It is not for nothing, then, that we are taught in church to call all
men our brethren, and we must learn to realize that all the nations of
the earth are akin to us and to one another, and that the differences
between them in looks, in moral qualities, and in mind are really not
much more than what we often see in the members of one large family,
where one brother may be a genius and make a great name or a fortune for
himself, while another will never get beyond the simplest schooling and,
later on, the plainest work as laborer or poorly paid clerk. Take the
most light-complexioned child to the tropics, and there let him lead an
outdoor life--hunting, herding cattle, building, ploughing, and
harvesting--then look at the middle-aged man; you will find him burnt by
the sun, tanned by wind and weather to a dark brown which will not
bleach off even should he return to his native northern country to live.
His children will be born darker than he was, his grandchildren probably
darker still, and so on. What, then, must be the change should the
descendants of a particular set of men live thousands--not hundreds, but
thousands--of years in one particular zone of the earth, under the same
conditions of climate, food, and local nature generally--what we call
"environment"?
This is exactly what happened to those detachments which once upon a
time separated from the original human family. Each may have gone forth
at random, but there was the earth to choose from and to be had for the
taking; and, wherever such a detachment settled, there was nothing to
prevent its posterity staying on and on, and developing their own
peculiarities under local influences; for it would take many, many
centuries before there would again be a lack of room and the process of
separation would be repeated. Thus were formed the subdivisions of the
human kind, with their striking characteristics and distinctive
peculiarities, which we call the great Races of the World.
Now, if this thing were to happen to any one of us--that we should
discover brothers and kinsfolk of whom we knew nothing before--we would
be very curious to find out all we could about them: where they came
from, what had happened to them during all those years until they
settled where we found them, and when and why they separated from their
forefathers, who were also our own. These are the very things we want to
find out about the various nations who live in the world now, and those
who have lived in it before anything existed of what is now in the
world, all the way back to the beginning.
The task is quite easy, so long as we have books to help us, histories
to tell us year by year all that went on in every part of the Great
Round World, as our newspapers tell us day by day what is going on in it
now. But books do not take us very far back. It is only four hundred
years since printing was invented, and not more than six hundred since
the art of making paper out of rags has been known. But people could
write hundreds and hundreds of years before that was invented, and used
almost anything to record the memorable doings of their day--bark of
trees, skins of animals (parchment), "papyrus," a material made of the
fibres of a plant. Short inscriptions over the entrances of temples and
palaces, or cut with the chisel on monuments erected in memory of great
events or above the graves of famous men, and long inscriptions covering
whole walls or even the face of high rocks smoothed for the purpose,
were like so many stone books, pages of which are continually discovered
and read by our scholars.
But we come at last to times so remote that there is not a trace of the
roughest writing, not a fragment of the crudest monument, to tell us the
story of the men who, then as now, must have thought and labored and
invented, only so much more slowly, under difficulties which we can
hardly picture to ourselves. "What, then," is the natural question,
"what can we know of such times, and of earlier ones still? How do we
know things happened in the manner described a few pages back?" We know
it, in the first place, _by analogy_, _i.e._, because the same things
have happened over and over again in the same manner in times which we
know all about, _and are happening now, under our eyes_--for what is the
constant tide of immigration which keeps coming in from the East but,
under modern conditions, the same swarming off from overcrowded native
hives of seekers after more land and new fortunes? In the second place,
the oldest races of the world left abundant traces by which we can
determine not only the places of their settlements, but their mode of
life and the degree of culture they successively reached.
There has certainly been a time when men did not know enough to build
dwellings for themselves--or, not to be unfair, had not the necessary
tools--but lived in the forests which then very nearly covered the
globe, using such natural shelter as they found ready for them, almost
like the savage animals which it was their main business to fight and
kill in self-defence and also for food and clothing. Caverns in steep
mountain-sides must have been their most luxurious, because safest and
best-protected, retreats. Many dozens of such caverns are known in all
parts of the world, and the tale they tell is not difficult to read.
Several have become very famous, from the wealth of finds with which
they rewarded the searchers. Some appear to have been used as
burying-places, for the ground in them is covered to a great depth with
broken-up human skulls and skeletons, while outside, on the rocky ledges
or platforms before the mouth of the cavern, are found the traces of
large fires, built again and again on the same spot--ashes, and cinders,
and charred bones of animals; also broken marrow-bones, horns, hoofs,
and other remains of plentiful meals, showing that then already it was
the custom to feast at funerals.
Other caverns have as certainly been used as dwellings. Hence the name
of "cave-dwellers," which has been given to those otherwise unknown
races. How very crude and primitive their mode of life is shown by the
vast quantities of tools and weapons in hard flint--generally
broken--which are found intermixed with the other remains. They are very
simple: heads of spears, blades of knives and scrapers, some indented
like coarse saws, hatchets and mallets chipped into shape with no
attempt at polishing--such, with occasional variations in bone, was the
sum total of the cave-dwellers' equipment for the chase, for war, and
for domestic purposes. That they could, with such slender resources,
hold their own against the animals whose haunts they shared and who then
were so much more numerous than men, is the more wonderful that those
animals were of monstrous size, more than twice the size of the same
kinds now, not to speak of some huge beasts which then roamed woods and
plains in herds and are now wholly extinct--such as the mammoth, the
ancestor of our elephant.
In all those heaps of tools and fragments, not a trace of any metal has
been found; wherefore this oldest of all times of which we can catch
stray glimpses has been given the general name of "Age of Stone."
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