are large pear-shaped pieces of stone trimmed flat on the two opposite
sides or “faces.” Hence “biface” has been used to describe these tools.
The front view is like that of a pear with a rather pointed top, and
the back view looks almost exactly the same. Look at them side on, and
you can see that the front and back faces are the same and have been
trimmed to a thin tip. The real purpose in trimming down the two faces
was to get a good cutting edge all around. You can see all this in the
illustration.
[Illustration: ABBEVILLIAN BIFACE]
We have very little idea of the way in which these core-bifaces were
used. They have been called “hand axes,” but this probably gives the
wrong idea, for an ax, to us, is not a pointed tool. All of these early
tools must have been used for a number of jobs--chopping, scraping,
cutting, hitting, picking, and prying. Since the core-bifaces tend to
be pointed, it seems likely that they were used for hitting, picking,
and prying. But they have rough cutting edges, so they could have been
used for chopping, scraping, and cutting.
FLAKE TOOLS
The third tradition is the _flake_ tradition. The idea was to get a
tool with a good cutting edge by simply knocking a nice large flake off
a big block of stone. You had to break off the flake in such a way that
it was broad and thin, and also had a good sharp cutting edge. Once you
really got on to the trick of doing it, this was probably a simpler way
to make a good cutting tool than preparing a biface. You have to know
how, though; I’ve tried it and have mashed my fingers more than once.
The flake tools look as if they were meant mainly for chopping,
scraping, and cutting jobs. When one made a flake tool, the idea seems
to have been to produce a broad, sharp, cutting edge.
[Illustration: CLACTONIAN FLAKE]
The core-biface and the flake traditions were spread, from earliest
times, over much of Europe, Africa, and western Asia. The map on page
52 shows the general area. Over much of this great region there was
flint. Both of these traditions seem well adapted to flint, although
good core-bifaces and flakes were made from other kinds of stone,
especially in Africa south of the Sahara.
CHOPPERS AND ADZE-LIKE TOOLS
The fourth early tradition is found in southern and eastern Asia, from
northwestern India through Java and Burma into China. Father Maringer
recently reported an early group of tools in Japan, which most resemble
those of Java, called Patjitanian. The prehistoric men in this general
area mostly used quartz and tuff and even petrified wood for their
stone tools (see illustration, p. 46).
This fourth early tradition is called the _chopper-chopping tool_
tradition. It probably has its earliest roots in the pebble tool
tradition of African type. There are several kinds of tools in this
tradition, but all differ from the western core-bifaces and flakes.
There are broad, heavy scrapers or cleavers, and tools with an
adze-like cutting edge. These last-named tools are called “hand adzes,”
just as the core-bifaces of the west have often been called “hand
axes.” The section of an adze cutting edge is ∠ shaped; the section of
an ax is < shaped.
[Illustration: ANYATHIAN ADZE-LIKE TOOL]
There are also pointed pebble tools. Thus the tool kit of these early
south and east Asiatic peoples seems to have included tools for doing
as many different jobs as did the tools of the Western traditions.
Dr. H. L. Movius has emphasized that the tools which were found in the
Peking cave with Peking man belong to the chopper-tool tradition. This
is the only case as yet where the tools and the man have been found
together from very earliest times--if we except Sterkfontein.
DIFFERENCES WITHIN THE TOOL-MAKING TRADITIONS
The latter three great traditions in the manufacture of stone
tools--and the less clear-cut pebble tools before them--are all we have
to show of the cultures of the men of those times. Changes happened in
each of the traditions. As time went on, the tools in each tradition
were better made. There could also be slight regional differences in
the tools within one tradition. Thus, tools with small differences, but
all belonging to one tradition, can be given special group (facies)
names.
This naming of special groups has been going on for some time. Here are
some of these names, since you may see them used in museum displays
of flint tools, or in books. Within each tradition of tool-making
(save the chopper tools), the earliest tool type is at the bottom
of the list, just as it appears in the lowest beds of a geological
stratification.[3]
[3] Archeologists usually make their charts and lists with the
earliest materials at the bottom and the latest on top, since
this is the way they find them in the ground.
Chopper tool (all about equally early):
Anyathian (Burma)
Choukoutienian (China)
Patjitanian (Java)
Soan (India)
Flake:
“Typical Mousterian”
Levalloiso-Mousterian
Levalloisian
Tayacian
Clactonian (localized in England)
Core-biface:
Some blended elements in “Mousterian”
Micoquian (= Acheulean 6 and 7)
Acheulean
Abbevillian (once called “Chellean”)
Pebble tool:
Oldowan
Ain Hanech
pre-Stellenbosch
Kafuan
The core-biface and the flake traditions appear in the chart (p. 65).
The early archeologists had many of the tool groups named before they
ever realized that there were broader tool preparation traditions. This
was understandable, for in dealing with the mixture of things that come
out of glacial gravels the easiest thing to do first is to isolate
individual types of tools into groups. First you put a bushel-basketful
of tools on a table and begin matching up types. Then you give names to
the groups of each type. The groups and the types are really matters of
the archeologists’ choice; in real life, they were probably less exact
than the archeologists’ lists of them. We now know pretty well in which
of the early traditions the various early groups belong.
THE MEANING OF THE DIFFERENT TRADITIONS
What do the traditions really mean? I see them as the standardization
of ways to make tools for particular jobs. We may not know exactly what
job the maker of a particular core-biface or flake tool had in mind. We
can easily see, however, that he already enjoyed a know-how, a set of
persistent habits of tool preparation, which would always give him the
same type of tool when he wanted to make it. Therefore, the traditions
show us that persistent habits already existed for the preparation of
one type of tool or another.
This tells us that one of the characteristic aspects of human culture
was already present. There must have been, in the minds of these
early men, a notion of the ideal type of tool for a particular job.
Furthermore, since we find so many thousands upon thousands of tools
of one type or another, the notion of the ideal types of tools _and_
the know-how for the making of each type must have been held in common
by many men. The notions of the ideal types and the know-how for their
production must have been passed on from one generation to another.
I could even guess that the notions of the ideal type of one or the
other of these tools stood out in the minds of men of those times
somewhat like a symbol of “perfect tool for good job.” If this were
so--remember it’s only a wild guess of mine--then men were already
symbol users. Now let’s go on a further step to the fact that the words
men speak are simply sounds, each different sound being a symbol for a
different meaning. If standardized tool-making suggests symbol-making,
is it also possible that crude word-symbols were also being made? I
suppose that it is not impossible.
There may, of course, be a real question whether tool-utilizing
creatures--our first step, on page 42--were actually men. Other
animals utilize things at hand as tools. The tool-fashioning creature
of our second step is more suggestive, although we may not yet feel
sure that many of the earlier pebble tools were man-made products. But
with the step to standardization and the appearance of the traditions,
I believe we must surely be dealing with the traces of culture-bearing
_men_. The “conventional understandings” which Professor Redfield’s
definition of culture suggests are now evidenced for us in the
persistent habits for the preparation of stone tools. Were we able to
see the other things these prehistoric men must have made--in materials
no longer preserved for the archeologist to find--I believe there would
be clear signs of further conventional understandings. The men may have
been physically primitive and pretty shaggy in appearance, but I think
we must surely call them men.
AN OLDER INTERPRETATION OF THE WESTERN TRADITIONS
In the last chapter, I told you that many of the older archeologists
and human paleontologists used to think that modern man was very old.
The supposed ages of Piltdown and Galley Hill were given as evidence
of the great age of anatomically modern man, and some interpretations
of the Swanscombe and Fontéchevade fossils were taken to support
this view. The conclusion was that there were two parallel lines or
“phyla” of men already present well back in the Pleistocene. The
first of these, the more primitive or “paleoanthropic” line, was
said to include Heidelberg, the proto-neanderthaloids and classic
Neanderthal. The more anatomically modern or “neanthropic” line was
thought to consist of Piltdown and the others mentioned above. The
Neanderthaler or paleoanthropic line was thought to have become extinct
after the first phase of the last great glaciation. Of course, the
modern or neanthropic line was believed to have persisted into the
present, as the basis for the world’s population today. But with
Piltdown liquidated, Galley Hill known to be very late, and Swanscombe
and Fontéchevade otherwise interpreted, there is little left of the
so-called parallel phyla theory.
While the theory was in vogue, however, and as long as the European
archeological evidence was looked at in one short-sighted way, the
archeological materials _seemed_ to fit the parallel phyla theory. It
was simply necessary to believe that the flake tools were made only
by the paleoanthropic Neanderthaler line, and that the more handsome
core-biface tools were the product of the neanthropic modern-man line.
Remember that _almost_ all of the early prehistoric European tools
came only from the redeposited gravel beds. This means that the tools
were not normally found in the remains of camp sites or work shops
where they had actually been dropped by the men who made and used
them. The tools came, rather, from the secondary hodge-podge of the
glacial gravels. I tried to give you a picture of the bulldozing action
of glaciers (p. 40) and of the erosion and weathering that were
side-effects of a glacially conditioned climate on the earth’s surface.
As we said above, if one simply plucks tools out of the redeposited
gravels, his natural tendency is to “type” the tools by groups, and to
think that the groups stand for something _on their own_.
In 1906, M. Victor Commont actually made a rare find of what seems
to have been a kind of workshop site, on a terrace above the Somme
river in France. Here, Commont realized, flake tools appeared clearly
in direct association with core-biface tools. Few prehistorians paid
attention to Commont or his site, however. It was easier to believe
that flake tools represented a distinct “culture” and that this
“culture” was that of the Neanderthaler or paleoanthropic line, and
that the core-bifaces stood for another “culture” which was that of the
supposed early modern or neanthropic line. Of course, I am obviously
skipping many details here. Some later sites with Neanderthal fossils
do seem to have only flake tools, but other such sites have both types
of tools. The flake tools which appeared _with_ the core-bifaces
in the Swanscombe gravels were never made much of, although it
was embarrassing for the parallel phyla people that Fontéchevade
ran heavily to flake tools. All in all, the parallel phyla theory
flourished because it seemed so neat and easy to understand.
TRADITIONS ARE TOOL-MAKING HABITS, NOT CULTURES
In case you think I simply enjoy beating a dead horse, look in any
standard book on prehistory written twenty (or even ten) years ago, or
in most encyclopedias. You’ll find that each of the individual tool
types, of the West, at least, was supposed to represent a “culture.”
The “cultures” were believed to correspond to parallel lines of human
evolution.
In 1937, Mr. Harper Kelley strongly re-emphasized the importance
of Commont’s workshop site and the presence of flake tools with
core-bifaces. Next followed Dr. Movius’ clear delineation of the
chopper-chopping tool tradition of the Far East. This spoiled the nice
symmetry of the flake-tool = paleoanthropic, core-biface = neanthropic
equations. Then came increasing understanding of the importance of
the pebble tools in Africa, and the location of several more workshop
sites there, especially at Olorgesailie in Kenya. Finally came the
liquidation of Piltdown and the deflation of Galley Hill’s date. So it
is at last possible to picture an individual prehistoric man making a
flake tool to do one job and a core-biface tool to do another. Commont
showed us this picture in 1906, but few believed him.
[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF TOOL-PREPARATION TRADITIONS
Time approximately 100,000 years ago]
There are certainly a few cases in which flake tools did appear with
few or no core-bifaces. The flake-tool group called Clactonian in
England is such a case. Another good, but certainly later case is
that of the cave on Mount Carmel in Palestine, where the blended
pre-neanderthaloid, 70 per cent modern-type skulls were found. Here, in
the same level with the skulls, were 9,784 flint tools. Of these, only
three--doubtless strays--were core-bifaces; all the rest were flake
tools or flake chips. We noted above how the Fontéchevade cave ran to
flake tools. The only conclusion I would draw from this is that times
and circumstances did exist in which prehistoric men needed only flake
tools. So they only made flake tools for those particular times and
circumstances.
LIFE IN EARLIEST TIMES
What do we actually know of life in these earliest times? In the
glacial gravels, or in the terrace gravels of rivers once swollen by
floods of melt water or heavy rains, or on the windswept deserts, we
find stone tools. The earliest and coarsest of these are the pebble
tools. We do not yet know what the men who made them looked like,
although the Sterkfontein australopithecines probably give us a good
hint. Then begin the more formal tool preparation traditions of the
west--the core-bifaces and the flake tools--and the chopper-chopping
tool series of the farther east. There is an occasional roughly worked
piece of bone. From the gravels which yield the Clactonian flakes of
England comes the fire-hardened point of a wooden spear. There are
also the chance finds of the fossil human bones themselves, of which
we spoke in the last chapter. Aside from the cave of Peking man, none
of the earliest tools have been found in caves. Open air or “workshop”
sites which do not seem to have been disturbed later by some geological
agency are very rare.
The chart on page 65 shows graphically what the situation in
west-central Europe seems to have been. It is not yet certain whether
there were pebble tools there or not. The Fontéchevade cave comes
into the picture about 100,000 years ago or more. But for the earlier
hundreds of thousands of years--below the red-dotted line on the
chart--the tools we find come almost entirely from the haphazard
mixture within the geological contexts.
The stone tools of each of the earlier traditions are the simplest
kinds of all-purpose tools. Almost any one of them could be used for
hacking, chopping, cutting, and scraping; so the men who used them must
have been living in a rough and ready sort of way. They found or hunted
their food wherever they could. In the anthropological jargon, they
were “food-gatherers,” pure and simple.
Because of the mixture in the gravels and in the materials they
carried, we can’t be sure which animals these men hunted. Bones of
the larger animals turn up in the gravels, but they could just as
well belong to the animals who hunted the men, rather than the other
way about. We don’t know. This is why camp sites like Commont’s and
Olorgesailie in Kenya are so important when we do find them. The animal
bones at Olorgesailie belonged to various mammals of extremely large
size. Probably they were taken in pit-traps, but there are a number of
groups of three round stones on the site which suggest that the people
used bolas. The South American Indians used three-ball bolas, with the
stones in separate leather bags connected by thongs. These were whirled
and then thrown through the air so as to entangle the feet of a fleeing
animal.
Professor F. Clark Howell recently returned from excavating another
important open air site at Isimila in Tanganyika. The site yielded
the bones of many fossil animals and also thousands of core-bifaces,
flakes, and choppers. But Howell’s reconstruction of the food-getting
habits of the Isimila people certainly suggests that the word “hunting”
is too dignified for what they did; “scavenging” would be much nearer
the mark.
During a great part of this time the climate was warm and pleasant. The
second interglacial period (the time between the second and third great
alpine glaciations) lasted a long time, and during much of this time
the climate may have been even better than ours is now. We don’t know
that earlier prehistoric men in Europe or Africa lived in caves. They
may not have needed to; much of the weather may have been so nice that
they lived in the open. Perhaps they didn’t wear clothes, either.
WHAT THE PEKING CAVE-FINDS TELL US
The one early cave-dwelling we have found is that of Peking man, in
China. Peking man had fire. He probably cooked his meat, or used
the fire to keep dangerous animals away from his den. In the cave
were bones of dangerous animals, members of the wolf, bear, and cat
families. Some of the cat bones belonged to beasts larger than tigers.
There were also bones of other wild animals: buffalo, camel, deer,
elephants, horses, sheep, and even ostriches. Seventy per cent of the
animals Peking man killed were fallow deer. It’s much too cold and dry
in north China for all these animals to live there today. So this list
helps us know that the weather was reasonably warm, and that there was
enough rain to grow grass for the grazing animals. The list also helps
the paleontologists to date the find.
Peking man also seems to have eaten plant food, for there are hackberry
seeds in the debris of the cave. His tools were made of sandstone and
quartz and sometimes of a rather bad flint. As we’ve already seen, they
belong in the chopper-tool tradition. It seems fairly clear that some
of the edges were chipped by right-handed people. There are also many
split pieces of heavy bone. Peking man probably split them so he could
eat the bone marrow, but he may have used some of them as tools.
Many of these split bones were the bones of Peking men. Each one of the
skulls had already had the base broken out of it. In no case were any
of the bones resting together in their natural relation to one another.
There is nothing like a burial; all of the bones are scattered. Now
it’s true that animals could have scattered bodies that were not cared
for or buried. But splitting bones lengthwise and carefully removing
the base of a skull call for both the tools and the people to use them.
It’s pretty clear who the people were. Peking man was a cannibal.
* * * * *
This rounds out about all we can say of the life and times of early
prehistoric men. In those days life was rough. You evidently had to
watch out not only for dangerous animals but also for your fellow men.
You ate whatever you could catch or find growing. But you had sense
enough to build fires, and you had already formed certain habits for
making the kinds of stone tools you needed. That’s about all we know.
But I think we’ll have to admit that cultural beginnings had been made,
and that these early people were really _men_.
MORE EVIDENCE of Culture
[Illustration]
While the dating is not yet sure, the material that we get from caves
in Europe must go back to about 100,000 years ago; the time of the
classic Neanderthal group followed soon afterwards. We don’t know why
there is no earlier material in the caves; apparently they were not
used before the last interglacial phase (the period just before the
last great glaciation). We know that men of the classic Neanderthal
group were living in caves from about 75,000 to 45,000 years ago.
New radioactive carbon dates even suggest that some of the traces of
culture we’ll describe in this chapter may have lasted to about 35,000
years ago. Probably some of the pre-neanderthaloid types of men had
also lived in caves. But we have so far found their bones in caves only
in Palestine and at Fontéchevade.
THE CAVE LAYERS
In parts of France, some peasants still live in caves. In prehistoric
time, many generations of people lived in them. As a result, many
caves have deep layers of debris. The first people moved in and lived
on the rock floor. They threw on the floor whatever they didn’t want,
and they tracked in mud; nobody bothered to clean house in those days.
Their debris--junk and mud and garbage and what not--became packed
into a layer. As time went on, and generations passed, the layer grew
thicker. Then there might have been a break in the occupation of the
cave for a while. Perhaps the game animals got scarce and the people
moved away; or maybe the cave became flooded. Later on, other people
moved in and began making a new layer of their own on top of the first
layer. Perhaps this process of layering went on in the same cave for a
hundred thousand years; you can see what happened. The drawing on this
page shows a section through such a cave. The earliest layer is on the
bottom, the latest one on top. They go in order from bottom to top,
earliest to latest. This is the _stratification_ we talked about (p.
12).
[Illustration: SECTION OF SHELTER ON LOWER TERRACE, LE MOUSTIER]
While we may find a mix-up in caves, it’s not nearly as bad as the
mixing up that was done by glaciers. The animal bones and shells, the
fireplaces, the bones of men, and the tools the men made all belong
together, if they come from one layer. That’s the reason why the cave
of Peking man is so important. It is also the reason why the caves in
Europe and the Near East are so important. We can get an idea of which
things belong together and which lot came earliest and which latest.
In most cases, prehistoric men lived only in the mouths of caves.
They didn’t like the dark inner chambers as places to live in. They
preferred rock-shelters, at the bases of overhanging cliffs, if there
was enough overhang to give shelter. When the weather was good, they no
doubt lived in the open air as well. I’ll go on using the term “cave”
since it’s more familiar, but remember that I really mean rock-shelter,
as a place in which people actually lived.
The most important European cave sites are in Spain, France, and
central Europe; there are also sites in England and Italy. A few caves
are known in the Near East and Africa, and no doubt more sites will be
found when the out-of-the-way parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia are
studied.
AN “INDUSTRY” DEFINED