteenth century has not yet witnessed. Still farther
would the triumphs of inventive genius be found to have been carried,
when the later deposits, now assigned to the ages of bronze and iron,
were formed. Vainly should we be straining our imaginations to guess
the possible uses and meaning of such relics--machines, perhaps,
for navigating the air or exploring the depths of the ocean, or
for calculating arithmetical problems beyond the wants or even the
conception of living mathematicians.
The opinion entertained generally by the classical writers of Greece and
Rome, that Man in the first stage of his existence was but just removed
from the brutes, is faithfully expressed by Horace in his celebrated
lines, which begin:--
Quum prorepserunt primis animalia terris.--Sat. lib. 1, 3, 99.
The picture of transmutation given in these verses, however severe
and contemptuous the strictures lavishly bestowed on it by Christian
commentators, accords singularly with the train of thought which the
modern doctrine of progressive development has encouraged.
"When animals," he says, "first crept forth from the newly formed earth,
a dumb and filthy herd, they fought for acorns and lurking-places with
their nails and fists, then with clubs, and at last with arms, which,
taught by experience, they had forged. They then invented names for
things and words to express their thoughts, after which they began to
desist from war, to fortify cities and enact laws." They who in
later times have embraced a similar theory, have been led to it by no
deference to the opinions of their pagan predecessors, but rather in
spite of very strong prepossessions in favour of an opposite hypothesis,
namely, that of the superiority of their original progenitors, of whom
they believe themselves to be the corrupt and degenerate descendants.
So far as they are guided by palaeontology, they arrive at this result
by an independent course of reasoning; but they have been conducted
partly to the same goal as the ancients by ethnological considerations
common to both, or by reflecting in what darkness the infancy of
every nation is enveloped and that true history and chronology are the
creation, as it were, of yesterday.