THE PALAEOLITHIC AGE
[Sidenote: Reasons for devoting a chapter to the Palaeolithic Age.]
A chapter devoted to Palaeolithic Man may perhaps appear irrelevant
to a work the aim of which is to serve as an introduction to English
history; for it has been questioned whether in this country he left
any descendants, and therefore whether he exercised even the smallest
influence upon the later immigrants. But in France, if not here, the
Palaeolithic merged, perhaps by a long period of transition, into the
Neolithic Age:[17] the neolithic inhabitants of Britain were of course
descended from palaeolithic ancestors; and in every part of the world
in which it existed the palaeolithic culture was apparently much the
same. There are therefore other reasons besides that of sentiment for
attempting in this book to describe the life of primitive men and the
surroundings in which they lived: yet sentiment has its weight; for no
one who is not heedless of the past would forget the efforts of those
who, in hard struggle with nature and with fierce beasts, were the
unconscious founders of European civilization. Without the faith of
the Shinto ancestor-worshipper one may share his daily repeated pious
gratitude,--‘Ye forefathers of the generations, and of our families,
and of our kindred, unto you, the founders of our homes, we utter the
gladness of our thanks.’[18]
[Sidenote: Tertiary man.]
The palaeolithic people had acquired a degree of skill in the
manufacture of stone tools which is only attainable by the most
practised modern imitators. But the progress which they made during the
incalculably long period of their existence was so small that they must
have needed ages to ascend to the level at which we are able to observe
them. Therefore, although no skeletons, no implements have yet been
found which can be referred, in the opinion of all experts, to the
Tertiary Period, the most sceptical are willing to believe that man,
even if he did not deserve the appellation of _Homo sapiens_, did then
wander upon the face of the earth.[19] But how, when he had assumed
the erect position and had begun to make intelligent use of the hands
which gave him such an advantage in contending with other carnivorous
animals more powerful than himself, he learned slowly and by repeated
efforts to chip the flints that he picked up into serviceable shapes;
how in the struggle for a livelihood the stronger or the more cunning
prevailed; how with developing intelligence came keener susceptibility
to pain as well as to pleasure; how men’s fancies were quickened by
light and darkness, sun, moon, and stars, and their fears excited by
storm and flood and fire; how they strove to communicate to each other
their alarms, their desires, and their joys--these things may only be
imagined; and the imagination of those who have read most wisely and
have most observantly studied the ways of modern savages will lead them
least astray.
[Sidenote: The Ice Age.]
The Tertiary was merging into the Quaternary or Pleistocene Period
when the climate which had before fostered the palms and crocodiles
whose fossils have been discovered in the London Clay,[20] but had
been gradually changing, became intensely cold. Snow fell thickly
upon the mountains of Scandinavia; glaciers began to creep down the
valleys; and gradually the ice accumulated until it overspread the
whole of Northern Europe, filled the basins of the Baltic and the
North Sea, hid mountains and uplands in Scotland, and choked the dales
of Northern England, of the Midlands, and of Wales; while isolated
glaciers were formed even so far southward as the valleys of the
Beaujolais and the Lyonnais. The ice has left its record upon the
Highland and Cumbrian mountains, whose rugged crags it moulded into
flowing curves; upon rocks which were scratched by stones embedded in
slowly moving glaciers; in the mud, stiff and tenacious, which they
deposited as they grided over many kinds of rocks, and which, being
interspersed with stones, large and small, is called boulder-clay; in
rocks which they transported and dropped far from their native sites,
and by which the directions that they followed can still be traced; in
moraines which mark the limits of their descent and their recession;
in lakes that were formed, after the ice had disappeared, in glens
which moraines had dammed;[21] in the Arctic plants which survive on
mountains, and in those whose fossil remains have been found in Norfolk
near the level of the sea. In many places the boulder-clay lies in two
or more layers, separated by stratified sands and gravels, from which
it has been generally inferred that the Ice Age was interrupted by a
period--here and there by short intervals--during which the climate
was mild. Told briefly and in general terms, the tale which a learner
might piece together from geological textbooks[22] is something like
this. The cold was most intense during the earlier stage, when the
lower boulder-clay was being deposited, and, little by little, Britain
rose until it became one with the Continent, with Ireland, and with
Scandinavia, and extended far westward into the Atlantic Ocean. Then,
we are told, the ice-sheet that covered Scandinavia was six thousand
feet thick; and though it became thinner as it advanced southward, it
shrouded the hill-tops in Scotland, where boulders were lifted right
over the water-parting, and dropped on the western side, and scored
its marks upon rocks in the Lake District at heights of two thousand
five hundred feet; while, spreading over Ireland, it went out to sea
beyond Cork and Kerry, where the wall of ice broke off and floated
away in bergs. Then the land slowly sank until in the interglacial
period only the hills stood out above the sea, and Great Britain
became an archipelago. Again the movement was upward, though often
interrupted and perhaps not general in extent: the climate was again
becoming severe; and, although the rigours of the first period were not
repeated, local glaciers crept down the higher valleys north of the
Midlands, while icebergs floated over the parts that remained submerged
and over the North Sea. Now too, as in the earlier period, the cold
was not everywhere continuous: there were oscillations during which
the glaciers alternately advanced and retreated. As the Ice Age was
beginning to near its end, the land continued to rise until the North
Sea, the English Channel, and the Irish Sea once more disappeared.
In the latest stage of all, when Arctic conditions were about to
vanish even in our northern latitudes, there was a gradual subsidence:
Scotland was lowered about one hundred feet beneath the present level
of the sea, as the highest ‘raised beach’ along the shores of the great
estuaries testifies; and the waters rushed in over the sinking valley
of the Dover Strait.
Such was the orthodox faith: but the rising geologists have discarded
some of its articles; and even among the faithful there are pious
doubters. Many authorities deny that the sea-shells which are found
on hills in North Wales, Cheshire, and elsewhere, prove that they
were once submerged: those shells, they insist, were ploughed up by
glaciers out of the sea-floor; and they require us to believe that they
were carried up the sides of the hills to heights of thirteen hundred
and fifty feet above the sea-level.[23] But although these shells
are probably not in their original position, and the mere presence
of marine organisms is no sufficient proof of former submergence,
shells have been found near Inverness, five hundred feet above the
sea, in the very place where they lived and died. Still, it does not
follow that the submergence which they attest was interglacial.[24]
Some inquirers believe that the glaciers advanced and retreated once
and no more;[25] that there was only one slight elevation of the land
and one slight subsidence: others that Britain was not only elevated
twice, but also twice partially submerged; others that it was finally
severed from the Continent in the earlier part of the Ice Age, when
the drainage of Northern Europe, pouring into the North Sea and barred
by the ice-sheet from escaping northwards, cut for itself a channel
across the isthmus which now lies below the Dover Strait.[26] One
expert still insists that when man first entered Britain the whole
country stood at least six hundred feet above its present level:[27]
another, in the same work, denies that its greatest elevation was more
than seventy feet;[28] and their editor looks helplessly on. One writer
suggests that there may never have been an Ice Age, in the strictest
sense of the term, at all, but only local glaciers, such as now exist
in Greenland.[29] Another has laboured to show that the accumulation of
ice-sheets ‘merely marked one or more culminating epochs in a period
when the climate was at least as commonly temperate as Arctic’.[30]
Others even now maintain that not one only, but five interglacial
periods interrupted the intense cold;[31] others again that there
was no interglacial period at all, but only local ameliorations of
climate.[32] Another fertile theme of controversy has been the origin
of the boulder-clays. But the confession of a Fellow of the Royal
Society, who, as a member of the Geological Survey, lived in Norfolk
for eight years, studying its geology, suggests that, after all, a
sense of humour may compensate for inability to fathom the mysteries
of the Ice Age. ‘After spending about a year in Norfolk,’ he says, ‘I
began to believe I knew all about the drifts, but during the following
seven years of my sojourn in that county, as I moved from place to
place, I somehow seemed to know less and less, and I cannot say what
would have been the result, but fortunately the geological survey of
the county came to an end.’[33] Fortunately, too, it is not essential
to our study of palaeolithic man to decide in every case between the
theories of rival geologists. All admit that in Britain the Thames was
the extreme southern limit of glacial movement, although even in the
southern fringe Arctic conditions prevailed; that glaciers covered
a large part of the country north of the Thames, and on the higher
regions coalesced into ice-sheets: the view that the lower boulder-clay
was a _moraine profonde_ has at last been generally adopted;[34] while
almost all agree that there was at least one interglacial period, and
that there were climatic variations in certain tracts. Nevertheless one
of the ablest and most experienced of our field geologists has recently
given weighty reasons for his own conviction that even this solitary
age of amelioration should not be regarded as an established fact.[35]
[Sidenote: Continental Britain.]
But, if we are to study the Palaeolithic Age intelligently, we must
endeavour to test for ourselves the dogma that Britain was then
continental. That dogma has recently been questioned by geologists who
have minutely re-examined in the field the phenomena of the Glacial
Epoch. Mr. Clement Reid, for instance, holds that in the Palaeolithic
Age England never rose more than seventy feet above its present
level,[36] and that men first entered it across a narrow strait which
was formed in the earlier period of glaciation.[37] It is certain that
the sea then washed the coast of Sussex and the western counties; for
near Selsea there is a patch of boulder-clay--the only one south of
the Thames--which must have been deposited by shore-ice, and there are
rocks belonging to Bognor or the Isle of Wight, to the Channel Islands,
and to Brittany, which were transported by icebergs and dropped when
they melted under the summer sun.[38] Again, before the first English
boulder-clay was formed Arctic plants flourished near Cromer; and,
says Mr. Reid,[39] ‘as these occur just above the present sea-level,
and lie evenly on the strata below without deeply channelling them,
the height of the land at the commencement of the Glacial Epoch, in
Norfolk at any rate, must have been almost the same as it is now’. The
same observer assures us that in Southern Britain the first intense
cold was succeeded, after an interval of which geology has nothing
to tell, by an interglacial period in which the land sunk about one
hundred and forty feet below its present level, so that shingle was
deposited on what is now Portsdown Hill;[40] and that it then gradually
rose until, long before the second glaciation began, its level, marked
by fresh-water and estuarine deposits, once more virtually coincided
with the present line.[41] But, he tells us, at some time after the
disappearance of the ice which deposited the latest boulder-clay of
Norfolk the land stood rather higher than now;[42] and he holds that
even in the early part of the Neolithic Age Britain must have been
almost connected with the Continent, for many of the river valleys were
excavated to depths of from sixty to seventy feet below the present
level of the sea.[43] The submerged forests of Devonshire, Cornwall,
and the Bristol Channel, which contain traces of neolithic handiwork,
flourished at a time when the land stood from fifty to seventy feet
above its present elevation.[44]
But there are other facts which demonstrate that at some time after the
first period of intense cold--perhaps in that interval of which geology
has nothing to tell--the Continent must have included Britain. As we
shall presently see, not only the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the
glutton, and other Arctic animals, but also many species which prefer
a temperate climate, and others which are now tropical, lived in this
country side by side with palaeolithic man. Nearly all of them had
been represented here before the earliest glaciers of Scotland were
formed.[45] But even on the southern side of the Thames the cold was
so intense during the earlier part of the Ice Age that none of the
tropical, none even of the temperate species could there have lived:
since the land was barren, treeless, and frozen,[46] even the mammoth,
protected though it was by its woolly coat, could have found little
food;[47] and large herds of Arctic animals travelled as far southward
as Italy and Spain.[48] It is therefore evident that the beasts of
tropical and of temperate climes whose remains have been found in the
river-drift and in caves along with palaeolithic implements must have
entered Britain after the coldest period had ceased.[49] Moreover, vast
quantities of bones of Pleistocene mammals, some of which, such as
the reindeer, have never been found in Britain in preglacial deposits,
have been dredged up out of the bed of the North Sea, principally from
the Dogger Bank;[50] and it is therefore clear that at some time after
the climax of the Glacial Period that sea or a large part of it did
not exist. It cannot indeed be proved that the men of the river-drift
and the caves entered Britain as soon as the other animals;[51] and
possibly the Dover Strait may have existed as a narrow channel at
the time of their arrival: but since the bones that were raised from
the Dogger Bank appear to belong to the time when the Thames was
laying down the gravels in which men’s tools have been found,[52] it
seems probable that the land bridge was standing in some part of the
Palaeolithic Age.
[Sidenote: The relation of palaeolithic man to the Ice Age.]
It has been demonstrated that palaeolithic men were living in East
Anglia after glaciers had finally disappeared from that part of the
country. The valleys of the Ouse and its tributaries, in the gravels
of which their implements are to be found, were worn down through
boulder-clay.[53] Excavations at Hoxne in Suffolk have shown that the
people who left their tools there lived at a time which was separated
by two climatic waves, attested by the flora of two sets of strata,
from the age in which the latest boulder-clay of that district had
been deposited.[54] Moreover, in many cases in which evidence has
been adduced to show that palaeolithic remains are of glacial or
interglacial date, doubts have arisen either as to the artificial
character of the flints or as to the age of the beds in which they
were found.[55] When, for instance, a member of the Geological Survey
announced that he had found palaeolithic implements at Brandon
in Suffolk in three interglacial beds, separated by layers of
boulder-clay,[56] Sir John Evans suggested that the clay was not in its
original position, but had slipped down from a higher level.[57] Again,
Dr. Henry Hicks and Sir Joseph Prestwich were convinced that the cave
of Cae Gwyn in the Vale of Clwyd had been inhabited before the climax
of the Ice Age.[58] Here a flint flake was taken out of earth separated
by a superincumbent bed of clay from a layer of sand and gravel, above
which again rested boulder-clay that, in Hicks’s judgement, showed no
sign of having ever been disturbed, and which, in the opinion of Mr.
Clement Reid,[59] must have been deposited before the last glaciation
of the district. Even this evidence, however, is not unanimously
accepted. Flints have also been found in the Cromer Forest Bed at East
Runton, which was certainly preglacial; but Sir John Evans cannot see
on them the faintest marks of human workmanship.[60]
Nevertheless, it is not improbable that when the hunters whose tools
have been exhumed from the drift of South-Eastern Britain were living
in a comparatively mild climate, Scotland, the Lake Country, and the
highlands of Yorkshire and Wales may still have been partially buried
beneath ice.[61] The high-level drift of the Thames valley, which has
yielded so many implements, is believed by eminent geologists to have
been laid down at a time when ice spread over Northern Britain;[62] and
in support of this view it has been contended that in those regions
no palaeolithic implements have been found.[63] The argument cannot
be easily set aside; but it has been pointed out that in the northern
districts, owing to the extreme scarcity of flint, stone tools could
only have been made of harder rocks, on which it is not so easy to
detect marks of human agency; that the alluvial deposits in those
parts are not readily accessible to search; and that, if they are
patiently explored, implements may yet be recovered from them.[64]
Some years, however, have elapsed since this suggestion was made; and
it has not yet been verified. Moreover, the absence from the country
north of Yorkshire, save in a few preglacial deposits, of such bones as
have been found with palaeolithic remains seems to indicate that the
animals contemporary with palaeolithic man were unable to find food in
Northern Britain owing to the continuance of an Arctic climate.[65]
Man was undoubtedly living in Southern Britain in the cold period that
succeeded the so-called interglacial period of Sussex and Hampshire;
for the plateau gravels that cap the Bournemouth cliffs, in which
his tools have been found, are older than the valley gravels of the
Hampshire Avon and the Stour, which were formed towards the end of the
Ice Age by torrents that streamed over frozen chalk downs impervious
to water and swept away the fragments of their crumbling surface.[66]
Furthermore, stone implements have been found at Caddington below, and
near London embedded in, a stratum known as ‘contorted drift’, which is
believed to have been formed in a period of great cold;[67] and it is
merely a question of words whether this period is to be included in the
last phase of the Ice Age.[68]
[Sidenote: ‘Eolithic’ man?]
But there is one district from which evidence has been obtained that
has convinced many who sought conviction, that there were men in
Britain before the first British palaeolithic tool was made. In the
village of Ightham, near Sevenoaks, lives a tradesman, named Benjamin
Harrison, whose discoveries have caused much searching of heart, if
they have not revolutionized our knowledge of the life of early man.
In 1885 he began to search for old stone implements on the chalk
plateau between the valleys of the Medway and the Darent. There,
embedded in patches of gravel that must have been drifted on to the
plateau from hills higher still, which had been already worn down by
denudation even when palaeolithic hunters were roaming among herds of
mammoths in the valley of the Thames, he found flints of divers shapes
which seemed to him to bear sure traces of man’s handiwork, and which
have been termed ‘eoliths’, or stone implements of a dawning age.
Nearly all of them, indeed, were so rude that the chipping on their
edges has been ascribed by sceptics to the action of nature. But if
even a small fraction of them could be proved to be authentic, the
contention of their finder would be established. They recur, again and
again, in certain well-defined and peculiar shapes; the chips have in
many cases been removed not from the exposed parts but from concave
sides which, he would have us believe, natural agents could hardly
have affected;[69] if Sir John Evans and other experts are unable to
accept them as artificial, Canon Greenwell,[70] Pitt-Rivers,[71] and
Prestwich[72] were convinced that they had been wrought by man; even
the labourers who picked them out of the gravel hardly ever failed
to distinguish them from the surrounding flints;[73] and, if we may
believe the champions of their authenticity, those who assert that they
were shaped by nature have failed to produce stones of similar forms
from the valley-drift.[74] Now when the hunters of the Thames valley
were making their tools, Britain had the same main features of hill
and dale that it has to-day; but when the gravels were being drifted
on to the Kentish plateau, Thames and Medway were yet unborn; and,
filling the great valley that now lies between the North Downs and the
Lower Greensand hills, some five miles further south, the plateau rose
southward to Central Wealden uplands two thousand feet or more above
the sea. With no special knowledge of geology the antiquary who spends
a holiday in walking from Sevenoaks or Wrotham on to the plateau may
satisfy himself that this is true. Mingled with the eoliths in the
patches of drift are fragments of chert that must have been washed
down from the Lower Greensand at a time when it rose high above the
plateau’s level; for south of the eolithic area, inclining upward
below the chalk and below the Upper Greensand, the outcrop of the
Lower Greensand shows itself still. The plateau drift lies upon rock
of preglacial age;[75] and although there is no evidence that it is
itself older than the Pleistocene period, some geologists hold that it
was deposited soon after, perhaps before, British glaciers began to
form.[76]
But assuming that the eoliths are artificial, does it follow that
they are older than the oldest palaeoliths, or that they were wrought
by a race different from the men of the valleys? Mr. Clement Reid
has pointed out that the gravel at Alderbury, some three miles below
Salisbury, in which multitudes of eoliths have been found, is on
exactly the same level as that of a gravel three miles lower down
the valley, where Prestwich picked up a palaeolithic implement which
had fallen from a yet higher elevation.[77] If the position of this
implement was an index of its age, eoliths were being used in Wiltshire
after palaeoliths had begun to be manufactured.[78] On the other hand,
it is asserted that eoliths have lately been found in Tertiary deposits
on the high plateau above the Avon;[79] and one geologist, who rejects
all eoliths, would argue that Benjamin Harrison’s labours have not
been vain. Many palaeolithic implements have been found on the Kentish
plateau, but never embedded in association with eoliths: most of them
are unworn, and look as if they had remained on the very spot where
they were lost; and it is easy to see that they are far less ancient
than the eoliths. But certain implements have also been found there
which, although they were not lying in the gravels, appeared to bear
marks of having been derived from them and washed down in the same
drift that contains the eoliths. Like the latter they were stained
deep brown, covered with glacial scratches, and coated with the white
deposit of silica.[80] If this argument had been generally accepted,
one might conclude that the greater antiquity of British man does not
depend for its proof upon the authenticity of the eoliths. What all
admit is that in France flints of eolithic form have been found even in
Tertiary beds.[81]
But while the extreme antiquity of many eoliths is certain, the
question of their authenticity has recently been debated with
renewed and redoubled vigour. About two years ago an eminent French
palaeontologist, Monsieur Marcellin Boule, announced that in the
process of manufacturing cement at Mantes many flints had been
converted into eolithic forms;[82] and it has been contended that the
conditions which were actually observed in the factory were analogous
to those of the torrential streams by which flints may have been
dashed hither and thither as they were swept on to the Kentish plateau
in primaeval times.[83] An ardent advocate of the authenticity of
eoliths insisted that some of the Kentish types would be looked for in
vain among the machine-made specimens from Mantes;[84] but a sceptic
affirmed that he had himself found an eolith, manifestly untouched by
man, with its notch accurately fitting against another stone, the two
having been ground together by a natural process which he described as
the slipping, sliding, and foundering of the insoluble surface material
from higher to lower levels.[85] Although it was objected that certain
rectangular eoliths with blunt edges could not have been produced
except by art,[86] it is permissible to doubt whether the human origin
of eoliths will ever be established beyond dispute; and he who reflects
that they have been met with not only in Tertiary beds but in those
immeasurably later deposits which were contemporary with or but little
older than palaeolithic man[87] will leave them for the present
without regret to the consideration of enthusiasts.
[Sidenote: The environment of palaeolithic man in Britain.]
Let us then try to conceive of the environment of those palaeolithic
hunters of whose culture we have clearer indications in a late phase
of the Ice Age, when the glaciers of Southern Britain had passed away.
Then the configuration of the country was very different from that
which we behold. The chalk ranges of Kent and of Picardy were unbroken.
The Thames, fed sometimes by torrential rains, flowing rapidly and
fitfully in the broad shallow valley which it was excavating, was
depositing gravels on the slopes that bordered it, a hundred feet above
the level of its existing waters,[88] and wandering far eastward across
a plain from whose now sunken surface bones of mammoth and reindeer,
of hyena and bear have been dredged, to swell that greater Rhine which
found no outlet till it reached a far northern sea. Mammoths, woolly
rhinoceroses, and giant elks with antlers ten feet across, roamed
in the forests; hippopotamuses swam in the streams;[89] brown bears
and grizzly bears and lions and hyenas made their dens in caves, and
dragged into their dark and sinuous recesses the prey which they had
torn down in the open.
[Sidenote: Whence did he come?]
The earlier palaeolithic immigrants, impelled perhaps by scarcity of
game, had crossed the valley of the Dover Strait doubtless from the
nearer parts of France or Belgium; but the original home of the race is
unknown, for palaeolithic tools have been found not only in this island
and almost every European country except Scandinavia, but also in North
Africa, in the valley of the Nile,[90] in Palestine and Asia Minor,
the Euphrates Valley, Somaliland, India, and North America: as a high
authority has remarked, they are ‘so identical in form and character
with British specimens that they might have been manufactured by the
same hands’;[91] and the same may be said of those which were wrought
by the Tasmanians, who, fifty years ago, had not yet been exterminated
by the pioneers of Christian civilization.[92]
[Sidenote: Chronological puzzles.]
Many attempts have been made to calculate the number of millenniums
that have elapsed since our Palaeolithic Age began and since it came to
its end. Croll, the author of the astronomical theory of the Ice Age,
finally concluded that that epoch ceased about eighty thousand years
ago;[93] and Sir Archibald Geikie laboured in his youth to estimate
the time which the rivers would have taken to excavate their valleys
from the days when they were depositing the high-level gravels to the
era when they reached their present depth.[94] But any one who uses
his powers of reflection will see how many elements of uncertainty
must stultify such a method as this;[95] and, since the cause of the
Ice Age remains unknown, the calculations of Croll were futile.[96]
Indeed, if it were possible to prove that eighty thousand years have
passed since the beginning or since the end of the Palaeolithic Age,
not much would be gained; for whose mind can conceive what such a
period means? The wiser archaeologists have given up the quest of
chronological precision; and they know that the imagination may be
stimulated by more legitimate means. Go to Caversham and stand upon the
gravels washed down by the Thames in his lusty youth:[97] one hundred
and twenty feet below he is flowing now; think of the ages that passed
while his waters were hollowing out that valley, which was as it is
still before the Palaeolithic Age had passed away. Walk along the cliff
near Bournemouth, and look out over the Solent Sea. That cliff was once
a river bank; and even the cautious geologist who has described how
Hampshire was wrought into its present form is willing to believe that
man had then appeared in our land. Where you see salt water he would
have seen dry land, bounded far away by a range of hills which linked
the downs of the Isle of Wight to those that rise behind Weymouth Bay,
and of which the Needles remain as lonely relics: he would have seen
the Solent flow, a mighty river, enriched by the tribute of the Stour,
the Avon, the Itchen, and the Test.[98] Ascend the hill on which stands
Dover Castle, and gaze upon Cape Grisnez. Let the waters beneath you
disappear: across the chalk that once spanned the Channel like a bridge
men walked from the white cliff that marks the horizon to where you
stand. No arithmetical chronology can spur the imagination to flights
like these.[99]
[Sidenote: Palaeolithic skeletons.]
The dwellers on the plateau, if they did exist in preglacial times,
have left us no memorial save their tools: but can we picture to
ourselves the lineaments of the palaeolithic hunters who came after
them? Human bones, including two perfect skulls, closely associated
with the bones of hyenas, have been recovered from a cave near
Plymouth. The average height of the people to whom they belonged was
little more than five feet: the skulls have hardly been described with
sufficient accuracy to enable us to compare them with others of the
same period; but, in regard to breadth and to the degree of projection
of the lower jaw, they were not very different from the majority of
modern British skulls.[100] Two other human skulls have been found
in England for which palaeolithic age has been claimed--one near
Swanscombe in Kent, the other near Bury St. Edmunds; but the former
may not be as old as the bed from which it was unearthed; and the
other was so broken that its contour could hardly be restored.[101]
But almost all the older palaeolithic skulls that have been found in
Western Europe belong to the same type, which is generally called after
the famous specimen that was exhumed nearly half a century ago in the
Neander valley in Rhenish Prussia, and of which the most characteristic
examples were derived from a cavern at Spy in the province of Namur.
The Swanscombe skull has somewhat similar characters; and it has been
supposed that the earlier palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain belonged
to the Neanderthal race. Unfortunately, however, the dates of the
Neanderthal and Spy specimens cannot be fixed. The latter may belong
to the comparatively advanced period in which the best palaeolithic
stone implements of France were manufactured: the former was not seen
in place by a competent observer, and its age is quite uncertain.[102]
If the very few skeletons that we possess are typical, these men were
short, big-boned, and powerfully built. Their heads were long and
narrow, their foreheads amazingly low and retreating, and their jaws
heavy and projecting. But their most striking features were enormously
massive and outstanding brow ridges. Although the Neanderthal skull
was described by Huxley as the most ape-like of all human skulls,
and although for some time after its discovery it was the subject of
animated discussion, it and its congeners were thenceforward regarded
by all anatomists until the beginning of the present century as human
in the strictest sense of the word. Within the last few years, however,
a German anthropologist has endeavoured to prove that it and the two
skulls of Spy may only be called human in a limited sense: he refuses
to class them under the head of _Homo sapiens_, and refers them to an
older species, which he calls _Homo primigenius_. This view, however,
has not made influential converts: the Neanderthal skull was capacious
enough to lodge a brain as large as that of many a living savage; and
trained observers have pointed out that skulls of like contour have
belonged in modern times to men of considerable mental power.[103]
A considerable number of skeletons have lately been discovered in
Moravia, which, although like the Neanderthal race they had long skulls
and prominent brows, belonged to a higher type, and, as the length of
their thigh-bones showed, were of great stature;[104] while the caves
of Baoussé-Roussé, near Mentone, were the resting-place of very ancient
men, in whose skeletons anatomists have detected certain negroid
characteristics, although their skulls must have contained a large
volume of brain.[105]
But the Palaeolithic Age was of such vast duration that before its
close Britain may well have been invaded by new races. In the latest
period there were living in the Riviera a people whose physical
features connect them with the earliest French neolithic race; and
in South-Western France skulls of like type have been found at
Laugerie-Basse and Chancelade in the valley of the Lozère.[106]
The relics of these men which have been discovered in the caves in
which they dwelled show that some of them were worthy to be called
forerunners of Pheidias and Praxiteles. With their tools of flint or
chert they carved ivory dagger-handles, or, as we are now assured,
objects of uncertain use,[107] adorning them with figures of the heads
of reindeer, and scratched on horns or tusks drawings of mammoths,
deer, horses, and hunters spearing salmon, of which the finer examples
are recognized by modern artists as true works of art.[108] A single
specimen, found in the Robin Hood Cave in Creswell Crags, is all that
we can show:[109] but implements with which it was associated present
points of likeness to those of the French caves which justify the
assumption that the primitive artists of France sent emigrants to our
land.
[Sidenote: Range of the palaeolithic hunters in Britain.]
The palaeolithic nomads, whether of the earlier or the later race,
pushed their way as far north as Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, and
Denbighshire, perhaps even into the East Riding of Yorkshire; and as
far west as Glamorganshire, Caermarthenshire and Devonshire:[110]
but almost all the remains of their handiwork have been found in
the south-eastern district of England,--in Kent, especially the
neighbourhood of Reculver, Sussex, Hampshire, Essex, Middlesex,
and Surrey, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Northamptonshire,
Oxfordshire and Berkshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk.
[Sidenote: Where their tools have been found.]
The places in which these relics lay buried may be grouped in four
classes,--the plateau gravels, already described; gravels which were
apparently deposited not by rivers but by heavy rains which, falling
upon frozen chalk downs, destroyed the shattered surface and swept
it away in floods;[111] the river-drift, and caves; and, unlike the
belongings of the neolithic herdsmen, those of the older inhabitants
are not to be found, except in special cases, on or near the surface
of the earth. The amateur who has acquired the rudiments of geology
and has learned to discern stone implements among the fragments of
rock which surround them, knows that in the gravels and sands which
rivers deposited at various elevations when they were flowing now here
now there in higher and wider channels he may hope to find specimens
to add to his collection. Common sense too teaches him that in the
same valley the higher terraces were formed before the lower, and
that the tools which they contain, however closely they may resemble
those which are embedded below, are nevertheless, as a rule, far
older.[112] If he asks himself how they found their way into these
gravel beds, reflection will soon suggest the answer. It would seem
that although the palaeolithic hunters dwelled sometimes near lakes or
ponds, they usually settled on the banks of streams. Fishing, hunting,
wading through fords, warned by swiftly rising floods to quit their
habitations, they lost or abandoned the weapons which now serve our
purpose instead of theirs. But in some cases beds which contained
palaeolithic remains are so situated that a tiro would never suppose
that they had been deposited by running water at all. Few even of
professed geologists would have thought of searching on the hill-tops
at Caddington, near Dunstable; yet old stone implements have been found
there in profusion. When the men who made them were alive the hills
were valleys, and the valleys which now lie below the hills did not
exist. Nor would it have occurred to any but a geologist that the tools
which were espied lying at the foot of the cliffs between Reculver and
Herne Bay had fallen from the gravels which line their summit.[113]
[Sidenote: Inhabited caves.]
Kent’s Cavern and the Brixham Cave, near Torquay, the Wookey Hole
‘Hyena Den’, near Wells, the Long Hole Cave in Glamorganshire, and the
caves of Creswell Crags, on the north-eastern border of Derbyshire,
are perhaps the most famous of their class. Heaps of bones have been
found in all of them, which proved that the men who, from time to
time, inhabited them were contemporary, like those whose tools are
recovered from the river-drift, with animals of which some, like the
mammoth, the straight-tusked elephant, and the ‘sabre-toothed’ tiger,
have disappeared from the face of the earth, and many have long been
extinct in Britain. Generally in the lower strata the stone tools
are exactly like those found in the river-drift; while in the higher
they are as a rule more elaborately finished, and are associated with
needles, harpoons, and other implements of bone. The same sequence is
discernible in the palaeolithic caves of France and Belgium.[114]
[Sidenote: Cave implements and river-drift implements.]
Let us compare in some museum the sets of tools and weapons which have
been taken from caves with those of the river-drift. Are the latter
older than the former, and is it possible to establish in either or in
both a chronological succession of types? Taken by itself, the form of
palaeolithic implements, at least in this country, is not generally
a criterion of their age; but neither the forms of those that have
come from the caves nor the bones which accompanied them forbid us to
believe that the oldest are at least as old as any that belonged to
the drift. Generally speaking, the fauna of the caves and of the river
gravels are identical.[115] It is therefore certain that, although
in general aspect a collection of implements derived from the former
source is unlike one from the latter because the two were deposited
in different circumstances, some of the deposits in the drift and
in the caves were contemporaneous.[116] Since a few implements of
river-drift form have been found in caves along with those of higher
types, it seems reasonable to conclude that the same men possessed
both; and if those which are characteristic of the caves are almost
entirely absent from the drift, is not the explanation partly that
they were more perishable, partly that many of them would not have
been used in the field? In other words, there is no reason to believe
that the later occupants of the caves were men of different race or of
different habits from the contemporary hunters whose lost tools have
been given up by the drift.[117] Long ago Monsieur de Mortillet framed
a chronological classification of French and Belgian palaeolithic
implements according to their types, which, though of late years it has
been modified, has been provisionally accepted; but in this country
it has been found impossible to follow his example: the same types
exist here, but the relative antiquity of the specimens can seldom be
determined; for implements of the oldest French types have been found
in deposits which belong to the close of our Palaeolithic Age.[118]
Even when implements from the high-level terraces are compared with
those of the lower, no marked distinction is observed. In certain cases
of course a local classification has been established. Thus the stone
implements in the upper strata of two of the caves of Creswell Crags
belonged to the advanced type which is called after the settlement of
Solutré in the department of Saône-et-Loire;[119] and the implements
of North-East London which, from their position at the bottom of the
excavations as well as their colour, were evidently the oldest, were
also inferior in workmanship to newer specimens found above them some
twelve feet beneath the surface, and far inferior to the newest of
the same district, which were recovered from an old land-surface,
two or three feet below the existing ground, generally called the
‘Palaeolithic Floor.’[120] Again, in the brick-fields of Caddington
excavation revealed an ancient land-surface on which a palaeolithic
colony had made their tools. At a later time a new surface about two
feet higher was formed by brick-earth, which must have been swept
down by heavy rains from the hills above; and on this more implements
appeared. Above it again is a bed of contorted drift, containing
implements whose deep ochreous colour would seem to show that of the
three series they are the oldest: evidently they were washed down
from the hill-tops on which perhaps lived the earliest inhabitants of
the district, and which, as they were gradually worn away, formed a
deposit in what were then valleys, but are now in their turn hills. The
lowest implements, which were of course older than those next above
them, belong to the type called after the cave of Le Moustier in the
valley of the Vezère, which is itself later than the type associated
with the high-level gravels of the Somme.[121] It has been suggested
that when the evidence of plants or of strata is wanting, the relative
age of palaeolithic implements may be provisionally estimated by the
animal remains with which they are found. The straight-tusked elephant,
the ‘big-nosed’ rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus were characteristic,
we are told, of the earliest palaeolithic times;[122] the mammoth, the
woolly rhinoceros, the cave-bear, and the hyena of a later period;
and the reindeer was specially abundant towards the close of the age.
But it is now generally recognized that if this orderly succession of
fauna existed in Aquitaine, it cannot be distinguished either in our
island or in Northern Gaul. When we find Arctic and tropical animals
commingled, when we see that the bones of big-nosed rhinoceros and
woolly rhinoceros, of straight-tusked elephant and hyena and reindeer
have been dug out of the same beds,[123] we may conclude that it is
hardly worth while to gauge the antiquity of the works of palaeolithic
craftsmen by such tests as these.
On a general review it should seem that the French chronological
classifications of palaeolithic implements, even applied to England,
contain a measure of truth. The implements which are commonly found
in the river-drift and other deposits in the open field undoubtedly
began to be manufactured before those which are characteristic of the
caves; and those of Mousterian type were first made, both in England
and in France, long before the development of the elegant Solutrean
forms and the period in which flourished the artists of South-Western
France.[124] But both in France and in England Mousterian implements
were still used during the later period;[125] and even drift implements
of the oldest kind continued to be used by palaeolithic hunters of the
latest generation.[126]
[Sidenote: Divers forms of tools.]
In order to apprehend the culture of the palaeolithic races, it is
necessary to be conversant with the forms of their tools. The great
majority were made of flint; but in places where flint was scarce
or difficult to obtain other stones, for example, chert, quartzite
pebbles, sandstones, and felstone, were used. The principal forms
were flint flakes, which were probably intended to serve as knives,
sometimes even as saws (for a few of them are serrated),[127] and,
in certain instances, as scrapers for dressing hides; implements or
weapons, pear-shaped or tongue-shaped in outline, more or less acutely
pointed, and more or less truncated at the butt, some of which look
like spear-heads, though they may have been grasped in the hand; and
oval, almond-shaped, and occasionally heart-shaped or triangular
implements, which have a cutting edge all round. Each of these forms of
course comprises many varieties, not only in contour but also in the
mode of chipping; and a few tools of abnormal shapes have also been
found, as well as natural blocks of flint, called ‘hammer-stones’,
which were used in the process of manufacture, and most of which were
slightly trimmed in order to make them more serviceable. Near Ipswich a
lady has recently discovered a tiny implement which, it has been fondly
suggested, some hunter may have wrought as a toy for his child.[128]
Among the bone implements were harpoons, barbed sometimes on one,
sometimes on both sides, which have been found in Kent’s Cavern and
other caves, and which closely resemble those that are used by the
Eskimos of our own day; and needles drilled by bone awls, with eyes
so small that the threads of reindeer sinew which they received could
hardly have exceeded a thirtieth of an inch in diameter. Moreover,
it is more than probable that clubs, wooden tools, and utensils and
vessels of skin were also used, which, from their perishable nature,
have long since disappeared.[129]
[Sidenote: Palaeolithic workshops.]
The explorations of antiquaries have revealed more than one of the
open-air workshops in which the primitive tool-makers plied their
trade. Near Crayford, on a sandy beach beneath an old chalk cliff
that overhung the Thames when on its southern side its bed was nearly
two miles wider, excavation discovered the surface, strewn with flint
flakes, in actual contact with mammoths’ bones, on which the workers
had lived and toiled until a great flood drove them away, leaving the
sediment which for countless ages concealed their remains. The inferior
quality of the flint showed that they had not known how to win it by
mining from the rock, but had been obliged to content themselves with
such stray blocks as they could find. The enthusiast who discovered
the site was actually able to fit many of the flakes together, and
to reconstruct the original blocks from which they had been struck
off.[130] At Caddington, where hammer-stones and punches, great blocks
of flint which had been used as anvils, and innumerable flakes and
cores bore their silent testimony, Mr. Worthington Smith inferred from
the confusion in which finished and unfinished tools were left that
the settlers, terrified perhaps by some violent storm, had suddenly
quitted their abode. He found an implement which had been ruined by
an ill-directed blow of the hammer, and one which had been re-flaked
and re-pointed by a later worker; and his practised eye detected
that the craftsmen had flaked their tools differently from those of
Crayford.[131] Speaking generally, however, the methods of working
were the same as those which are still followed by the ‘knappers’ of
Brandon in Suffolk, who manufacture gun-flints for African savages. The
flakes which were to be used as knives or scrapers were detached from
the blocks by a stone hammer; and the larger implements were trimmed
into the various shapes which have been described, by blows along their
edges, which chipped off small splinters. The effect of the hammer
was to produce on the flake, just below the point where the blow was
delivered, a protuberance, which is called the ‘bulb of percussion’,
and which of course left a corresponding cavity on the block from which
the flake was detached. This bulb is the mark by which a manufactured
flint may be recognized; but on tools whose artificial origin is
manifest even to an untrained eye it has often been obliterated by the
process of chipping.[132]
[Illustration: FIG. 1.]
[Illustration: FIG. 2. ½]
[Illustration: FIG. 3. ½]
[Illustration: FIG. 4. ½]
[Sidenote: Handles.]
Inquisitive antiquaries have raised the question whether any
palaeolithic implements were furnished with handles. The Tasmanians
simply grasped their tools in their hands;[133] and there is little
evidence that the Britons mounted theirs:[134] but the triangular
sharply-pointed flints which have been already described might
sometimes have been used as arrow-points or javelin-heads.[135] Some
were doubtless missiles and nothing more.
[Sidenote: Uses of tools.]
But, as experts who have passed their leisure in recovering, comparing,
and classifying these things confess, it is impossible to define the
various purposes to which this or that stone tool was applied. ‘Who,’
says Lord Avebury,[136] ‘could describe the exact use of a knife?’
We only know that with his rude implements the palaeolithic hunter
did all the work that his hand found to do,--felled trees, chopped
wood to feed his fire, dug up esculent roots, scooped out canoes,
killed and cut up the animals on which he subsisted, skinned them and
dressed their hides to clothe himself withal, encountered his enemies
in battle, and defended himself in conflict with the beasts against
which his keen sight and hearing, his intellect, and these weapons,
which it enabled [Sidenote: Culture of the palaeolithic inhabitants of
Britain.] him to fashion, were his sole protection.[137] Yet as we look
at the tools in a museum, nearly the same at the end as the beginning
of our immeasurably long Palaeolithic Age, we marvel even more at the
mental stagnation of the primeval savage than at the skill which he
had laboriously attained; and we wonder how it was that men who had
learned to chip their blocks of flint so accurately remained content,
generation after generation, with the art which they had acquired,
and never thought of grinding the cutting edge against another stone
and thus producing a better and sharper weapon. ‘We see in our own
times,’ wrote Sir Charles Lyell,[138] ‘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.’ It would seem that in the Palaeolithic Age
men had no pottery and grew no corn: they certainly had no cattle;
and, though they lived by hunting, they had no dogs.[139] Perhaps they
sometimes dug pits to trap their game; for one of the engravings from
La Madelaine may have been intended to depict a beast impaled upon a
wooden stake.[140] Their numbers must have been very small; for people
who live by the chase alone require for their sustenance forests of
vast extent.[141] Some, as we have seen, lived in caves; others, as
we may infer from the remains that have been picked up beneath the
cliffs of Oldbury,[142] by Sevenoaks, under projecting ledges of rock;
generally perhaps, and especially in districts in which no caves were
available, the dwellings were huts or shelters made of trees and
boughs. Some of the bones that were found in Kent’s Cavern, some even
of the gravels that have yielded eoliths,[143] show traces of fire,
which was probably produced by the friction of sticks or by striking
flint against iron pyrites;[144] and one is tempted to infer that the
hunters or their women learned to make their food more palatable by
cooking. The numberless fractured bones which were strewed in the
caves had evidently been pounded for the sake of the marrow, which in
every age was a dainty dish for prehistoric folk; and in the closing
period, when harpoons had been invented, men were able to vary their
diet of meat and herbs and wild fruit with divers kinds of fish. By
that time too they had acquired the art of sewing, and doubtless they
made themselves coats of skins, perhaps even, like the cave-dwellers
of the Pyrenees, long gauntlets of fur;[145] while fossils that have
been found with natural holes artificially enlarged may justify the
assumption that, like the cave-dwellers of France, they adorned
themselves with necklaces.[146] The figure of a horse engraved on a
bone that was disinterred from one of the Creswell caves suggests, as
we have seen, that in this country, as in France, there were men who
were not destitute of the artistic faculty: but this solitary specimen
can hardly compare with the best of the drawings that delighted the
explorers of the contemporary French caves. It is difficult for any one
who looks at these life-like sketches to believe that those who made
them were not inspired by love of art; but the ingenuity of a modern
archaeologist, who observes that the Australian aborigines scratch on
rocks the likenesses of animals as charms to promote their fecundity,
has suggested that they were merely talismans intended to supply the
hunter with abundant game. As he insists[147] that the animals which
the artists represented were all edible, one may fairly ask whether
they were accustomed to feed upon the glutton,[148] the serpent, and
the wolf;[149] whether they counted each other as legitimate prey;
what could have been the utilitarian motive for depicting an otter
chasing a fish;[150] and what was the object of engraving the strange
quasi-human creature which the antiquary who discovered it in the
cavern of Mas d’Azil described as an ‘anthropomorphic ape, nearer
akin to man than the anthropoids that we know’.[151] Nevertheless it
is not improbable that religion, which has stimulated savage as well
as mediaeval and modern art, may have been one of the motives of the
cave-dwellers; and perhaps the artist was sometimes a magician, though
it would be idle to speculate on the purpose of his spells.[152]
Disciplined imagination, working upon a basis of ascertained fact,
may help one to picture the lives of those primitive inhabitants of
our island. We can see them returning at evening to the fires which
their women had kindled, and which served at once to warm them, to
cook their food, to keep off beasts of prey, and to scare away the
malignant spirits of whom, if they were like other savages, they were
yet more in dread. We may see a vast herd of reindeer crossing the
ford at Windsor, and wolves watching for their chance to spring upon
stragglers. We may hear the trumpeting of the elephant, the roar of the
lion, the bellowing of the wild bull, the howl of the hyena, the snort
of the hippopotamus, as it splashed or swam in the waters of the Thames
or the Ouse. We may imagine the hunter striving by sign, or gesture, or
rudimentary language, to express his delight when he has succeeded in
the chase, his despair when ill success leaves him and his to pine with
hunger, his terror when the eclipsed moon turning to red, when flood,
or lightning, or pestilence warns him that the spirits of nature are
wroth, his grief when bear, or bison, or famished wolf has slain his
wife or child. How he disposed of his dead he has left no sign: but in
the caves near Mentone, which were inhabited in successive periods of
the Palaeolithic Age, there were evidences that the corpses had been
decently interred;[153] and the skeletons found in Moravia[154] had
been carefully protected by a rampart of stones.[155]
[Sidenote: Religion.]
Had the primitive people of Britain any religion, or any ideas that
contained the germs of religious belief? It is not enough to point to
modern savages like the Tasmanians, whose material culture was lower
than that of the palaeolithic Britons, but who certainly believed in
a spiritual world.[156] The cave-dwellers of Mentone were interred
with their implements and ornaments, perhaps intended for use in a
future state;[157] but such evidence is not forthcoming here. The
painted pebbles, however, and the ‘bull-roarers’ which were treasured
in the caves of South-Western France may well have had analogues among
the inhabitants of this island[158] who were in the same stage of
culture; and doubtless, like the similar objects which are shown by
the natives of Central Australia, they were connected, more or less
closely, with religious ideas.[159] No savage tribe, indeed, has yet
been observed of whom it can be proved that they were without religion;
for some travellers who have affirmed the contrary have been unable
to comprehend ideas which differed wholly from their own; some have
recorded facts which gave the lie to their own denial; some have
confessed that after long intercourse they had discovered the existence
of beliefs which they had never suspected; and all who have been
qualified by tact and sympathy to deal with savages have recognized
how hard it is to induce them to disclose their inmost thoughts.[160]
But much depends upon the sense in which the word Religion is to be
understood. The great anthropologist whose writings have given the
most powerful impetus to the study of primitive culture has taken
as his ‘minimum definition of religion’ the belief in spiritual
beings;[161] and although it might be rash to affirm that materialism
is inconsistent with religion, and no sympathetic reader would deny
that the Latin poet who denounced ‘foul religion’ with such fierce
earnestness had a religion of his own, Professor Tylor’s words may
serve as our guide.[162] It is true that the conception of a spiritual
being formed by a primitive mind has hardly anything in common with
that approved by a theologian or a philosopher: for the savage, as for
Tertullian and Origen, spirits are not immaterial; they are exceedingly
subtle, but still corporeal. Nor, indeed, are they necessarily
immortal. Savage religion is utterly different from that which has
been the guide of life to men who, though they had put away all hope
of everlasting life, retained their sense of the nobility of human
nature,--‘to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and
to keep himself unspotted from the world’; utterly different from that
which inspires the idealist to whom theology is a vain thing and the
supernatural unreal, but who clings to his belief that man’s punishment
or reward hereafter is simply to be what he has become, that his
destiny is to grow in grace, lapsing perhaps, but again aspiring, until
his spirit becomes one with the indwelling spirit of God. Yet, although
the orthodox may refuse the name of religion to an animism begotten of
fear and unconnected with ethics, though idealists may scoff at the
conception of spiritual beings which invests them with bodily form and
ponderable and mortal albeit ethereal substance, that animism was the
seed out of which their own faith--its framework but not its nobler
part--was evolved.
He whose mind is informed by the teaching of ethnography may conceive,
if he has a sympathetic imagination, the mental state that gave birth
to primitive religion; but if his reading has not been wasted, he will
understand how vain would be the attempt to ascribe to this or that
prehistoric people any known savage creed. For, alike in origin and in
essence, the forms of modern animism are manifold. To the palaeolithic
Briton fire, leaping roaring and devouring, devastating flood, rushing
wind, lightning flash, disease, death itself,--all may have been
animated by spirit, or have been themselves spiritual beings. Elves,
goblins, phantoms may have been created by his brain, and have seemed
to flit before him when prolonged fasting had stimulated the creative
power of his fancy. The conceptions that were ultimately to become
the greater gods of polytheism may have arisen in his mind as in the
minds of other savage men. At least we may believe that, unless he
differed greatly from the modern savages whose handiwork resembles his,
he began to people the universe with spiritual beings when he became
conscious of his own soul; that the phantasms which he saw in dreams
were for him real and alive; that every spirit in which he believed
originated in the curiosity that led him to seek the cause of every
natural phenomenon; that, although social friction had compelled him
to recognize a moral code, his religion and his morality were not one
but two, not mutually supporting but distinct; and, finally, that no
thought of future retribution or reward troubled or comforted his heart.
[Sidenote: Totemism.]
Intimately connected with primitive religion is totemism, that strange
institution which has been observed in various stages of survival
among the North American Indians, the forest tribes of South America,
the aboriginals of Western and Central Australia, the Malays, the
hill-tribes of Central India, certain Mongoloid tribes of Central
Asia, in Bechuanaland, and in the Bantu district of South Africa;[163]
which in every case began before those whom it affected had come to
domesticate animals, to till the earth, or to fashion pottery;[164] and
which tends to decay when hunting gives place to pasturage.[165] One
cannot but inquire whether an institution so widespread existed among
the prehistoric inhabitants of Britain; and, although no distinct case
of totemism has been found or recorded in Europe,[166] the inquiry is
not perhaps so hopeless as it may at first sight appear.
The leading principles of totemism have been so often defined that
they are doubtless familiar to many readers. Evidently it originated
at a time when men were not possessed by the fancy that they were a
distinct branch of creation, but felt their kinship with other animals,
which they had hardly begun to regard as inferior.[167] The members
of the clans which form a totemic tribe trace their descent generally
from some animal, sometimes even from a plant or an object which we
should call inanimate, and bear its name. But how did the conception of
relationship between a clan and an animal or vegetable species arise?
It has been suggested that metempsychosis may supply the explanation.
Some great man perhaps gave out that after his death no hare was to be
eaten by his clan because a hare would be possessed by his soul. Thus
not only his own children and grandchildren but also hares would be his
descendants; and he would be the founder of a totem-family, which might
develop into a totem-clan.[168] On the other hand, it has been argued
that when totemism began descent was necessarily reckoned in the female
line, and that it is therefore useless to search for its origin in
anything--for example, ‘a paternal soul tenanting an animal’--which was
deemed to be inherited from a male ancestor.[169]
Until a recent date it was an article of faith among anthropologists
that, except in special circumstances, the life of a totem-animal
was, in the eyes of the clan which belonged to it, sacred, and that
marriage between the members of any one clan was absolutely tabooed. If
a clansman of a Crocodile clan desired a wife, he must seek her from a
Wolf clan or from some other. But within the last few years totemism
has been carefully and minutely observed among the Arunta tribe of
Central Australia; and the records of these observations mark a new
era in anthropology. With the Aruntas totemism does not forbid the
slaughter of the totem-animal and does not prescribe exogamy: it is
based upon the belief that they are descended from ‘quasi-human animal
or vegetable ancestors, whose souls are still reborn in human form in
successive generations’.[170] It has, however, been maintained that in
the organization of this tribe there are still discernible traces of
totemism of the primitive type, involving both exogamy and respect for
the life of the totem-animal;[171] and also that their totemism is so
decadent that nothing can be learned from it as to totemic origins.[172]
Totemism is indeed a subject of extraordinary difficulty: its
literature is enormous and rapidly growing; and it is out of the
question in this book to do more than point out its problems, and put
the reader in the way of pursuing the study for himself. The problem
of its origin can never be solved with certainty; for the institution
cannot now be observed in its primitive state; and any attempt to
trace it backward must start from conjecture as to the original social
condition of man.[173] Perhaps the most plausible and ingenious
theory rests upon the assumption, for which considerable evidence has
been adduced, that groups of men originally designated one another by
animal and plant names, and that these names were accepted even when
they were bestowed in derision. Such a group, finding itself called,
let us say, by the name of the pig, and not knowing how it had come by
the name, would naturally believe that there was an intimate connexion
between itself and the porcine species.[174] The taboos which forbade
the slaughter of the totem-animal and marriage between a man and a
maiden of the same kin would, it is argued, follow when once the
universal belief, that ‘the blood is the life’ and therefore sacred,
was evolved.[175]
There are superstitions and names which suggest that totemism may once
have existed in Britain; but even if their evidence is accepted, it
is of course impossible to point out the source from which they were
ultimately derived. They may have belonged to our early Neolithic Age,
or they may have been introduced later, when totemism had died out, by
invaders who had received them from inferior tribes with whom they came
in contact. We are assured that Cornish fishermen believe that drowning
men sometimes assume the form of animals;[176] that in the village
of Burchurch in Shropshire it is deemed unlucky to kill a bat;[177]
that at Great Crosby in Lancashire the goose is held sacred;[178] and
that certain Scottish clans derived their names from animals.[179] The
familiar passage in which Caesar observes that the Britons counted it
impious to taste the flesh of hares, fowls, and geese[180] has also
been interpreted as a survival of totemism.[181] But this is a mere
guess. The greatest of anthropologists has warned us not to assume that
every sacred animal is a totem:[182] the association with a clan of a
species of animals is only one form of animal-worship. It is, however,
quite possible that if these animals had once been totems, they were
revered by clans with whom the ancestors of the British Celts had mixed
before they emigrated from Gaul; for broken bones of the hare, which
were found in one of the caves of Perthi-Chwareu in Denbighshire, show
that at all events in that part of neolithic Britain the animal was
eaten.[183]
[Sidenote: Was the domestication of animals a result of totemism?]
Some anthropologists have argued that the domestication of animals and
even agriculture resulted from totemism.[184] Thus Monsieur Reinach
insists that the domestication of the boar is an irrefragable proof
of its former sanctity; for, he argues, if men had always thought
themselves entitled to kill and eat boars, boars would never have
multiplied under human protection, and become the ancestors of domestic
swine. Domestication, he considers, implies a long truce between men
and animals, something analogous to the Golden Age, celebrated by poets
of antiquity, in which men were vegetarians. One may be pardoned for
maintaining a sceptical attitude towards a theory which is obviously
incapable of proof, which to men who live remote from libraries but
in the midst of animals presents insuperable difficulties, and which,
moreover, seems to imply that prehistoric tribes were excessively
stupid. If it were true, one would expect to find that oxen, sheep,
and pigs had been reared in the Palaeolithic Age, and that modern
totem groups had domesticated or were now domesticating totem animals.
But the only animal which the cave-dwellers of South-Western France
apparently domesticated was the horse, which was doubtless lassoed
and fastened not because it was sacred but for food;[185] and the
Aruntas have no domestic animals. A hungry Australian would have no
scruple in killing and eating an animal, not belonging to his own
totem-species, which by his wife would be deemed sacred: the Bantus
have sheep and oxen, but neither the ox nor the sheep is among their
totems. What motive could savages have had for keeping totem-animals in
captivity in large numbers unless they had desired to eat their flesh
or to drink their milk, and why should they have toiled to provide
food for them in winter? Why should the domestication of any species
be impossible unless the lives of the animals were spared for a long
term of years; and why, if every bull and ram were suffered to gratify
its sexual instincts unchecked, and cows and ewes were unmilked and
unused, should they become tame.[186] It is surely not incredible that
primitive hunters, not belonging to Bull or Boar clans, who saw that
wild oxen and wild boars were good for food, should have conceived the
idea of ensuring a more constant supply by trapping young animals,
taming them, and breeding from them. Totemism may conceivably have
had some influence upon the domestication of animals; but it seems
probable that there was room for common sense.[187] And the mere fact
that a piece of sculpture representing an ear of barley was found in a
cave at Lourdes hardly seems sufficient to justify the conclusion that
barley was an object of worship in the Palaeolithic Age, and that its
subsequent cultivation was due to totemism.[188] What we may safely
conclude is that exogamy, with which totemism is commonly associated,
although they may have been originally distinct, was one of the chief
factors in consolidating groups and allying them together.[189]
[Sidenote: Magic.]
The subject of totemism naturally leads on to that of magic; for in
Australia totemic groups have developed into co-operative magic-working
societies; and there is no rashness in assuming that magic flourished
everywhere before the end of the Palaeolithic Age. We are often told
that magic was based upon a confused association of ideas; that it was
the embryo of science;[190] and that priest and magician have ever
been foes. There is much truth in this: but magic is not to be so
easily explained; and most of us are still far from sympathetically
understanding the mental state in which it originated. To say that one
kind of magic is an outgrowth of the law of similarity, the magician
fancying, for example, that by making drawings of animals he can cause
their species to multiply; that the other depends upon the law of
contact, when, for instance, it is supposed that whatever is done to a
weapon will correspondingly affect the person whom it wounded,[191]--to
say this is not to fathom the magician’s mind. Magic, notwithstanding
the hostility with which priests have regarded magicians, cannot be
separated from religion by a line of demarcation; nor indeed is it
always possible to differentiate magicians from priests.[192] It has
been well said that magic, as observed among primitive tribes, is
‘part and parcel of the “god-stuff” out of which religion fashions
itself’.[193] Australian magicians believe that their powers are
conferred upon them by supernatural beings;[194] and the magicians of
many tribes call upon spirits to aid them in working their spells.[195]
One of the most important functions of the magician is to ensure an
adequate fall of rain; but in New Guinea this duty belongs to the
priest of the god by whose favour the rain is believed to fall.[196]
Vast learning has been expended to prove that monarchy originated in
magic;[197] but we only know that magicians have sometimes succeeded
in making themselves kings;[198] and doubtless in certain cases magic
may have helped to sow the seed out of which gradations of rank were
evolved.[199] But this would be but one more illustration of the
accepted truth that family, tribe, priesthood, monarchy--all our
institutions--are rooted in savagery.[200]
[Sidenote: Was there a ‘hiatus’ between the Palaeolithic and the
Neolithic Age?]
The close of the British Palaeolithic Age is veiled in obscurity.
‘Mesolithic’ implements, whose form might show that they belonged to a
period of transition between Palaeolithic and the Neolithic Age, have
been diligently sought for; and some of the seekers insist that they
have found them:[201] but the claim has not won general acceptance;
and even if it could be established, a doubt would remain whether
the makers of those implements belonged to the palaeolithic race of
Britain or to a race which had come from abroad after our Palaeolithic
Age had passed away. In the words of a high authority[202] ‘there
appears, in this country at all events, to be a complete gap between
the River-drift and Surface Stone Periods, so far as any intermediate
forms of implements are concerned; and here at least the race of men
who fabricated the oldest of the palaeolithic implements may have,
and in all probability had, disappeared at an epoch remote from that
when the country was again occupied by those who not only chipped but
polished their tools.’ It has been urged by those who would extend this
characteristically guarded conclusion that out of forty-eight mammalian
species which were living in Britain in the older, only thirty-one
survived into the later period; that Britain was united with the
Continent in the former, and was an island in the latter; and that in
caves which were inhabited in both periods the strata that contained
palaeolithic remains were separated by a layer of stalagmite, the
formation of which would have required many centuries, from the upper
neolithic stratum. But all these arguments do not prove that there was
a breach of continuity between the two ages. If seventeen mammalian
species perished, thirty-one did survive. If Britain was continental in
the Palaeolithic Age and insular in the Neolithic, the contrast does
not exclude the possibility that man survived with his fellow animals
from the former into the latter: at the time when the Hoxne implements
were lost the land stood only a few feet above its present level,[203]
and a strait must have separated Britain from Gaul; nor, on the other
hand, is it absolutely certain that the earliest neolithic immigrants
did not cross the Channel valley on foot. And if the stalagmite which
lay between palaeolithic and neolithic implements proved that in
certain caves the stage of culture represented by the lower strata was
separated by a vast gulf of time from that represented by the higher,
it still remains possible that some descendants of the primitive
hunters may have survived to meet the neolithic invaders. Whoever
maintains that there was a ‘hiatus’ between the two stone ages in
Britain must frame some theory to account for the disappearance of the
palaeolithic race. Either they must have been utterly destroyed by some
cataclysm which could hardly have been less fatal to the thirty-one
mammalian species that survived; or they must have been struck down
by a pestilence, such as has never been recorded, that spared none;
or they must have died out, although there was no civilized race to
expedite their fate; or they must one and all have emigrated for some
reason which cannot be explained. It is true that in the valley of
the Lea near London and at Caddington the old land-surface on which
they lived is covered by ‘contorted drift’, above which no undisturbed
palaeolithic relics have been found; and it has been supposed that
the cold to which the formation of this deposit was due forced the
inhabitants to migrate southward. But this evidence has not been taken
seriously; and it has also been suggested that the emigration, if it
took place, was caused by an outbreak of disease, which, if it was
real, may have been merely local. Again, it has been asserted by the
most persistent advocate of discontinuity that the ‘cave men’ fled in
terror before neolithic persecutors;[204] that their line of retreat
is indicated by implements in the caves of Germany and in refuse heaps
of Siberia; and that the extinction of certain mammals and the flight
of others was due to the change of climate which resulted from the
new-born insularity of Britain.[205] But if the cave-men were driven
away by neolithic invaders, what becomes of the alleged hiatus? why
should implements in Germany and Siberia be connected with British
fugitives? and if mammals abandoned Britain because it had become
an island, how did they get away? Somewhere or other the newer was
evolved from the older culture: the palaeolithic skeletons which have
been found in the caves near Mentone are not distinguishable from
those of the same Ligurian coast which were interred in the Neolithic
Age;[206] and evidence from stratified deposits in the valley of the
Seine, lying one above another in unbroken succession, as well as the
remarkable discoveries at Mas d’Azil and in the Riviera, have convinced
the anthropologists of France that in their country a hiatus did not
exist.[207] Therefore those of us who cling to the belief that the
neolithic immigrants who first ventured to launch their frail canoes on
the narrow Channel and ran them aground on the Kentish coast may have
found the new-born island inhabited by men of an older race have some
reason to show for our pious faith.[208]