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PREHISTORIC MEN
by
ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD
Research Associate, Old World Prehistory
Professor
Oriental Institute and Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago
Drawings by Susan T. Richert
[Illustration]
Chicago Natural History Museum
Popular Series
Anthropology, Number 37
Third Edition Issued in Co-operation with
The Oriental Institute, The University of Chicago
Edited by Lillian A. Ross
Printed in the United States of America
by Chicago Natural History Museum Press
Copyright 1948, 1951, and 1957 by Chicago Natural History Museum
First edition 1948
Second edition 1951
Third edition 1957
Fourth edition 1959
Preface
[Illustration]
Like the writing of most professional archeologists, mine has been
confined to so-called learned papers. Good, bad, or indifferent, these
papers were in a jargon that only my colleagues and a few advanced
students could understand. Hence, when I was asked to do this little
book, I soon found it extremely difficult to say what I meant in simple
fashion. The style is new to me, but I hope the reader will not find it
forced or pedantic; at least I have done my very best to tell the story
simply and clearly.
Many friends have aided in the preparation of the book. The whimsical
charm of Miss Susan Richert’s illustrations add enormously to the
spirit I wanted. She gave freely of her own time on the drawings and
in planning the book with me. My colleagues at the University of
Chicago, especially Professor Wilton M. Krogman (now of the University
of Pennsylvania), and also Mrs. Linda Braidwood, Associate of the
Oriental Institute, and Professors Fay-Cooper Cole and Sol Tax, of
the Department of Anthropology, gave me counsel in matters bearing on
their special fields, and the Department of Anthropology bore some of
the expense of the illustrations. From Mrs. Irma Hunter and Mr. Arnold
Maremont, who are not archeologists at all and have only an intelligent
layman’s notion of archeology, I had sound advice on how best to tell
the story. I am deeply indebted to all these friends.
While I was preparing the second edition, I had the great fortune
to be able to rework the third chapter with Professor Sherwood L.
Washburn, now of the Department of Anthropology of the University of
California, and the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters with Professor
Hallum L. Movius, Jr., of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. The
book has gained greatly in accuracy thereby. In matters of dating,
Professor Movius and the indications of Professor W. F. Libby’s Carbon
14 chronology project have both encouraged me to choose the lowest
dates now current for the events of the Pleistocene Ice Age. There is
still no certain way of fixing a direct chronology for most of the
Pleistocene, but Professor Libby’s method appears very promising for
its end range and for proto-historic dates. In any case, this book
names “periods,” and new dates may be written in against mine, if new
and better dating systems appear.
I wish to thank Dr. Clifford C. Gregg, Director of Chicago Natural
History Museum, for the opportunity to publish this book. My old
friend, Dr. Paul S. Martin, Chief Curator in the Department of
Anthropology, asked me to undertake the job and inspired me to complete
it. I am also indebted to Miss Lillian A. Ross, Associate Editor of
Scientific Publications, and to Mr. George I. Quimby, Curator of
Exhibits in Anthropology, for all the time they have given me in
getting the manuscript into proper shape.
ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD
_June 15, 1950_
Preface to the Third Edition
In preparing the enlarged third edition, many of the above mentioned
friends have again helped me. I have picked the brains of Professor F.
Clark Howell of the Department of Anthropology of the University of
Chicago in reworking the earlier chapters, and he was very patient in
the matter, which I sincerely appreciate.
All of Mrs. Susan Richert Allen’s original drawings appear, but a few
necessary corrections have been made in some of the charts and some new
drawings have been added by Mr. John Pfiffner, Staff Artist, Chicago
Natural History Museum.
ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD
_March 1, 1959_
Contents
PAGE
How We Learn about Prehistoric Men 7
The Changing World in Which Prehistoric Men Lived 17
Prehistoric Men Themselves 22
Cultural Beginnings 38
More Evidence of Culture 56
Early Moderns 70
End and Prelude 92
The First Revolution 121
The Conquest of Civilization 144
End of Prehistory 162
Summary 176
List of Books 180
Index 184
HOW WE LEARN about Prehistoric Men
[Illustration]
Prehistory means the time before written history began. Actually, more
than 99 per cent of man’s story is prehistory. Man is at least half a
million years old, but he did not begin to write history (or to write
anything) until about 5,000 years ago.
The men who lived in prehistoric times left us no history books, but
they did unintentionally leave a record of their presence and their way
of life. This record is studied and interpreted by different kinds of
scientists.
SCIENTISTS WHO FIND OUT ABOUT PREHISTORIC MEN
The scientists who study the bones and teeth and any other parts
they find of the bodies of prehistoric men, are called _physical
anthropologists_. Physical anthropologists are trained, much like
doctors, to know all about the human body. They study living people,
too; they know more about the biological facts of human “races” than
anybody else. If the police find a badly decayed body in a trunk,
they ask a physical anthropologist to tell them what the person
originally looked like. The physical anthropologists who specialize in
prehistoric men work with fossils, so they are sometimes called _human
paleontologists_.
ARCHEOLOGISTS
There is a kind of scientist who studies the things that prehistoric
men made and did. Such a scientist is called an _archeologist_. It is
the archeologist’s business to look for the stone and metal tools, the
pottery, the graves, and the caves or huts of the men who lived before
history began.
But there is more to archeology than just looking for things. In
Professor V. Gordon Childe’s words, archeology “furnishes a sort of
history of human activity, provided always that the actions have
produced concrete results and left recognizable material traces.” You
will see that there are at least three points in what Childe says:
1. The archeologists have to find the traces of things left behind by
ancient man, and
2. Only a few objects may be found, for most of these were probably
too soft or too breakable to last through the years. However,
3. The archeologist must use whatever he can find to tell a story--to
make a “sort of history”--from the objects and living-places and
graves that have escaped destruction.
What I mean is this: Let us say you are walking through a dump yard,
and you find a rusty old spark plug. If you want to think about what
the spark plug means, you quickly remember that it is a part of an
automobile motor. This tells you something about the man who threw
the spark plug on the dump. He either had an automobile, or he knew
or lived near someone who did. He can’t have lived so very long ago,
you’ll remember, because spark plugs and automobiles are only about
sixty years old.
When you think about the old spark plug in this way you have
just been making the beginnings of what we call an archeological
_interpretation_; you have been making the spark plug tell a story.
It is the same way with the man-made things we archeologists find
and put in museums. Usually, only a few of these objects are pretty
to look at; but each of them has some sort of story to tell. Making
the interpretation of his finds is the most important part of the
archeologist’s job. It is the way he gets at the “sort of history of
human activity” which is expected of archeology.
SOME OTHER SCIENTISTS
There are many other scientists who help the archeologist and the
physical anthropologist find out about prehistoric men. The geologists
help us tell the age of the rocks or caves or gravel beds in which
human bones or man-made objects are found. There are other scientists
with names which all begin with “paleo” (the Greek word for “old”). The
_paleontologists_ study fossil animals. There are also, for example,
such scientists as _paleobotanists_ and _paleoclimatologists_, who
study ancient plants and climates. These scientists help us to know
the kinds of animals and plants that were living in prehistoric times
and so could be used for food by ancient man; what the weather was
like; and whether there were glaciers. Also, when I tell you that
prehistoric men did not appear until long after the great dinosaurs had
disappeared, I go on the say-so of the paleontologists. They know that
fossils of men and of dinosaurs are not found in the same geological
period. The dinosaur fossils come in early periods, the fossils of men
much later.
Since World War II even the atomic scientists have been helping the
archeologists. By testing the amount of radioactivity left in charcoal,
wood, or other vegetable matter obtained from archeological sites, they
have been able to date the sites. Shell has been used also, and even
the hair of Egyptian mummies. The dates of geological and climatic
events have also been discovered. Some of this work has been done from
drillings taken from the bottom of the sea.
This dating by radioactivity has considerably shortened the dates which
the archeologists used to give. If you find that some of the dates
I give here are more recent than the dates you see in other books
on prehistory, it is because I am using one of the new lower dating
systems.
[Illustration: RADIOCARBON CHART
The rate of disappearance of radioactivity as time passes.[1]]
[1] It is important that the limitations of the radioactive carbon
“dating” system be held in mind. As the statistics involved in
the system are used, there are two chances in three that the
“date” of the sample falls within the range given as plus or
minus an added number of years. For example, the “date” for the
Jarmo village (see chart), given as 6750 ± 200 B.C., really
means that there are only two chances in three that the real
date of the charcoal sampled fell between 6950 and 6550 B.C.
We have also begun to suspect that there are ways in which the
samples themselves may have become “contaminated,” either on
the early or on the late side. We now tend to be suspicious of
single radioactive carbon determinations, or of determinations
from one site alone. But as a fabric of consistent
determinations for several or more sites of one archeological
period, we gain confidence in the “dates.”
HOW THE SCIENTISTS FIND OUT
So far, this chapter has been mainly about the people who find out
about prehistoric men. We also need a word about _how_ they find out.
All our finds came by accident until about a hundred years ago. Men
digging wells, or digging in caves for fertilizer, often turned up
ancient swords or pots or stone arrowheads. People also found some odd
pieces of stone that didn’t look like natural forms, but they also
didn’t look like any known tool. As a result, the people who found them
gave them queer names; for example, “thunderbolts.” The people thought
the strange stones came to earth as bolts of lightning. We know now
that these strange stones were prehistoric stone tools.
Many important finds still come to us by accident. In 1935, a British
dentist, A. T. Marston, found the first of two fragments of a very
important fossil human skull, in a gravel pit at Swanscombe, on the
River Thames, England. He had to wait nine months, until the face of
the gravel pit had been dug eight yards farther back, before the second
fragment appeared. They fitted! Then, twenty years later, still another
piece appeared. In 1928 workmen who were blasting out rock for the
breakwater in the port of Haifa began to notice flint tools. Thus the
story of cave men on Mount Carmel, in Palestine, began to be known.
Planned archeological digging is only about a century old. Even before
this, however, a few men realized the significance of objects they dug
from the ground; one of these early archeologists was our own Thomas
Jefferson. The first real mound-digger was a German grocer’s clerk,
Heinrich Schliemann. Schliemann made a fortune as a merchant, first
in Europe and then in the California gold-rush of 1849. He became an
American citizen. Then he retired and had both money and time to test
an old idea of his. He believed that the heroes of ancient Troy and
Mycenae were once real Trojans and Greeks. He proved it by going to
Turkey and Greece and digging up the remains of both cities.
Schliemann had the great good fortune to find rich and spectacular
treasures, and he also had the common sense to keep notes and make
descriptions of what he found. He proved beyond doubt that many ancient
city mounds can be _stratified_. This means that there may be the
remains of many towns in a mound, one above another, like layers in a
cake.
You might like to have an idea of how mounds come to be in layers.
The original settlers may have chosen the spot because it had a good
spring and there were good fertile lands nearby, or perhaps because
it was close to some road or river or harbor. These settlers probably
built their town of stone and mud-brick. Finally, something would have
happened to the town--a flood, or a burning, or a raid by enemies--and
the walls of the houses would have fallen in or would have melted down
as mud in the rain. Nothing would have remained but the mud and debris
of a low mound of _one_ layer.
The second settlers would have wanted the spot for the same reasons
the first settlers did--good water, land, and roads. Also, the second
settlers would have found a nice low mound to build their houses on,
a protection from floods. But again, something would finally have
happened to the second town, and the walls of _its_ houses would have
come tumbling down. This makes the _second_ layer. And so on....
In Syria I once had the good fortune to dig on a large mound that had
no less than fifteen layers. Also, most of the layers were thick, and
there were signs of rebuilding and repairs within each layer. The mound
was more than a hundred feet high. In each layer, the building material
used had been a soft, unbaked mud-brick, and most of the debris
consisted of fallen or rain-melted mud from these mud-bricks.
This idea of _stratification_, like the cake layers, was already a
familiar one to the geologists by Schliemann’s time. They could show
that their lowest layer of rock was oldest or earliest, and that the
overlying layers became more recent as one moved upward. Schliemann’s
digging proved the same thing at Troy. His first (lowest and earliest)
city had at least nine layers above it; he thought that the second
layer contained the remains of Homer’s Troy. We now know that Homeric
Troy was layer VIIa from the bottom; also, we count eleven layers or
sub-layers in total.
Schliemann’s work marks the beginnings of modern archeology. Scholars
soon set out to dig on ancient sites, from Egypt to Central America.
ARCHEOLOGICAL INFORMATION
As time went on, the study of archeological materials--found either
by accident or by digging on purpose--began to show certain things.
Archeologists began to get ideas as to the kinds of objects that
belonged together. If you compared a mail-order catalogue of 1890 with
one of today, you would see a lot of differences. If you really studied
the two catalogues hard, you would also begin to see that certain
objects “go together.” Horseshoes and metal buggy tires and pieces of
harness would begin to fit into a picture with certain kinds of coal
stoves and furniture and china dishes and kerosene lamps. Our friend
the spark plug, and radios and electric refrigerators and light bulbs
would fit into a picture with different kinds of furniture and dishes
and tools. You won’t be old enough to remember the kind of hats that
women wore in 1890, but you’ve probably seen pictures of them, and you
know very well they couldn’t be worn with the fashions of today.
This is one of the ways that archeologists study their materials.
The various tools and weapons and jewelry, the pottery, the kinds
of houses, and even the ways of burying the dead tend to fit into
pictures. Some archeologists call all of the things that go together to
make such a picture an _assemblage_. The assemblage of the first layer
of Schliemann’s Troy was as different from that of the seventh layer as
our 1900 mail-order catalogue is from the one of today.
The archeologists who came after Schliemann began to notice other
things and to compare them with occurrences in modern times. The
idea that people will buy better mousetraps goes back into very
ancient times. Today, if we make good automobiles or radios, we can
sell some of them in Turkey or even in Timbuktu. This means that a
few present-day types of American automobiles and radios form part
of present-day “assemblages” in both Turkey and Timbuktu. The total
present-day “assemblage” of Turkey is quite different from that of
Timbuktu or that of America, but they have at least some automobiles
and some radios in common.
Now these automobiles and radios will eventually wear out. Let us
suppose we could go to some remote part of Turkey or to Timbuktu in a
dream. We don’t know what the date is, in our dream, but we see all
sorts of strange things and ways of living in both places. Nobody
tells us what the date is. But suddenly we see a 1936 Ford; so we
know that in our dream it has to be at least the year 1936, and only
as many years after that as we could reasonably expect a Ford to keep
in running order. The Ford would probably break down in twenty years’
time, so the Turkish or Timbuktu “assemblage” we’re seeing in our dream
has to date at about A.D. 1936-56.
Archeologists not only “date” their ancient materials in this way; they
also see over what distances and between which peoples trading was
done. It turns out that there was a good deal of trading in ancient
times, probably all on a barter and exchange basis.
EVERYTHING BEGINS TO FIT TOGETHER
Now we need to pull these ideas all together and see the complicated
structure the archeologists can build with their materials.
Even the earliest archeologists soon found that there was a very long
range of prehistoric time which would yield only very simple things.
For this very long early part of prehistory, there was little to be
found but the flint tools which wandering, hunting and gathering
people made, and the bones of the wild animals they ate. Toward the
end of prehistoric time there was a general settling down with the
coming of agriculture, and all sorts of new things began to be made.
Archeologists soon got a general notion of what ought to appear with
what. Thus, it would upset a French prehistorian digging at the bottom
of a very early cave if he found a fine bronze sword, just as much as
it would upset him if he found a beer bottle. The people of his very
early cave layer simply could not have made bronze swords, which came
later, just as do beer bottles. Some accidental disturbance of the
layers of his cave must have happened.
With any luck, archeologists do their digging in a layered, stratified
site. They find the remains of everything that would last through
time, in several different layers. They know that the assemblage in
the bottom layer was laid down earlier than the assemblage in the next
layer above, and so on up to the topmost layer, which is the latest.
They look at the results of other “digs” and find that some other
archeologist 900 miles away has found ax-heads in his lowest layer,
exactly like the ax-heads of their fifth layer. This means that their
fifth layer must have been lived in at about the same time as was the
first layer in the site 200 miles away. It also may mean that the
people who lived in the two layers knew and traded with each other. Or
it could mean that they didn’t necessarily know each other, but simply
that both traded with a third group at about the same time.
You can see that the more we dig and find, the more clearly the main
facts begin to stand out. We begin to be more sure of which people
lived at the same time, which earlier and which later. We begin to
know who traded with whom, and which peoples seemed to live off by
themselves. We begin to find enough skeletons in burials so that the
physical anthropologists can tell us what the people looked like. We
get animal bones, and a paleontologist may tell us they are all bones
of wild animals; or he may tell us that some or most of the bones are
those of domesticated animals, for instance, sheep or cattle, and
therefore the people must have kept herds.
More important than anything else--as our structure grows more
complicated and our materials increase--is the fact that “a sort
of history of human activity” does begin to appear. The habits or
traditions that men formed in the making of their tools and in the
ways they did things, begin to stand out for us. How characteristic
were these habits and traditions? What areas did they spread over?
How long did they last? We watch the different tools and the traces
of the way things were done--how the burials were arranged, what
the living-places were like, and so on. We wonder about the people
themselves, for the traces of habits and traditions are useful to us
only as clues to the men who once had them. So we ask the physical
anthropologists about the skeletons that we found in the burials. The
physical anthropologists tell us about the anatomy and the similarities
and differences which the skeletons show when compared with other
skeletons. The physical anthropologists are even working on a
method--chemical tests of the bones--that will enable them to discover
what the blood-type may have been. One thing is sure. We have never
found a group of skeletons so absolutely similar among themselves--so
cast from a single mould, so to speak--that we could claim to have a
“pure” race. I am sure we never shall.
We become particularly interested in any signs of change--when new
materials and tool types and ways of doing things replace old ones. We
watch for signs of social change and progress in one way or another.
We must do all this without one word of written history to aid us.
Everything we are concerned with goes back to the time _before_ men
learned to write. That is the prehistorian’s job--to find out what
happened before history began.
THE CHANGING WORLD in which Prehistoric Men Lived
[Illustration]
Mankind, we’ll say, is at least a half million years old. It is very
hard to understand how long a time half a million years really is.
If we were to compare this whole length of time to one day, we’d get
something like this: The present time is midnight, and Jesus was
born just five minutes and thirty-six seconds ago. Earliest history
began less than fifteen minutes ago. Everything before 11:45 was in
prehistoric time.
Or maybe we can grasp the length of time better in terms of
generations. As you know, primitive peoples tend to marry and have
children rather early in life. So suppose we say that twenty years
will make an average generation. At this rate there would be 25,000
generations in a half-million years. But our United States is much less
than ten generations old, twenty-five generations take us back before
the time of Columbus, Julius Caesar was alive just 100 generations ago,
David was king of Israel less than 150 generations ago, 250 generations
take us back to the beginning of written history. And there were 24,750
generations of men before written history began!
I should probably tell you that there is a new method of prehistoric
dating which would cut the earliest dates in my reckoning almost
in half. Dr. Cesare Emiliani, combining radioactive (C14) and
chemical (oxygen isotope) methods in the study of deep-sea borings,
has developed a system which would lower the total range of human
prehistory to about 300,000 years. The system is still too new to have
had general examination and testing. Hence, I have not used it in this
book; it would mainly affect the dates earlier than 25,000 years ago.
CHANGES IN ENVIRONMENT
The earth probably hasn’t changed much in the last 5,000 years (250
generations). Men have built things on its surface and dug into it and
drawn boundaries on maps of it, but the places where rivers, lakes,
seas, and mountains now stand have changed very little.
In earlier times the earth looked very different. Geologists call the
last great geological period the _Pleistocene_. It began somewhere
between a half million and a million years ago, and was a time of great
changes. Sometimes we call it the Ice Age, for in the Pleistocene
there were at least three or four times when large areas of earth
were covered with glaciers. The reason for my uncertainty is that
while there seem to have been four major mountain or alpine phases of
glaciation, there may only have been three general continental phases
in the Old World.[2]
[2] This is a complicated affair and I do not want to bother you
with its details. Both the alpine and the continental ice sheets
seem to have had minor fluctuations during their _main_ phases,
and the advances of the later phases destroyed many of the
traces of the earlier phases. The general textbooks have tended
to follow the names and numbers established for the Alps early
in this century by two German geologists. I will not bother you
with the names, but there were _four_ major phases. It is the
second of these alpine phases which seems to fit the traces of
the earliest of the great continental glaciations. In this book,
I will use the four-part system, since it is the most familiar,
but will add the word _alpine_ so you may remember to make the
transition to the continental system if you wish to do so.
Glaciers are great sheets of ice, sometimes over a thousand feet
thick, which are now known only in Greenland and Antarctica and in
high mountains. During several of the glacial periods in the Ice Age,
the glaciers covered most of Canada and the northern United States and
reached down to southern England and France in Europe. Smaller ice
sheets sat like caps on the Rockies, the Alps, and the Himalayas. The
continental glaciation only happened north of the equator, however, so
remember that “Ice Age” is only half true.
As you know, the amount of water on and about the earth does not vary.
These large glaciers contained millions of tons of water frozen into
ice. Because so much water was frozen and contained in the glaciers,
the water level of lakes and oceans was lowered. Flooded areas were
drained and appeared as dry land. There were times in the Ice Age when
there was no English Channel, so that England was not an island, and a
land bridge at the Dardanelles probably divided the Mediterranean from
the Black Sea.
A very important thing for people living during the time of a
glaciation was the region adjacent to the glacier. They could not, of
course, live on the ice itself. The questions would be how close could
they live to it, and how would they have had to change their way of
life to do so.
GLACIERS CHANGE THE WEATHER
Great sheets of ice change the weather. When the front of a glacier
stood at Milwaukee, the weather must have been bitterly cold in
Chicago. The climate of the whole world would have been different, and
you can see how animals and men would have been forced to move from one
place to another in search of food and warmth.
On the other hand, it looks as if only a minor proportion of the whole
Ice Age was really taken up by times of glaciation. In between came
the _interglacial_ periods. During these times the climate around
Chicago was as warm as it is now, and sometimes even warmer. It may
interest you to know that the last great glacier melted away less than
10,000 years ago. Professor Ernst Antevs thinks we may be living in an
interglacial period and that the Ice Age may not be over yet. So if you
want to make a killing in real estate for your several hundred times
great-grandchildren, you might buy some land in the Arizona desert or
the Sahara.
We do not yet know just why the glaciers appeared and disappeared, as
they did. It surely had something to do with an increase in rainfall
and a fall in temperature. It probably also had to do with a general
tendency for the land to rise at the beginning of the Pleistocene. We
know there was some mountain-building at that time. Hence, rain-bearing
winds nourished the rising and cooler uplands with snow. An increase
in all three of these factors--if they came together--would only have
needed to be slight. But exactly why this happened we do not know.
The reason I tell you about the glaciers is simply to remind you of the
changing world in which prehistoric men lived. Their surroundings--the
animals and plants they used for food, and the weather they had to
protect themselves from--were always changing. On the other hand, this
change happened over so long a period of time and was so slow that
individual people could not have noticed it. Glaciers, about which they
probably knew nothing, moved in hundreds of miles to the north of them.
The people must simply have wandered ever more southward in search
of the plants and animals on which they lived. Or some men may have
stayed where they were and learned to hunt different animals and eat
different foods. Prehistoric men had to keep adapting themselves to new
environments and those who were most adaptive were most successful.
OTHER CHANGES
Changes took place in the men themselves as well as in the ways they
lived. As time went on, they made better tools and weapons. Then, too,
we begin to find signs of how they started thinking of other things
than food and the tools to get it with. We find that they painted on
the walls of caves, and decorated their tools; we find that they buried
their dead.
At about the time when the last great glacier was finally melting away,
men in the Near East made the first basic change in human economy.
They began to plant grain, and they learned to raise and herd certain
animals. This meant that they could store food in granaries and “on the
hoof” against the bad times of the year. This first really basic change
in man’s way of living has been called the “food-producing revolution.”
By the time it happened, a modern kind of climate was beginning. Men
had already grown to look as they do now. Know-how in ways of living
had developed and progressed, slowly but surely, up to a point. It was
impossible for men to go beyond that point if they only hunted and
fished and gathered wild foods. Once the basic change was made--once
the food-producing revolution became effective--technology leaped ahead
and civilization and written history soon began.
Prehistoric Men THEMSELVES
[Illustration]
DO WE KNOW WHERE MAN ORIGINATED?
For a long time some scientists thought the “cradle of mankind” was in
central Asia. Other scientists insisted it was in Africa, and still
others said it might have been in Europe. Actually, we don’t know
where it was. We don’t even know that there was only _one_ “cradle.”
If we had to choose a “cradle” at this moment, we would probably say
Africa. But the southern portions of Asia and Europe may also have been
included in the general area. The scene of the early development of
mankind was certainly the Old World. It is pretty certain men didn’t
reach North or South America until almost the end of the Ice Age--had
they done so earlier we would certainly have found some trace of them
by now.
The earliest tools we have yet found come from central and south
Africa. By the dating system I’m using, these tools must be over
500,000 years old. There are now reports that a few such early tools
have been found--at the Sterkfontein cave in South Africa--along with
the bones of small fossil men called “australopithecines.”
Not all scientists would agree that the australopithecines were “men,”
or would agree that the tools were made by the australopithecines
themselves. For these sticklers, the earliest bones of men come from
the island of Java. The date would be about 450,000 years ago. So far,
we have not yet found the tools which we suppose these earliest men in
the Far East must have made.
Let me say it another way. How old are the earliest traces of men we
now have? Over half a million years. This was a time when the first
alpine glaciation was happening in the north. What has been found so
far? The tools which the men of those times made, in different parts
of Africa. It is now fairly generally agreed that the “men” who made
the tools were the australopithecines. There is also a more “man-like”
jawbone at Kanam in Kenya, but its find-spot has been questioned. The
next earliest bones we have were found in Java, and they may be almost
a hundred thousand years younger than the earliest African finds. We
haven’t yet found the tools of these early Javanese. Our knowledge of
tool-using in Africa spreads quickly as time goes on: soon after the
appearance of tools in the south we shall have them from as far north
as Algeria.
Very soon after the earliest Javanese come the bones of slightly more
developed people in Java, and the jawbone of a man who once lived in
what is now Germany. The same general glacial beds which yielded the
later Javanese bones and the German jawbone also include tools. These
finds come from the time of the second alpine glaciation.
So this is the situation. By the time of the end of the second alpine
or first continental glaciation (say 400,000 years ago) we have traces
of men from the extremes of the more southerly portions of the Old
World--South Africa, eastern Asia, and western Europe. There are also
some traces of men in the middle ground. In fact, Professor Franz
Weidenreich believed that creatures who were the immediate ancestors
of men had already spread over Europe, Africa, and Asia by the time
the Ice Age began. We certainly have no reason to disbelieve this, but
fortunate accidents of discovery have not yet given us the evidence to
prove it.
MEN AND APES
Many people used to get extremely upset at the ill-formed notion
that “man descended from the apes.” Such words were much more likely
to start fights or “monkey trials” than the correct notion that all
living animals, including man, ascended or evolved from a single-celled
organism which lived in the primeval seas hundreds of millions of years
ago. Men are mammals, of the order called Primates, and man’s living
relatives are the great apes. Men didn’t “descend” from the apes or
apes from men, and mankind must have had much closer relatives who have
since become extinct.
Men stand erect. They also walk and run on their two feet. Apes are
happiest in trees, swinging with their arms from branch to branch.
Few branches of trees will hold the mighty gorilla, although he still
manages to sleep in trees. Apes can’t stand really erect in our sense,
and when they have to run on the ground, they use the knuckles of their
hands as well as their feet.
A key group of fossil bones here are the south African
australopithecines. These are called the _Australopithecinae_ or
“man-apes” or sometimes even “ape-men.” We do not _know_ that they were
directly ancestral to men but they can hardly have been so to apes.
Presently I’ll describe them a bit more. The reason I mention them
here is that while they had brains no larger than those of apes, their
hipbones were enough like ours so that they must have stood erect.
There is no good reason to think they couldn’t have walked as we do.
BRAINS, HANDS, AND TOOLS
Whether the australopithecines were our ancestors or not, the proper
ancestors of men must have been able to stand erect and to walk on
their two feet. Three further important things probably were involved,
next, before they could become men proper. These are:
1. The increasing size and development of the brain.
2. The increasing usefulness (specialization) of the thumb and hand.
3. The use of tools.
Nobody knows which of these three is most important, or which came
first. Most probably the growth of all three things was very much
blended together. If you think about each of the things, you will see
what I mean. Unless your hand is more flexible than a paw, and your
thumb will work against (or oppose) your fingers, you can’t hold a tool
very well. But you wouldn’t get the idea of using a tool unless you had
enough brain to help you see cause and effect. And it is rather hard to
see how your hand and brain would develop unless they had something to
practice on--like using tools. In Professor Krogman’s words, “the hand
must become the obedient servant of the eye and the brain.” It is the
_co-ordination_ of these things that counts.
Many other things must have been happening to the bodies of the
creatures who were the ancestors of men. Our ancestors had to develop
organs of speech. More than that, they had to get the idea of letting
_certain sounds_ made with these speech organs have _certain meanings_.
All this must have gone very slowly. Probably everything was developing
little by little, all together. Men became men very slowly.
WHEN SHALL WE CALL MEN MEN?
What do I mean when I say “men”? People who looked pretty much as we
do, and who used different tools to do different things, are men to me.
We’ll probably never know whether the earliest ones talked or not. They
probably had vocal cords, so they could make sounds, but did they know
how to make sounds work as symbols to carry meanings? But if the fossil
bones look like our skeletons, and if we find tools which we’ll agree
couldn’t have been made by nature or by animals, then I’d say we had
traces of _men_.
The australopithecine finds of the Transvaal and Bechuanaland, in
south Africa, are bound to come into the discussion here. I’ve already
told you that the australopithecines could have stood upright and
walked on their two hind legs. They come from the very base of the
Pleistocene or Ice Age, and a few coarse stone tools have been found
with the australopithecine fossils. But there are three varieties
of the australopithecines and they last on until a time equal to
that of the second alpine glaciation. They are the best suggestion
we have yet as to what the ancestors of men _may_ have looked like.
They were certainly closer to men than to apes. Although their brain
size was no larger than the brains of modern apes their body size and
stature were quite small; hence, relative to their small size, their
brains were large. We have not been able to prove without doubt that
the australopithecines were _tool-making_ creatures, even though the
recent news has it that tools have been found with australopithecine
bones. The doubt as to whether the australopithecines used the tools
themselves goes like this--just suppose some man-like creature (whose
bones we have not yet found) made the tools and used them to kill
and butcher australopithecines. Hence a few experts tend to let
australopithecines still hang in limbo as “man-apes.”
THE EARLIEST MEN WE KNOW
I’ll postpone talking about the tools of early men until the next
chapter. The men whose bones were the earliest of the Java lot have
been given the name _Meganthropus_. The bones are very fragmentary. We
would not understand them very well unless we had the somewhat later
Javanese lot--the more commonly known _Pithecanthropus_ or “Java
man”--against which to refer them for study. One of the less well-known
and earliest fragments, a piece of lower jaw and some teeth, rather
strongly resembles the lower jaws and teeth of the australopithecine
type. Was _Meganthropus_ a sort of half-way point between the
australopithecines and _Pithecanthropus_? It is still too early to say.
We shall need more finds before we can be definite one way or the other.
Java man, _Pithecanthropus_, comes from geological beds equal in age
to the latter part of the second alpine glaciation; the _Meganthropus_
finds refer to beds of the beginning of this glaciation. The first
finds of Java man were made in 1891-92 by Dr. Eugene Dubois, a Dutch
doctor in the colonial service. Finds have continued to be made. There
are now bones enough to account for four skulls. There are also four
jaws and some odd teeth and thigh bones. Java man, generally speaking,
was about five feet six inches tall, and didn’t hold his head very
erect. His skull was very thick and heavy and had room for little more
than two-thirds as large a brain as we have. He had big teeth and a big
jaw and enormous eyebrow ridges.
No tools were found in the geological deposits where bones of Java man
appeared. There are some tools in the same general area, but they come
a bit later in time. One reason we accept the Java man as man--aside
from his general anatomical appearance--is that these tools probably
belonged to his near descendants.
Remember that there are several varieties of men in the whole early
Java lot, at least two of which are earlier than the _Pithecanthropus_,
“Java man.” Some of the earlier ones seem to have gone in for
bigness, in tooth-size at least. _Meganthropus_ is one of these
earlier varieties. As we said, he _may_ turn out to be a link to
the australopithecines, who _may_ or _may not_ be ancestral to men.
_Meganthropus_ is best understandable in terms of _Pithecanthropus_,
who appeared later in the same general area. _Pithecanthropus_ is
pretty well understandable from the bones he left us, and also because
of his strong resemblance to the fully tool-using cave-dwelling “Peking
man,” _Sinanthropus_, about whom we shall talk next. But you can see
that the physical anthropologists and prehistoric archeologists still
have a lot of work to do on the problem of earliest men.
PEKING MEN AND SOME EARLY WESTERNERS
The earliest known Chinese are called _Sinanthropus_, or “Peking man,”
because the finds were made near that city. In World War II, the United
States Marine guard at our Embassy in Peking tried to help get the
bones out of the city before the Japanese attack. Nobody knows where
these bones are now. The Red Chinese accuse us of having stolen them.
They were last seen on a dock-side at a Chinese port. But should you
catch a Marine with a sack of old bones, perhaps we could achieve peace
in Asia by returning them! Fortunately, there is a complete set of
casts of the bones.
Peking man lived in a cave in a limestone hill, made tools, cracked
animal bones to get the marrow out, and used fire. Incidentally, the
bones of Peking man were found because Chinese dig for what they call
“dragon bones” and “dragon teeth.” Uneducated Chinese buy these things
in their drug stores and grind them into powder for medicine. The
“dragon teeth” and “bones” are really fossils of ancient animals, and
sometimes of men. The people who supply the drug stores have learned
where to dig for strange bones and teeth. Paleontologists who get to
China go to the drug stores to buy fossils. In a roundabout way, this
is how the fallen-in cave of Peking man at Choukoutien was discovered.
Peking man was not quite as tall as Java man but he probably stood
straighter. His skull looked very much like that of the Java skull
except that it had room for a slightly larger brain. His face was less
brutish than was Java man’s face, but this isn’t saying much.
Peking man dates from early in the interglacial period following the
second alpine glaciation. He probably lived close to 350,000 years
ago. There are several finds to account for in Europe by about this
time, and one from northwest Africa. The very large jawbone found
near Heidelberg in Germany is doubtless even earlier than Peking man.
The beds where it was found are of second alpine glacial times, and
recently some tools have been said to have come from the same beds.
There is not much I need tell you about the Heidelberg jaw save that it
seems certainly to have belonged to an early man, and that it is very
big.
Another find in Germany was made at Steinheim. It consists of the
fragmentary skull of a man. It is very important because of its
relative completeness, but it has not yet been fully studied. The bone
is thick, but the back of the head is neither very low nor primitive,
and the face is also not primitive. The forehead does, however, have
big ridges over the eyes. The more fragmentary skull from Swanscombe in
England (p. 11) has been much more carefully studied. Only the top and
back of that skull have been found. Since the skull rounds up nicely,
it has been assumed that the face and forehead must have been quite
“modern.” Careful comparison with Steinheim shows that this was not
necessarily so. This is important because it bears on the question of
how early truly “modern” man appeared.
Recently two fragmentary jaws were found at Ternafine in Algeria,
northwest Africa. They look like the jaws of Peking man. Tools were
found with them. Since no jaws have yet been found at Steinheim or
Swanscombe, but the time is the same, one wonders if these people had
jaws like those of Ternafine.
WHAT HAPPENED TO JAVA AND PEKING MEN
Professor Weidenreich thought that there were at least a dozen ways in
which the Peking man resembled the modern Mongoloids. This would seem
to indicate that Peking man was really just a very early Chinese.
Several later fossil men have been found in the Java-Australian area.
The best known of these is the so-called Solo man. There are some finds
from Australia itself which we now know to be quite late. But it looks
as if we may assume a line of evolution from Java man down to the
modern Australian natives. During parts of the Ice Age there was a land
bridge all the way from Java to Australia.
TWO ENGLISHMEN WHO WEREN’T OLD
The older textbooks contain descriptions of two English finds which
were thought to be very old. These were called Piltdown (_Eoanthropus
dawsoni_) and Galley Hill. The skulls were very modern in appearance.
In 1948-49, British scientists began making chemical tests which proved
that neither of these finds is very old. It is now known that both
“Piltdown man” and the tools which were said to have been found with
him were part of an elaborate fake!
TYPICAL “CAVE MEN”
The next men we have to talk about are all members of a related group.
These are the Neanderthal group. “Neanderthal man” himself was found in
the Neander Valley, near Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1856. He was the first
human fossil to be recognized as such.
[Illustration: PRINCIPAL KNOWN TYPES OF FOSSIL MEN
CRO-MAGNON
NEANDERTHAL
MODERN SKULL
COMBE-CAPELLE
SINANTHROPUS
PITHECANTHROPUS]
Some of us think that the neanderthaloids proper are only those people
of western Europe who didn’t get out before the beginning of the last
great glaciation, and who found themselves hemmed in by the glaciers
in the Alps and northern Europe. Being hemmed in, they intermarried
a bit too much and developed into a special type. Professor F. Clark
Howell sees it this way. In Europe, the earliest trace of men we
now know is the Heidelberg jaw. Evolution continued in Europe, from
Heidelberg through the Swanscombe and Steinheim types to a group of
pre-neanderthaloids. There are traces of these pre-neanderthaloids
pretty much throughout Europe during the third interglacial period--say
100,000 years ago. The pre-neanderthaloids are represented by such
finds as the ones at Ehringsdorf in Germany and Saccopastore in Italy.
I won’t describe them for you, since they are simply less extreme than
the neanderthaloids proper--about half way between Steinheim and the
classic Neanderthal people.