CHAPTER XIV

THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATION: OLD WORLD PREHISTORY AND ARCHÆOLOGY

211. Sources of knowledge.—212. Chronology of the grand

divisions of culture history.—213. The Lower and Upper

Palæolithic.—214. Race influence and regional differentiation

in the Lower Palæolithic.—215. Upper Palæolithic culture

growths and races.—216. The Palæolithic aftermath:

Azilian.—217. The Neolithic: its early phase.—218. Pottery and

the bow.—219. Bone tools.—220. The dog.—221. The hewn ax.—222.

The Full Neolithic.—223. Origin of domesticated animals and

plants.—224. Other traits of the Full Neolithic.—225. The

Bronze Age: Copper and Bronze phases.—226. Traits associated

with bronze.—227. Iron.—228. First use and spread of iron.—229.

The Hallstadt and La Tène Periods.—230. Summary of development:

Regional differentiation.—231. The Scandinavian area as an

example.—232. The late Palæolithic Ancylus or Maglemose

Period.—233. The Early Neolithic Litorina or Kitchenmidden

Period.—234. The Full Neolithic and its subdivisions

in Scandinavia.—235. The Bronze Age and its periods in

Scandinavia.—236. Problems of chronology.—237. Principles of

the prehistoric spread of culture.

211. SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE

The story of the growth and development of culture in the Western

Hemisphere which has been sketched in reconstruction in the last chapter

is built up from the incomplete information of excavations and the

indirect evidence of culture trait distributions and analyses. Earlier

than about ten thousand years ago, this hemisphere has no known human

history. In the Old World, conditions are doubly different. There is

a long primeval record, stretching perhaps a hundred thousand years

beyond 8000 B.C., documented much like the subsequent culture history

of America, but with a wealth of geological, faunal, and skeletal data

to compensate for the loss of ancient cultural evidences in the lapse

of time. Secondly, for the last ten thousand years, there is a fuller

record than for America. This greater fullness is partly due to the

earlier start toward its higher forms which civilization took in the

Eastern Hemisphere. And this relatively early advancement brought it

about that by 3000 B.C. adequate systems of writing had been achieved in

Africa and Asia, so that contemporary inscriptions have been preserved

to throw direct light on the thoughts and institutions of the people of

that day, and to date the centuries of their rulers for us. These last

five thousand years thus belong to history, rather than to prehistory, in

some parts of the hemisphere; and they allow many a close inference as to

what happened in the previous five thousand years when writing was as yet

unknown or its first systems were being evolved.

These ten thousand years since the close of the Old Stone Age, half

of them studied by the methods of anthropology, half also by those

of history, and the whole forming the richest field in human culture

history, are the subjects of the present chapter and the next.

First, however, it is necessary to refer back to the earliest known

development of civilization in the Old Stone Age (Chapter VI), whose

close is our present starting point.

212. CHRONOLOGY OF THE GRAND DIVISIONS OF CULTURE HISTORY

The period of human existence since the first tool was made is generally

divided into four grand divisions (§ 66, 67): the Palæolithic or Old

Stone Age; the Neolithic or New Stone Age; the Bronze Age; and the Iron

Age. The duration of these four ages is diverse and notably diminishing

from earliest to latest. The last three are comprised within the past ten

thousand years: 8000 B.C. may be looked upon as a reasonably accurate

date for the commencement of the Neolithic. For western Europe, at least,

the probable error of this date is not over one or at most two thousand

years. Back of this approximately fixed point stretches the immeasurably

longer Palæolithic, for the determination of whose duration there is

available not even any semi-historical evidence, and which can only be

estimated in terms of geological alterations, continental glaciations,

and faunal and floral changes—all unsatisfactory means for arriving at an

absolute chronology expressible in years.

To a vague 100,000 B.C. as the tentative figure for the beginning of

the Palæolithic, and an approximate 8000 B.C. for the commencement of

the Neolithic, there can be added 3000 B.C. for the onset of the Bronze

and 1000 B.C. of the Iron Age. The last two dates are averages only.

The Greek islands, for instance, received bronze about this period,

the Orient had it earlier, western Europe not until about 2500 B.C.,

northern Europe still later. In the same way, iron is well attested for

western Asia in the thirteenth century before Christ, for Central Europe

and France about 900 B.C., in Scandinavia some centuries later, in fact

becoming abundant only shortly before the Roman period.

In the wide sense, the outstanding generalizations derivable from these

figures are twofold. As regards the later periods, those of metal and

probably the Neolithic, the west lagged behind the east, the north behind

the south; Asia preceded and invented, Europe followed and imitated. As

regards the entire duration, a tremendous disproportion is observable.

The vast bulk of the total time of culture is covered by the Palæolithic:

the three following Ages are all squeezed into a tenth of the whole.

Within this fraction again the Neolithic takes up half, leaving the

two metal Ages to divide the other half between them. There is a clear

tendency toward acceleration of development.

213. THE LOWER AND UPPER PALÆOLITHIC

Within the Old Stone Age, a primary division is to be made between

the Lower and Upper Palæolithic. The Lower Palæolithic comprises

the Chellean, Acheulean, and Mousterian periods, when Europe was

inhabited by Neandertal man, who was distinct from the modern human

species, and possibly by a pre-Neandertal race not yet discovered.

The Upper Palæolithic, or Reindeer Age, consists of the Aurignacian,

Solutrean, and Magdalenian, with the Azilian as epilogue. Through

these Upper Palæolithic periods long-headed branches of _Homo

sapiens_—ourselves—existed: the Cro-Magnon, Grimaldi, and Brünn types,

some of them foreshadowing the existing Caucasian and Negroid races (§

14, 16-18). The longest step forward in the development of European

Palæolithic civilization comes in the passage from its Lower to its Upper

phase. Before this transition, new achievements were rare and their total

small. The use of fire, of flint cores and flakes, of fracturing and

retouching, possibly the use of wooden handles, a minimal employment

of bone, and a definite disposal of the dead, about sum up known human

attainments to the end of the Lower Palæolithic (§ 81).

Compared with this stock of culture, that of the Upper Palæolithic is

elaborate. Bone awls and weapon points; shell necklaces and armlets;

clothing; painting of the dead; sculpture and engraving—a greater number

of elements than the Lower Palæolithic had been able to accumulate in

perhaps 75,000 years—appear in the Aurignacian. The foundations of the

whole of the Upper Palæolithic civilization were laid in this period.

That the Solutrean added needles and surface retouching of flint, the

Magdalenian a more vigorous development of pictorial line and use of

colors, lamps, harpoons, and spear throwers, represented in the main only

an enriching of the general Upper Palæolithic culture, whose essentials

were determined at the outset.[32]

214. RACE INFLUENCE AND REGIONAL DIFFERENTIATION IN THE LOWER PALÆOLITHIC

This profound change raises a natural conjecture. The Lower Palæolithic

culture, at least in its latest form, was carried by Neandertal man;

Upper Palæolithic culture is in great part associated with Cro-Magnon

man, whose anatomy was nearer our own. Did not this relatively modern

structure involve also a relatively modern set of mental faculties, and

these in turn, by their own sheer worth, produce the richer culture? The

supposition is plausible enough, and has been made. But it is sounder

procedure to withhold commitment of opinion. The inference involves the

assumption that approach to our own bodily type is accompanied by higher

native intelligence; and the further assumption that higher intelligence

will automatically produce advance in civilization. Probable as both

these assumptions may seem, they are still undemonstrated, in general and

in particular. The application of the assumptions to the facts therefore

gives an apparent explanation in terms of an ultimate but really unknown

causality. By accepting this hypothetical causality, it turns attention

away from the question of its validity. But the validity of the causal

relation between the body and intelligence, and between intelligence

and culture, is precisely a point that needs elucidation. It needs

elucidation as much as does the change of civilization that occurred in

Europe about 25,000 years ago; and is a much broader problem—indeed,

part of the most fundamental problem that anthropology still faces as

unsolved. Instead of a snapping interpretation of a dubious point in

human history in terms of a couple of still more dubious principles, it

will be wiser to lay these principles aside, for a time at least, and to

reconsider more intensively the facts bearing on the particular point at

issue.

There are two obvious lines of evidence that may help to throw light

on the change from the Lower to the Upper Palæolithic, and in fact

aid understanding of the whole Palæolithic. The first comprises the

relations between western Europe and other areas during that period;

the second, regional differences within Europe. In the previous chapter

on the Palæolithic, such considerations have been disregarded in favor

of a schematic presentation of what seemed the salient facts in a

field made sufficiently difficult by the antiquity and incompleteness

of data. The best of these data, and those which arrange themselves

most systematically, are those from Europe, which have therefore been

presented as if they constituted a self-sufficient unit. But it is

unlikely that the culture should have developed in Europe in complete

detachment for a hundred thousand years or that it should have remained

identical over the whole of that continent. It is necessary, in short, to

revise the simple outline of Chapter VI by giving heed to geographical

and other disturbing considerations.

First of all, it is well to realize that what has heretofore been called

the first tool, the Chellean pick or coup-de-poing, was not so much

the only tool of its period as the most characteristic one. It seems

to have been accompanied at all times and everywhere by smaller, less

regularly made implements, some of which were even worked out of flakes

instead of cores and subjected to crude blow-retouching. Further, these

medium-sized pieces were probably “invented” before the coup-de-poing;

which is after all what might be expected, the coup-de-poing being

a comparatively effective, regularly shaped, symmetrical implement

involving both an ideal of form and a tolerable, rough skill to produce.

Several Pre-Chellean stations, containing such smaller implements but no

coups-de-poing, are now recognized by many specialists in prehistory. The

most notable are those of St. Acheul and Abbeville, in northern France;

the remainder are in the same part of that country, in Belgium, or in

southern England, which at that time formed part of the continent. The

fauna of some of these sites is an early one and has been attributed

to the second interglacial era (§ 69) as compared with the third

interglacial in which the Chellean and Acheulean fall.

When the Chellean proper, with its typical, well-developed picks, is

examined, it becomes clear that the distribution of this distinctive

form is limited to a narrow strip of westernmost Europe from Belgium to

Spain. The picks recur in north and east Africa and the districts of Asia

bordering on the Mediterranean. They may not be of exactly the same age

in these regions as in westerly Europe, but they are of the same type,

and in view of the continuity of their distribution must be historically

connected. In fact, the coup-de-poing Chellean might well be described

as essentially an African (or Africo-Asian) development which underwent

an extension across what was then the land-bridge of Gibraltar up the

Atlantic face of Europe (Fig. 37).

The remainder of Europe was evidently also inhabited in this era; but by

people of a variant culture. From Germany eastward into Russia, possibly

Siberia, implements were worked which in part suggest the Pre-Chellean

ones of northern France, in part developments of such Pre-Chellean

pieces, and in part forms approaching Mousterian types. They do not

include Chellean picks. The name Pre-Mousterian has been proposed for

this central and east European culture. This name is appropriate,

provided it is remembered that Pre-Mousterian denotes not a phase

intermediate between the Acheulean and Mousterian of western Europe, but

a culture developed, like the Chellean, yet more or less independently,

out of the Pre-Chellean, and approximately coeval with the pure Chellean

of western Europe and its Acheulean continuation. In other words, two

culture-areas, an African-west-European and an east European, begin to

be discernible from an extremely early time in the Lower Palæolithic

(Fig. 37).

[Illustration: FIG. 37. Early Lower Palæolithic culture-areas (about

100,000-50,000 B.C.). Vertical shading, Chellean-Acheulean culture, with

coups-de-poing. The principal European districts containing typical

Chellean coups-de-poing are marked “C.” Stippling, “Pre-Mousterian”

culture, probably contemporaneous with Chellean and Acheulean, but

lacking coups-de-poing. White, uninhabited or unexplored. (Mainly after

Obermayer.)]

During the Acheulean, the western culture spread somewhat: into southern

England, southeastern France, Italy, and began to overlap with the

eastern culture along the Rhine. In the Mousterian, an assimilation

seems to have taken place: culture, or at least flint industry, became

more uniform over the whole of Europe, and in a measure the near parts

of Asia and Africa also. This general Mousterian culture, with its small

implements and emphasis on retouching, seems more likely to have evolved

out of the pickless eastern Pre-Mousterian than out of the western

Chellean-Acheulean with its large hewn coups-de-poing.

This would suggest an eastern origin for Mousterian man—the Neandertal

race. But it is well not to proceed beyond some slight probability on

this point because it is by no means certain that culture traveled

only as races traveled. In their simple way, culture contacts without

migrations may have been substantially as effective in shaping or

altering civilization fifty thousand years ago as to-day. For all

that can be demonstrated at present, the Mousterian Neandertal men of

western Europe may have been the blood descendants of the undiscovered

Chellean-Acheulean inhabitants of western Europe who had learned more

effective retouching and smaller tools from the east Europeans.

215. UPPER PALÆOLITHIC CULTURE GROWTHS AND RACES

With the advent of the Upper Palæolithic, possibly some 25,000 years

ago, the divergent culture-areas of the early Lower Palæolithic which

had become largely effaced during the Mousterian, emerge again; but with

shifted boundaries. The line of demarcation now is no longer formed

by the Rhine and the Alps, but by the Pyrenees. Throughout the Upper

Palæolithic, most of Spain formed an annex to the North African province,

whose culture has been named the Capsian after the type station of

Gafsa in Algiers. The Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian as they

have been previously described (§ 72-81) ran their course in a middle

European belt stretching from France to Poland (Figs. 38, 39). Northern

Spain, southern England, at times Italy and southern Russia, were more

or less in this mid-European province. The Balkans remain insufficiently

explored; all northernmost Europe was still uninhabited. In general,

it may be said that the mid-European Upper Palæolithic culture is

characterized by the associated traits of work in bone and art; the

contemporary Spanish-African Capsian by specialization along the line

of increasingly smaller and finer flint implements, culminating in neat

microliths measurable only in fractions of inches.

[Illustration: FIG. 38. Aurignacian culture-areas (about 25,000-18,000

B.C.). 1, West-central European Aurignacian, with art. 2, Italian

Aurignacian. 3, Lower Capsian of North Africa and Spain. 4, Lower Capsian

of Syria. 5, South Russia, perhaps post-Aurignacian. (Mainly after

Obermayer.)]

The southern equivalent of the mid-European Aurignacian was the Lower

Capsian, of at least equal territorial extent even in its narrowest form

(Fig. 38). The industry of Syria at this period was allied to the Capsian

of Africa and may be regarded as related to it. The rather scant remains

of the age in Italy are perhaps also to be allied with the Capsian

culture rather than with the true Aurignacian. This makes it look as

if at this time a great Lower Capsian culture-area embraced nearly all

the shores of the Mediterranean. As against this, the mid-European true

Aurignacian, so far as now known, covered only a narrow region.

During the Solutrean and Magdalenian, Africa and Spain were in the Upper

Capsian. Evidence from the eastern Mediterranean begins to fail. Italy is

wholly without discovered remains. There are indications (§ 240) that at

least by the beginning of the Magdalenian in Europe, the favored land of

Egypt had already entered into the Neolithic. If this is so, westernmost

Asia, Greece, and even Italy may have begun to be affected by this higher

phase of culture, and the paucity or absence of their late Palæolithic

remains would be accounted for. This view seems reasonable, but is

unproved.

The Solutrean seems to have been a brief period in western Europe, and

its extent appears limited also (Fig. 39). It reveals two principal

areas: one north of the Danube, the other in southern France. The former

may have been the earlier, from which the culture, or certain phases

of it, such as the art of even surface retouch on leaf-shaped blades,

were carried westward into France. In this connection two facts may be

significant.

First is the circumstance that the north Danubian Solutrean area

possessed an art, apparently largely of Solutrean age, which is quite

different from the Upper Palæolithic art of the west. Naturalism was

scarcely attempted, figures were highly conventional, the style was one

of concentric curves or stippling or hatching.

[Illustration: FIG. 39. Solutrean and Magdalenian culture-areas (about

18,000-10,000 B.C.) S, areas of pronounced Solutrean industry. 1

(vertical shading), Magdalenian culture. _2A_, _2B_, Upper Capsian,

western and eastern provinces, contemporaneous with Solutrean and

Magdalenian. (Based on Obermayer.)]

The second consideration is the Brünn race. This type, which as yet

is known only from a few examples (§ 17), is generally considered

Neandertaloid, but also shows leanings toward the Cro-Magnon race as

well as differences from it. The less dubious Brünn remains, those from

Brünn, Brüx, and perhaps Predmost, are all from Czecho-Slovakia, that

is, the north Danubian region; and they seem to be of Solutrean age.

These facts render it likely that there existed a connection between the

east Solutrean culture, the geometric art, and the Brünn race, and they

indicate at least some probability of the spread of Solutrean culture

from eastern to western Europe. Brünn man may have been a modified

Neandertal man who persisted in the east after Cro-Magnon man had become

established in the west during the Aurignacian. Or he may have been a

local eastern variant of a generic type whose better known western form

we call Cro-Magnon man.

As to Grimaldi man, his Negroid affiliations also seem less startling

once it is clear that the Aurignacian civilization was a mid-European

phenomenon, and that contemporary Spain and probably Italy formed part of

the essentially African development of the Lower Capsian. With southern

Europe a cultural annex of north Africa at this period, the presence

there of a Negroid type is reasonable enough. Further, both the strait

of Gibraltar and that between Tunis and Sicily were land bridges during

part of the Pleistocene; Gibraltar, for instance, probably during the

Lower Capsian and, again, after a subsidence, in the Upper Capsian. The

Mediterranean, in other words, must be conceived not as a great barring

sea, but as a land-locked lake or pair of lakes, so that Europe and

Africa were joined geographically as well as racially and culturally.

As to the Cro-Magnon race, its association with the

Aurignacian-Magdalenian culture of mid-European type is clear enough,

but its origin remains problematical. One naturally looks eastward: to

the north lay ice, to the west the Atlantic, to the south a different

even though related culture. But nothing is really known; no ancestral

Asiatic form, no closely cognate later race, no eastern culture out of

which the Aurignacian might have sprung nor to which it might have been

specifically related. All or some of these may have existed, but in the

absence of discovery, speculation is of little profit. There is the

further difficulty about a theory that brings Cro-Magnon man out of the

east into the west of Europe, that a little later, in the Solutrean,

central Europe, through which he presumably passed, seems to have been

in possession of the Brünn race. True, this might have been a later wave

out of the east; but to derive both races out of Asia, and perhaps the

preceding Neandertal type also, is a bit monotonous as a hypothesis,

besides being one of those assumptions that seem to answer problems

without really helping their understanding.

Much the same may be said as to the fate of Neandertal man—whether he was

exterminated by the Cro-Magnons, or absorbed, or was driven away, or died

out. A single discovery on this point will be worth more than the most

elaborate conjecture.

Two points seem clear, whatever may have been the diffusions of race and

culture at the time that the Lower Palæolithic was being replaced by the

Upper. On the side of flint industry, there was no break: the Aurignacian

is the continuation of the Mousterian. The experts occasionally have

difficulty in agreeing whether a station or level is to be assigned

to the late Mousterian or early Aurignacian. Whatever, therefore, was

imported in the Upper Palæolithic was joined to something that remained

over and continued in middle Europe from the Lower Palæolithic. Secondly,

the center of known naturalistic art development was the west, southern

France especially; perceptibly in the Aurignacian, notably in the

Magdalenian. Yet this tract is peripheral to the Aurignacian-Magdalenian

culture as a whole. It would thus be a forced explanation to look

upon this art as the outright result of a diffusion or migration: the

supposed recipients of the accomplishment would be carrying it farther

than its originators. In other words, Upper Palæolithic art was in the

main a growth on the soil of western Europe, so far as present evidence

indicates. These findings diminish the probability of any large scale

importation of Upper Palæolithic culture ready made as a by-product of

the irruption of a new race. The change from Lower to Upper Palæolithic

was indeed profoundly significant. But much of it may have been

consummated by a gradual evolution within western and central Europe.

It is worth observing that the Lower Palæolithic of Europe with all its

fundamental unity of culture stretched through different climates. The

Chellean was at least in part sub-tropical, the Acheulean a time of

cooling steppe climate, the Mousterian the period of maximum glaciation.

The Upper Palæolithic again has its transition from the close of the

Würm glaciation to the present temperature of Europe broken by three

temporary advances of the ice, known as they occurred in the Alps as the

Bühl, Gschnitz, and Daun phases. The following correlation of climatic

and cultural periods has been suggested: Aurignacian, close of the last

glacial and beginning of the post-glacial; Solutrean, first maximum of

ice recession (_Achenschwankung_); Magdalenian, Bühl advance, second

recession, and Gschnitz advance, corresponding respectively to the early,

middle, and late stages of the period. To these might be added that the

Azilian came at about the third recession and brief final Daun advance;

the Neolithic, with the final recession of ice and appearance of modern

conditions. It is clear that climatic circumstances were not the chief

determining factor in the cultural development of early Europe. Had they

been such, the Chellean would have differed culturally more from the

Mousterian than this from the Aurignacian.

Southern Europe and North Africa were not glaciated in the Pleistocene.

Heavier rainfall, perhaps accompanied by forestation, are likely to have

taken the place of the ice, whereas a change from forest to steppe, or

steppe to desert, corresponded to the recession of the ice in Alpine

and northern Europe. For more distant regions, such as India and south

Africa, the climatic correlations with Europe become dubious; which is

one of the reasons why as yet no sure linking in time can be effected

between their Palæolithic culture and that of Europe.

216. THE PALÆOLITHIC AFTERMATH: AZILIAN

After the Magdalenian, there follows in western Europe the Azilian, or

Azylian, named after Mas d’Azil in the French Pyrenees. It has also been

called Tourassian. This was the period in which the reindeer died out,

being replaced by the deer. Harpoons were accordingly made of deer horn

instead of reindeer antler, the spongier texture of the interior of the

material necessitating a coarser and broader form. Perforations to hold

the harpoon line now began to be regularly provided. Bone implements were

fewer, chiefly awls or simple dart heads. Stone implements became less

important. The best made flint forms were minute points or blades of

geometric form, often trapezoidal. These are the microliths, obviously

intended, in the main, for insertion in wood, sometimes perhaps in

sawlike rows. The great naturalistic Magdalenian art was dead in the

Azilian. Its place was taken by simple conventional designs painted on

pebbles, sometimes curiously suggestive of alphabetic symbols, although

it is unthinkable that they could at this early time, and among so

backward a people as these deer hunters, have served any purpose of

writing. The puzzling designs are more likely to have been used in magic

or religion.

The period of the Azilian was perhaps 10,000-8000 B.C. The climate was

approaching that of to-day, though still cooler. The area of the Azilian

proper was limited to the Pyrenean environs of southern France and

northern Spain. Related and contemporary cultures can however be traced

much farther; and the name Azilian in a larger sense may justifiably be

applied to these also. The greater part of Spain and Portugal and north

Africa were at this time in the Terminal Capsian. This was a local phase

lacking the deer horn harpoons and painted pebbles of the Pyrenees, but

with the microlithic flint industry especially conspicuous. In fact it is

in Africa that the development of the extreme microlithic forms out of

their antecedents, the reduced implements of the Upper Capsian, has been

most clearly traced. In Europe the Azilian forms do not connect nearly

so closely with the preceding Magdalenian. It looks therefore as if the

culture of western Europe in this period were based to a considerable

extent on traits evolved in Africa, to which various additions were

made locally, like the pebble-painting in the Pyrenean area. This

preponderance of African influences is corroborated by the occurrence in

Syria and southern Italy of small flints allied to the Terminal Capsian

ones. The same may be said of a culture phase of northern France, the

Tardenoisian, which extended also to Belgium and England—which latter

seems not to have become finally separated from the continent until about

this era. The Tardenoisian is specifically characterized by microliths

almost indistinguishable from the north African ones, but lacks the

other traits of the south French Azilian. It may also have persisted

longer, into the period which in the south was already early Neolithic.

Approximately contemporary and related is also the south German culture

represented at Ofnet, famous for its nests of skulls from decapitated

bodies; and that in southern Scandinavia called Maglemose (§ 233). In

Scotland and northern England, on the other hand, the harpoon head is

once more to the fore, perhaps because here as in the Pyrenean area

forested mountains and the sea were in juxtaposition and deer and salmon

could both be taken abundantly. The food habits of sub-arid and arid

north Africa must have been quite different; in fact it is evident that

snails were seasonally consumed here in large quantities.

All these local phases interrelate and may be grouped together as Azilian

as designative of the period and generic culture. The map (Fig. 40) shows

the extent to which the manifestations of this culture stage have been

traced. They may prove to extend farther.

Spain, at the close of the Palæolithic, possessed art of three types. In

the north, Magdalenian realism flourished as vigorously as in neighboring

southern France. The paintings of the cave of Altamira, for instance, are

no less numerous and superb than those of Font-de-Gaume. Second, in the

south, there prevailed a conventional style. Men and animals are still

recognizable, but schematically drawn, and among them are pictographic

symbols. Third, in eastern Spain, a cliff art was realistic in purpose,

but crude in execution. One can see without difficulty what the figures

are doing, but the proportions are distorted, and the fresh, vivid, sure

spirit of Magdalenian painting is wholly lacking. The figures represent

people more often than animals: gatherings, dances, long-gowned women,

men with bows. This is the earliest direct or indirect record of the bow

and arrow. It dates from the final phase of the Palæolithic, and the

weapon may not have become employed throughout Europe until the Neolithic

was definitely under way.

It is well to remember in this connection that no specific type of

culture, no matter how old, is likely ever to have existed without

variation over a whole hemisphere or continent. The later any type is,

the greater is the probability that it has had sufficient time for

specific characterization to enable it to be distinguished readily

from the contemporary cultures of other areas. The local provinces

or culture-areas of the Palæolithic foreshadow the deeper regional

differentiations of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages.

[Illustration: FIG. 40. Phases of the close of the Palæolithic (about

10,000-8,000 B.C.). _A_, Azilian proper; _C_, Terminal Capsian; _M_,

Maglemose; _O_, Ofnet, Bavaria; _S_, Scotch and north English Azilian;

_T_, Tardenoisian.]

There is some variation of usage as to whether the Azilian is assignable

to the Palæolithic or Neolithic. Some include it with the earliest

Neolithic phases to constitute a Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age. The era

has also been designated Epi-Palæolithic and Proto-Neolithic. The concept

of a separate Mesolithic period becomes important in the degree that the

original definition of the Neolithic as limited to the age of polished

stone remains rigorously adhered to. With the Neolithic conceived more

broadly, as discussed in the following section, a separate Mesolithic

becomes unnecessary, and the Azilian takes its place as a final

Palæolithic episode of mixed African and local developments after the

passing of the characteristic European Upper Palæolithic.

217. THE NEOLITHIC: ITS EARLY PHASE

The Neolithic is by original definition the age of polished stone as

opposed to the fracturing of stone in the Palæolithic. In a sense, this

definition is a true one, at any rate for Europe and the Near East. There

is no stone grinding in the Palæolithic and there is in the Neolithic.

But since the two stone ages were first discriminated fifty or more

years ago, a vast body of knowledge has accumulated about them, with

the result that the original criterion has become only an approximate

one. The definition of the Neolithic as the age of ground stone is at

the present time so over-elementary as to have become inaccurate. A long

initial phase of this age did not yet grind stone, but continued to use

tools made by the Palæolithic process of chipping. It was not until the

latter part of the New Stone Age was reached, what we may call the Full

Neolithic, that the grinding and polishing of stone were attempted.

What, then, it is natural to ask, makes the Early Neolithic Age really

Neolithic—what in fact separates it from the Palæolithic? It is a cluster

of traits; a cluster that grew as the Neolithic progressed; but every one

of whose constituents was lacking from the Old Stone Age.

218. POTTERY AND THE BOW

Outstanding in this cluster of cultural traits that mark the Neolithic

is pottery. Wherever, in Europe and the Near East at least, there is

universal agreement that a stage of development was Neolithic, pottery

is present. And conversely, wherever pottery occurs, no one has yet

doubted that a true Neolithic stage existed. The earliest potteryless

phases, such as that of Maglemose, which have sometimes been designated

as Proto-Neolithic, sometimes as Mesolithic, can advantageously be

considered terminal Palæolithic.

Second in importance is the bow, which in general appeared

contemporaneously with pottery. The evidence for its existence is

sometimes less clear. Pottery is imperishable and unmistakable. The

bow and arrow, on the other hand, are made of materials that decay in

a few years, under ordinary conditions. Only the stone or bone point

preserves, and this cannot always be distinguished with positiveness from

the head of a light spear or even from a small knife blade. There was a

time, for instance, when the smaller flint blades of the Solutrean were

often regarded as arrow points, whereas now the tendency, based on more

intensive comparisons, is to deny the bow and arrow to the Magdalenian

as well as the Solutrean. Certainly the harpoon and its thrower are so

numerous and indubitable in the Magdalenian that there would be reason

to expect an important weapon like the bow to have left at least some

sure traces: a definitive type of recognizable arrow head would have been

worked out. But such is not the case.

These two culture elements, pottery and the bow, signalized an enormous

advance over the past. Both required definite technical skill to

manufacture. And both were of the greatest service. Whole lines of foods

could now be utilized that had formerly been passed by: soups, stews,

porridges. Plants whose seeds or parts before were inedible, or almost

so, were added to the diet as soon as they could be boiled. The bow made

possible long range fighting, the free pursuit of large game, and the

capture of many small mammals and birds which previously it must have

been difficult to take. The harpoon was developed chiefly for fishing. It

would be of little help in killing birds, rabbits, and the like, or large

and dangerous animals like wild cattle.

219. BONE TOOLS

Hand in hand with the invention or rather introduction of the bow and

pottery—it seems doubtful whether they were devised in Europe—went an

increased employment of bone and horn tools at the expense of stone. This

drift had already begun in the Upper Palæolithic; in fact, is one of the

signs that mark it off from the Lower Palæolithic. It became accentuated

as the Upper Palæolithic wore on, still more prominent in its closing

Azilian phase[33]—hence the increasing minuteness of flint blades—and

continued into the early Neolithic. A good working chisel, wedge, awl,

or needle, for instance, must be smooth. This finish is difficult in

chipped stone, but easily attained in bone or horn by rubbing. It was not

therefore until stone grinding came into use in the later Neolithic, that

bone and horn began to fall in significance as materials. But they had

performed their service. It is unlikely that stone polishing would have

been attempted but for the experience and long habits of the polishing

process as acquired in dealing with the softer materials.

220. THE DOG

The first animal was also domesticated about the beginning of the

Neolithic. Dog remains have been found in two very late post-Magdalenian

Palæolithic sites, one in Scotland, the other in Denmark, both apparently

Azilian in age. Then, the Danish kitchenmiddens, which began in the

first stage of the Early Neolithic, contain innumerable bones that have

been gnawed by dogs. The animals may still have been half wild at this

period, since their own skeletons are rare in the middens. Evidently the

species was not yet firmly attached to man; its members went off to die

in solitude. This is what has generally been predicated on hypothetical

grounds of the history of dog and man. Contrary to most domesticated

animals, the dog is thought not to have been captured and tamed outright,

but to have attached himself to human beings as a parasitic hanger-on,

a shy, tolerated, uncared-for scavenger, living in a stage of symbiotic

relationship with our ancestors before his real domestication. This view

the prehistoric evidence seems to confirm.

221. THE HEWN AX

One more trait signalizes the Early Neolithic: the hewn stone ax. This

was a chipped implement, straight or slightly convex along the cutting

edge, tapering from that to the butt, about twice as long as broad,

rather thick, unperforated and ungrooved; in fact perhaps often unhandled

and driven by blows upon the butt: a sharp stone wedge as much as an ax,

in short. The whole Palæolithic shows no such implement: even the Azilian

has only bone or horn “axes.”

It is hardly necessary to repeat for the Neolithic what has already been

said of the Palæolithic periods: the older types, such as chipped flint

tools, continued very generally to be made. Such persistence is natural:

a survival of a low type among higher ones does not mean much. It is the

appearance of new and superior inventions that counts.

The Early Neolithic can be summed up, then, in these five traits:

pottery; the bow and arrow; abundant use of bone and horn; the dog; and

the hewn ax.

222. THE FULL NEOLITHIC

It is the later or Full Neolithic, beginning probably between 6000 and

5000 B.C. in western Europe, that is marked by the grinding or polishing

of stone. Even this criterion is less deep-going than might be thought

from all the references that prehistorians have made to it, since the new

process was put to limited service. Practically the only stone implements

that were ground into shape in Europe were of the ax class: the ax head

itself, the celt or chisel, hammer stones, and clubheads. The mill is the

principal artifact that can be added to the list. The ax long remained

what we to-day should scarcely dignify with the name of ax head: an

unpierced, ungrooved blade. It is only toward the end of the Neolithic in

Europe, after metal was already in use in the Orient and Mediterranean

countries, that perforated and well ground stone axes appear; many of

these make the impression of being stone imitations, among a remote,

backward people, of forms cast in bronze by the richer and more advanced

nations of the South and East.

Much more important than the ground stone ax in its influence on life was

the commencement, during the Neolithic, of two of the great fundamentals

of our own modern civilization: agriculture and domestic animals.

These freed men from the buffetings of nature; made possible permanent

habitation, the accumulation of food and wealth, and a heavier growth

of population. Also, agriculture and animal breeding were evidently

introduced only after numbers had reached a certain density. A sparse

population, being able to subsist on wild products, tends to remain

content with them. A fertile area with mild winters may support as high

as one soul per square mile without improvement of the natural resources;

in large forests, steppes, cold climates, and arid tracts, the territory

needed for the subsistence of each head becomes larger in a hunting stage

of existence.

The cultivated food plants of the European Neolithic were barley, wheat,

and millet, pease, lentils, and somewhat later, beans and apples. All

of these seem to derive from Mediterranean or west Asiatic sources. Of

non-edible plants there was flax, which served textile purposes and

involved loom weaving.

The species of domesticated animals numbered four, besides the dog:

cattle, swine, sheep, and goats. The horse,[34] cat, hen, duck, came into

Europe during the metal ages, in part during the historic period.

223. ORIGIN OF DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PLANTS

The place of first domestication of the four oldest species is not known

surely. Most of them had wild representatives in Europe long before and

after the domesticated forms appear, but the same was true in western

Asia and Egypt, and the general priority of these tracts in metal working

and other cultural achievements makes it likely that their inhabitants

were also the first to tame the animals in question. The subject is as

intricate as it is interesting, because of difficulty which biologists

experience in tracing the modified tame forms back to the wild species

with certainty. The mere fact of continued domestication, even without

conscious selection in breeding, often alters a species more from what

may have been its old wild form than this differs from another wild

species.

It is however clear from the unusually abundant and well preserved

Lake-dwelling remains of Switzerland that the earliest known domestic

animals of this region were considerably different from the nearest

native species. The wild bull or urus of Europe, _Bos primigenius_,

was large and long-horned. His bones in the oldest lake dwellings seem

to come from wild individuals that had been hunted. Alongside are the

remains of the domesticated _Bos brachyceros_, a short-horned form, small

and delicately built. Later, though still in the Neolithic, long-horned

tame cattle appear in the lake dwellings. Apparently the short-horns

had first been imported from the south; then the native urus was tamed;

finally, the two strains were crossed. These strains are thought to

survive in our modern cattle, those of eastern and central Europe being

prevailingly of the _primigenius_, of western Europe of the _brachyceros_

type.

A similar story applies to the pig. The first domesticated swine of

Switzerland were small, long-legged, and easily distinguishable from

the wild boar of the region. It thus is likely that they were imported

domesticated. In the Bronze Age, pigs grew larger, due perhaps to

crossing with the wild species. Sheep were certainly brought into Europe,

as there is no corresponding wild form; the goats, too, have their

nearest relatives in Asia. They were perhaps tamed before sheep. At any

rate, goats prevailed in the earlier lake dwellings, whereas later, sheep

outnumbered them.

Similar arguments apply to the origin of the cultivated plants in Europe.

For some of these, such as wheat, wild relatives—possible ancestors—are

known from Asia, but not from Europe. Also there has been such a drift

of later cultivated plants—legumes, greens, and fruits—from Asia and

the Mediterranean into Europe during the Bronze and Iron Ages, as to

render it probable that the earliest flow was in the same direction. The

instances of diffusion from north to south are few: oats, rye, and hemp

are perhaps the principal. These plants, however, were carried southward

slowly and accepted reluctantly, whereas the northerners were in general

avid of any southern or Oriental form which would bear their climate, as

the progressive spread and increased use of new forms shows. Furthermore,

even oats, rye, and hemp appear to be Asiatic in origin, and thus to have

entered Europe merely from the east, instead of southeast.

224. OTHER TRAITS OF THE FULL NEOLITHIC

The earliest animals were kept for their flesh and hides. Two or three

thousand years passed before cattle were used before the plow or to draw

wagons. Both the plow and the wheel were unknown in Europe until well

in the Bronze Age, after they had been established for some time in

Asia. Still later was the use of milk. Here again Asia and Egypt have

precedence.

Many other elements of culture appear in the Full Neolithic. Houses

were dug into the ground and roofed over with timbers and earth. The

dead were buried in enduring chambers of stone: “dolmens,” often put

together out of enormous slabs; or excavations in soft bed rock. Upright

pillars of undressed stone were erected—either singly as “menhirs”

or in “alignments”—in connection with religious or funerary worship.

Pottery was ornamented in a variety of geometric decorative styles,

usually incised rather than painted; their sequences and contemporary

distributions in several areas are gradually being determined.

225. THE BRONZE AGE: COPPER AND BRONZE PHASES

There is no abrupt break between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. Metal

was at first too rare, too difficult to mine and smelt and work, to be

used extensively. It served for special weapons, tools, and ornaments

of the wealthy. The life of the mass of the population went on in much

the old channels for generations or centuries after the new material had

become known. This was true especially of peoples in oreless regions, or

too backward to have learned the art of metal working. To such nations,

the first bronze came as an imported rarity, to be guarded as a treasure

or heirloom.

Of even less immediate effect than the discovery of bronze, was that

of the first metals known, copper and gold. The latter is of course

too scarce and too soft to serve for anything but ornaments; and pure

copper also, even when hardened by hammering, is of little use for

many mechanical purposes. It makes a fairly efficient dagger, a rather

mediocre ax, and a poor knife. The result was that a recognizable period

of copper preceded the true Bronze Age, yet that it was essentially a

last phase of the New Stone Age, with the metal creeping in as something

subsidiary. In Italy and Spain it has therefore become customary among

archæologists to speak of an “Eneolithic” period as a transition stage in

which some copper, and occasionally bronze of low tin content, occur. In

central and northern Europe, the equivalent stage falls somewhat later

and is sometimes called the Stone-Bronze period.

Bronze is an alloy of tin with copper, harder than the latter, easier to

melt, and casting better. In many properties it resembles brass, by which

term it is referred to in the English Bible; but must not be confounded

with it. Brass is an alloy of zinc with copper, of much later discovery,

apparently in Asia, and until recent centuries little used in Europe. As

regards bronze, even a two per cent addition of tin to copper results

in a perceptible hardening; and five to ten per cent produce a greatly

superior tool metal.

The origin of bronze is a problem of some difficulty, because the

earliest known users of bronze, the peoples of the Near East, possessed

little or no tin. There are said to have been tin supplies in the

Khorasan district of Persia, which might have been drawn upon by the

pre-Babylonians and thence carried to Egypt. The chief source of the tin

of later antiquity was Spain and England. But at the outset of the Bronze

Age, the Orientals did not even know of the existence of these countries,

while their natives, still ignorant of copper, could not have mined tin

for the purpose of hardening that basic metal.

Just how, then, bronze was discovered, is still unknown; but it must have

been in Western Asia not later than the fourth millenium B.C. Before

3000 B.C., in the period of the first dynasties ruling over united

Egypt, the art had been established in that country, since bronzes low

in percentage of tin have been discovered from that era. While ancient

Egypt mined its own copper in the adjacent Sinai peninsula, it is barren

of tin resources, so that the latter metal must have been imported.

Within a few centuries, bronze began to be used in Crete and Troy, and by

2500 B.C. in Italy and Spain, whereas it did not penetrate central and

northern Europe until about 1900 B.C., according to the usual estimates.

That the use of bronze over these widespread areas is a connected

phenomenon, a case of single origin and diffusion, is clear from the

manner in which the art spread from its center of invention like a wave

which arrived later the farther it had to travel. The spread is confirmed

by the fact that certain implement forms such as early triangular daggers

and later swords traveled with the material. Had the western natives

discovered bronze for themselves, they would have cast it into shapes

peculiar to themselves, instead of adopting those long established among

the Orientals.

226. TRAITS ASSOCIATED WITH BRONZE

About coincident with bronze there developed in Egypt and Babylonia

a flood of new arts and inventions: writing; sunburned brick; stone

masonry; sculpture and architecture; the arch; the plow and later the

chariot; the potter’s wheel, which turns clay vessels with mechanical

roundness; astronomical records and accurate calendars; an enhanced

cult of the dead and greater monuments for them. Many of these elements

were carried into westernmost Asia and the Ægean Islands; not so many

to Italy; fewer still to Spain and France; and a minimum to central and

northern Europe. But it would be an error to infer from the continued

backwardness of the northern peoples that they were wholly passive and

recipient. In their simpler, more barbaric way, they remodeled much of

what they had carried to them, altered the form, decorated it in their

own style, made much of some item which filled but an insignificant

place in the more complex civilization of the southeast. The fibula or

safety-pin, for instance, was seized upon with avidity by the central and

north European nations, made ornate and tremendously enlarged, until it

sometimes measured half a foot in length and more than half a pound in

weight with spiral whorls, bosses, pin clasps, or attached rings as big

as a palm. The Baltic nations, the farthest reached by this diffusion,

in particular threw themselves into the development of the fibula with

zest, success, and a large measure of decorative taste.

Even longer is the history of the sword. This has two lines of historic

development. The one-edged sword or saber tends to curvature and is

essentially a hewing weapon, not intended for thrusting, or only

secondarily so adapted. This form is first known in western Asia, is

apparently of Asiatic origin, and is the direct ancestor of the Saracen

and Indian scimitar, the Malayan kris and barong, the Japanese samurai’s

sword. The two-edged sword with point has at all times—until after the

introduction of firearms—been the prevailing form in Europe. Its ancestor

is the Egyptian bronze dagger, which in turn is probably derived from a

copper and ultimately a flint blade of dagger length. The Egyptian dagger

never grew to more than half-sword length, but the type was early carried

to Crete and Italy and Spain. By 2500-2000 B.C. the latter countries

were using triangular wide-bladed daggers of copper and bronze, with a

basal breadth not much less than the length. The handle was a separate

piece, riveted on. Gradually the length grew greater, the breadth less,

the edges more nearly parallel, the point sharper; the half-sword and

then the sword evolved out of the dagger. The handle, or its spike, came

to be cast with the blade. These drawn-out forms traveling to central

and northern Europe, were made there of greater and greater length,

especially after iron was known. For three thousand years, and from the

southern Mediterranean in its progress to the North Sea, the sword grew

longer and longer, but always by gradual modification: the whole series

of forms shows a transition in both time and geography. The Greek and

Roman sword remained of thigh length, and was used mainly for thrusting;

the Keltic and Germanic weapon was for hewing and almost unwieldy;

blades so big as to require two-handed swinging finally came to be

employed—a barbaric, ineffective exaggeration to which the long-cultured

Mediterraneans never descended.

[Illustration: FIG. 41. Prehistoric domed tombs built on the principle of

corbelling (§ 116): a probable example of the spread of a culture device

over a continent. Above, Mycenæ, Greece; middle, Alcalar, Portugal;

below, New Grange, Ireland. The Mycenæan structure, 1500 B.C. or after,

at the verge of the Iron Age, is probably later by some 1,000 years than

the others, which are late Neolithic with copper first appearing; and its

workmanship is far superior. (After Sophus Müller and Déchelette.)]

227. IRON

Iron was worked by man about two thousand years later than bronze. It is

a far more abundant metal than copper, and though it melts at a higher

temperature, is not naturally harder to extract from some of its ores.

The reason for its lateness of use is not wholly explained. It is likely

that the first use of metals was of those, like gold and copper, that

are found in the pure metallic state and, being rather soft, could be

treated by hammering without heat—by processes more or less familiar to

stone age culture. It is known that fair amounts of copper were worked

in this way by many tribes of North American Indians, who got their

supplies from the Lake Superior deposits and the Copper River placers in

Alaska. If the same thing happened in the most progressive parts of the

Eastern Hemisphere some 6,000 years ago, acquaintance with the metal may

before long have been succeeded by the invention of the arts of casting

and extracting it from its ores. When, not many centuries later, the

hardening powers of an admixture of tin were discovered and bronze with

its far greater serviceability for tools became known, a powerful impetus

was surely given to the new metallurgy, which was restricted only by the

limitations of the supply of metal, especially tin. Progress went on

in the direction first taken; the alloy became better balanced, molds

and casting processes superior, the forms attempted more adventurous or

efficient. For many centuries iron ores were disregarded; the bronze

habit intensified. Finally, accident may have brought the discovery of

iron; or shortage of bronze led to experimenting with other ores; and a

new age dawned.

Whatever the forces at work, the actual events were clearly those

outlined. And it is interesting that the New World furnishes an exact

parallel with its three areas and stages of native copper, smelted copper

and gold, and bronze (§ 108, 196), and with only the final period of iron

unattained at the time of discovery.

228. FIRST USE AND SPREAD OF IRON

Some of the earliest known cases of the use of iron were decorative:

for jewelry, or as inlay upon bronze. Finds of this sort have been

made in Switzerland, Germany, Greece, and the Caucasus. Once however

the extraction of the new material had become known, its abundance was

so great as to further its employment, which grew fairly rapidly,

though held back by several factors. One of these retarding causes was

the prevalence of the casting process, which had become definitely

established for bronze and was carried on with great skill, whereas

iron lends itself to ready casting only in a foundry and for objects of

larger size than were in customary use among the ancients. They forged

their iron, and this new art had to be gradually learned. At its best, it

could not produce some of the finer results of casting; in ornaments and

statuettes, for instance.

Wrought iron is comparatively soft. A bronze knife will cut or shave

better than a forged iron one. It was not until it was discovered

that the iron from certain ores could be converted into steel by

tempering—plunging the heated implement into water—that the new metal

became a tool material superior to bronze. The invention of tempering

seems to have followed fairly soon after the discovery of iron. But some

centuries elapsed before this art became at all general.

Finally, conservative fashion operated to delay the undisputed supremacy

of iron. Bronze has an attractive goldenish color; it oxidizes slowly

and superficially; it was anchored in ritual; and it tended to remain

associated with state and splendor, with wealth and nobility, whereas

iron crept into commonplace and humble usages. Nearly four centuries

after iron became known in the Greek world, the Iliad mentions it

but twenty-three times, bronze two hundred and seventy times. In the

Odyssey, a more bourgeois epic, and a little later in authorship, the

proportion of references to iron is higher: twenty-nine to eighty. The

first four books of the Old Testament, the composition of whose older

parts is usually placed synchronous with that of the Iliad—about 850

B.C.—but whose outlook is the conservative one of religion, mention iron

still more rarely: four times as against eighty-three references to

bronze—“brass” the Authorized Version calls it.

Which nation first made iron available to the world has not yet been

ascertained. It was almost certainly some people in western Asia. The

Hittites of Asia Minor, the Chalybes of Armenia, are prominent contenders

for the honor. It could scarcely have been the most civilized people of

the region, the Babylonians, because their alluvial country contains

neither ore nor stone. The time was probably subsequent to 1500 B.C.,

but not long after. By the time of Rameses the Great, in the thirteenth

century, the metal was known and somewhat used in Egypt, being imported

from the Hittites. Contemporaneously, the early Greek invaders who

overthrew the Ægean culture of Crete and Mycenæ and Troy were in the

beginnings of the Iron Age. Italy learned the new material from the

Etruscans about 1100 B.C. Babylonian and Assyrian records seem to refer

to it some few centuries earlier. The Jews in the time of Saul, 1000

B.C., are said by the Bible to have had little iron and no steel, a fact

that made possible their oppression by the Philistines of the coast. This

people, apparently descendants of the Minoan Cretans, have recently been

alleged as the discoverers of the art of steel making; though whether

with reason, remains to be proved. In central Europe iron became fairly

abundant about 900 B.C., and was soon mined and smelted locally. In

northern Europe its first sporadic appearance is soon after, but its

general prevalence, justifying the use of the term Iron Age, not anterior

to 500 B.C.

In the Far East, the history of iron is little known. In India, where it

is likely to have been derived from western Asia or Persia, its first

mention is at the end of the Vedic period, whose close is variously

estimated at 1400 B.C. and 1000 B.C. The metal must have been new then:

it was called “dark blue bronze.” The Hindus later carried knowledge of

iron and steel-working to the Malaysian East Indies.

When China got its first iron is not known, though it appears to have

been comparatively late. By the early part of the seventh century before

Christ, iron had become common enough to be taxed. But it was used for

hoes, plowshares, hatchets, needles, and domestic purposes only. Not

until the fifth century B.C. did steel-making become introduced into

China, and bronze begin to be superseded for weapons. Even in the first

century after Christ the natives of southernmost China were fighting with

bronze weapons in their struggle against amalgamation with the empire.

At any rate, the Chou dynasty, the period of the production of the

literary classics, from the eleventh to the third century B.C., was still

prevailingly a time of bronze, as attested both by native historical

records and the evidences of archæology. This lateness of iron in the

Far East raises a strong probability that the Chinese did not enter

the iron stage through their own discovery but were led into it by the

example of Mongol or Turkish peoples of north central Asia, who in turn

leaned upon the western Asiatics.

Japan has a definite Iron Age, well known through excavations. It is

thought to have begun about the fourth century B.C. This approximate

contemporaneity with China, whereas in nearly all the remainder of its

culture Japan borrowed from China and followed long behind it in time,

suggests that the Japanese or neighboring Koreans may have learned of

iron directly from the north Asiatic teachers of the Chinese.

229. THE HALLSTADT AND LATÈNE PERIODS

North of the Mediterranean lands, the prehistoric Iron Age of Europe

is divided into two periods: that of Hallstadt, named after a site in

Austria, and lasting from about 900 to 500 B.C.; and that of LaTène,

designated from a famous discovery in Switzerland, which stretched from

500 B.C. until almost the birth of Christ. The Hallstadt period is

better developed in middle than in western Europe: it was influenced

from Greece, the Balkans, and Italy. It prevailed along the Adriatic

and Danube as far as Bosnia and Hungary; over all but northern Germany;

in Switzerland; and in eastern France. Its flow was northwestward. The

LaTène culture was carried primarily by Kelts, falls into the period of

their greatest extension and prosperity, and centers in France. Here

it seems to have developed under the stimulus of Greek colonization at

Marseilles, to have spread northward to the British Isles, and eastward

into central Europe. Its general flow was northeastward.

Considerable iron and bronze work of some technical fineness was made

during the Hallstadt and LaTène periods. Fibulas, jewelry, weapons, and

cult apparatus were often elaborate. But the quality of the cultures

remained homespun, backward, and barbaric as compared with the plasticity

and polish which contemporary Greek civilization had attained.

The Hallstadt culture, for instance, was wholly without cities, stone

architecture or bridges, paved roads, coins, writing of any sort, the

potter’s wheel, or rotary millstone; nor was metal used for agricultural

implements. It was a time of villages, small towns, and scattered homes;

of sacred groves instead of temples; of boggy roads, of ox-carts and

solid wooden wheels; of a heavy, barbaric, warlike population, half

like European peasants, half like pioneers; self-content, yet always

dimly conscious that in the southern distance there lay lands of wealth,

refinement, and achievement.

The LaTène time showed many advances; but, relatively to the

civilizations of Greece and Rome—it was the period of Phidias and Plato,

of Archimedes and Cicero—the northern culture was as many milestones of

progress behind as during the Hallstadt era. The coins in use were Greek,

or local imitations of Greek money, their figures and legends often

corrupted to complete meaninglessness. Writing was still absent. Some

attempts at script began to be made toward the close of LaTène, but they

resulted in nothing more than the awkward Ogham and Runic systems. Until

perhaps a century or two before Cæsar, there were no cities or fortified

towns in Gaul. When they arose, it was on heights, behind walls of mixed

logs, earth, and stone, as against the masonry circumvallations which the

Ægean peoples were erecting more than a thousand years before. Even these

poor towns were built only by Kelts; the Germanic tribes remained shy of

them for centuries longer. Society was still essentially proto-feudal and

rustic. But there had filtered in from the Mediterranean, and were being

wrought locally, holed axes, iron wagon wheels, the potter’s wheel and

potter’s oven, rotary mills, dice, tongs, scissors, saws, and scythes—all

new to these northern lands, and curiously modern in their fundamental

types as compared with the essentially half-primitive, half-barbarian

suggestion that Hallstadt manufactures carry.

230. SUMMARY OF DEVELOPMENT: REGIONAL DIFFERENTIATION

Two conclusions emerge from the facts reviewed in this chapter and

serve to prevent an over-simple and schematic conception of the growth

of prehistoric civilization. The first is that successive phases of

culture, even in the earliest times, cannot be identified, much less

really understood, by reference to any single criterion such as this or

that technique of working stone or the knowledge of this or that metal.

In every case the culture is complex and characterized by a variety

of traits whose combination produces its distinctive cast. The more

important of these culture traits, with particular reference to Europe,

may be summarized thus:

_Period_ _Culture Elements Appearing_

Iron Iron, steel; in the Orient, alphabet

Bronze Metals, alloying, megaliths; in the Orient,

masonry, writing

Full Neolithic Domesticated animals and plants, stone polishing

Early Neolithic Pottery, bow

Upper Palæolithic Bone work, harpoon, art

Lower Palæolithic Fire, flint work

The second conclusion is that differentiation of culture according

to region is too great to be lightly brushed aside. Even for the

Palæolithic, which is so imperfectly known outside of Europe, and whose

content is so simple, it is clear that the developmental sequences in

Europe cannot be correctly interpreted without reference to provincial

growths and their affiliations in other continents (§ 214-216). In the

Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages, regional diversity increases. Egypt

and China, India and France, present deeply differentiated pictures in

3000 B.C., and again in 1000. Their cultures have throughout a separate

aspect. And yet innumerable connections link them. The very bronze and

iron that name the later ages, the grains and animals that are the

basis of their economic life, were intercontinentally disseminated,

and represent in most of the lands that came to possess them an import

from an alien focus of growth. And currents usually run both ways.

China received metals, wheat, cattle and horses, cotton, architecture,

religion, possibly the suggestion of script, from the west; but she gave

to it silk and porcelain, gunpowder and paper. Also there are inertias

and absences to be reckoned with. The Near East probably gave to Europe

most of the elements of civilization which the latter possessed during

the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron periods; but much which the Near East

had, it failed to transmit. Writing flowed into Europe a full two

thousand years after bronze, with which it was coeval in origin. Coinage

is far later in the Orient than masonry, but outstripped it and became

earlier established in western Europe.

The result is a great tangled web, whose structure is only gradually

being revealed by painstaking comparison and intensive study. Often the

most convincing evidence as to the composition and direction of the

culture currents is provided by highly specialized matters: styles of

pottery decoration, shapes of ax heads, forms of ornamental safety-pins.

It is not because these minutiæ are so fascinating in themselves that

archæologists are endlessly and often tediously concerned with them. It

is because these data offer the longest clues through the labyrinth,

because on their sure sequences can be strung hundreds of otherwise

non-significant or detached facts. But the results are as yet incomplete;

they are and promise to remain forever complex; and their systematic

presentation in coherent narrative awaits a larger and future treatment.

It will be wisest, in a work of the present compass, to outline the whole

development of a single area, to serve as a type sample.

231. THE SCANDINAVIAN AREA AS AN EXAMPLE

The most satisfactory region for such a purpose is Scandinavia—the

peninsula, Denmark, and the Baltic coasts, including much of northeast

Germany. This was a glacier-covered area in the Mousterian, and either

obliterated or uninhabited in the Upper Palæolithic. It has therefore no

Old Stone Age history. During the Magdalenian, the glaciers had shrunk

to cover only most of the Scandinavian peninsula and Finland. Denmark

was ice-free. But what is now the Baltic stretched as an open sound from

the North Sea across southern Finland and northwestern Russia to the

Arctic Ocean. From this ocean as well as the remaining glaciers emanated

a low temperature, in which there throve arctic forms of life, especially

the small shell _Yoldia arctica_, which flourishes only where the sea

bottom temperature ranges between 1° plus and 2° minus Centigrade. This

great, chilly sound of some sixteen to ten thousand years ago is known

as the Yoldia Sea. Denmark and the German coast must still have been

cold, as the remains of the sub-arctic flora show, and were without human

inhabitants.

232. THE LATE PALÆOLITHIC ANCYLUS OR MAGLEMOSE PERIOD

Around 10,000 B.C., as western Europe was entering upon the Azilian

aftermath of the Palæolithic, the land at both ends of the Yoldia Sea was

elevated sufficiently to cut this off from the open ocean. The Baltic was

thus closed at both ends, instead of neither, as before, or one only,

as now. The rivers continued to flow into it; it became brackish and

almost fresh, and the fauna changed. The distinctive fossil shell became

_Ancylus fluviatilis_, from which the great lake is known as the Ancylus

Lake. The Scandinavian flora once more included real trees, chiefly pines

and birches.

Man occupied south Sweden and Denmark in the Ancylus period. At Maglemose

have been found his remains during this Scandinavian equivalent of the

Azilian. Here he appears to have lived on rafts floating on a lake, which

subsequently filled with peat. Whatever fell overboard, became embedded

in the growing peat and was preserved. The inhabitants cut their raft

logs and firewood with axes of bone and elk horn, some of them perforated

for handles. They had bone fish-hooks, harpoons with single and double

rows of barbs, and still others with slits for the insertion of minute

flint blades, much like saw teeth. Some of the microlithic points have

also been found. All of the stone was chipped; there is no trace of

polishing other than of bone and antler. They engraved, sometimes in

a deteriorated style of Magdalenian naturalism, sometimes with simple

geometric ornaments. The dog accompanied these people, perhaps was

already half tame. Remains similar to those of Maglemose have been found

in several of the Baltic lands.

233. THE EARLY NEOLITHIC LITORINA OR KITCHENMIDDEN PERIOD

Within perhaps two thousand years, the Baltic opened again as at present,

grew saltier, and took on much its present conditions, except for being

somewhat larger. The water warmed, and _Litorina litorea_ and the oyster

became the characteristic molluscs. The climate was milder than before,

and the forests changed from birches and pines to oaks.

The men of this period lived largely on oysters and scallops, whose

shells piled up about their habitations by millions, forming ridge-like

mounds sometimes hundreds of yards long. These are the Kjökkenmöddings,

or Kitchenmiddens, refuse heaps or shell heaps. Among the shells are

ashes, bones of the land animals and birds that were hunted, and lost or

broken utensils. Some of the Maglemose implements continued to be used,

such as bone awls, chisels, and fish-hooks. Others were no longer made:

harpoons, the minute flint blades, and engraved objects. But new forms

had come in: above all, pottery and the stone ax—evidences that this was

an early period of the Neolithic, even though polished stone was still

lacking. The ax or “splitter” was chipped—hewn is really a more fitting

term—oval or trapezoidal in outline, the cutting edge convex or straight.

It seems to have been lashed to an elbow handle: there was no groove

or perforation. The pottery was coarse, dark, and undecorated except

sometimes for rows of crude dot impressions along the edge. Another new

implement was a handled bone comb with four or five teeth. It appears

to have been employed for carding rather than hair-dressing. The bow

was in use: arrowheads bore a cutting edge in front. The dog was the

only domestic or semi-domesticated animal; probably a Spitz-like breed,

perhaps of jackal origin. He managed to gnaw most of the bones that have

been preserved in the shell layers.

Approximately contemporary with the Danish kitchenmiddens, and similar

to them in their cultural repertoire, are a Spanish phase known as

Asturian and the Campignian of northern France. The Asturian remains are

also shell deposits. Their lower levels contain bones of cattle that

had perhaps been domesticated; middle strata add the sheep; and in the

uppermost, pottery appears. The northern ax is replaced by a handheld

pick. The Campignian possessed hewn axes or splitters similar to the

Danish ones; pottery; domesticated cattle; and seems to have made a

beginning of agriculture with barley. It would thus seem that pottery

and the hewn ax were the characteristic general criteria of this Early

Neolithic stage, with domesticated animals and agriculture coming in

earlier in southern and middle Europe, whereas the northerners continued

to depend longer on shellfish and game.

234. THE FULL NEOLITHIC AND ITS SUBDIVISIONS IN SCANDINAVIA

Two or three thousand years passed, and by about 5500 B.C. the

Scandinavian climate had become slightly cooler once more, the oaks gave

way to birches and pines, the Baltic lost some of its salt content, and

the oyster grew scarcer. The Kitchenmidden or Litorina period of the

Early Neolithic was over; the Full Neolithic had arrived. Axes were

polished, cattle kept, grain grown. Four Stages of development are

discernible.

5500-3500 B.C. Burials in soil. Sharp-butted axes.

3500-2500 B.C. Burials in dolmens, chambers of three to five

flat upright stones, roofed with one slab. Narrow-butted axes.

2500-2100 B.C. Burials in _Allées couvertes_ or _Ganggraeber_,

chambers of dolmen type but larger and with a roofed corridor

approach. Thick-butted axes. Some copper. Beautifully neat and

even chipping of flint daggers, lance heads, arrowpoints, some

suggesting by their forms that they may be flint imitations of

bronzes already in use on the Mediterranean. The same is true

of perforated stone axes, ground into ornamental curves, such

as are natural in cast metal.

2100-1900 B.C. Burials in stone cysts, progressively decreasing

in size. Thick-butted axes. Chipped daggers and curving axes

reminiscent of bronze forms continue. The first bronze appears,

its percentage of tin still low.

235. THE BRONZE AGE AND ITS PERIODS IN SCANDINAVIA

Bronze reached the Scandinavian region late, as a well developed

art, and its working soon showed a high degree of technical and

æsthetic excellence. But arts that in the Orient had appeared almost

simultaneously with bronze—writing, masonry, wheel turning of pottery—did

not reach Scandinavia until after bronze had been superseded by iron

there. The consequence was that the Northern culture remained on the

whole thoroughly barbarous. And yet, perhaps on account of this very

backwardness, an aloofness resulted which drove the Scandinavian

bronze-workers to follow their own tastes and develop their own forms and

styles, often with taste as exquisite as simple. In other words, a local

culture grew, much like the analogous local cultures in America which

have been traced in previous chapters. Yet the basis of this Northern

bronze culture was southern and Oriental invention; and the south and

east continued to influence Scandinavia. The northern safety-pin, for

instance, underwent the same stages as the southern one: backs that were

first straight and narrow, then sheetlike, then bowed, with the ends

enlarging to great buckles or disks. But the southern fibula, whatever

its type or period, was one-piece and elastic, the northern at all times

made of two separate parts, and without real spring.

Connection with other countries is evident from the Northern bronze

itself, at least the tin of which, if not the alloy, was imported.

Yet the finds of the Scandinavian Bronze Age, numerous as they are,

do not contain a single specimen that can be traced to Egypt or to

Greece. Even pieces made in middle Europe are rare. And molds, ladles,

unfinished castings, prove that the North cast its own bronze on the

spot. First knowledge of the art had evidently seeped in from the region

of Switzerland, Austria, and Hungary, which in turn derived it from the

Italian and Balkan peninsulas, which at a still earlier time had learned

it from Egypt or Asia.

It appears, then, that it would be equally erroneous to regard the

Scandinavian Bronze Age as an independent development or to regard it

as a mere copy or importation from the Orient. It was neither; or, in a

sense, it was both. Its origin lies in the great early focal point of

civilization in the Near East; its specific form, the qualities which

it took on, are its own. The disseminated ingredient, the basis due to

diffusion, must be admitted as fully as the elements of local development

which mark off a distinct Northern culture-area, or sub-focus of cultural

energy.

This interplay of forces is typical also of the Iron and New Stone

Ages, and it is the number of local centers of culture growth, their

increasingly rapid flourishing as time went on, and the multiplication of

connections between countries, that render the prehistory of Eur-Asiatic

civilization so difficult. If enough were known of the life of the

Palæolithic, it is probable that a similar though less intricate tangle

of developments might be evident for that period also.

The resemblance to the interrelations of areas within America is

manifest. The Southwest stands to southern Mexico as Scandinavia does

to the Orient: suffused by it, stimulated by it, created by it, almost;

yet at all times with a provincial cast of its own. The Southwestern

specialist can trace a continuous evolution on the spot which tempts him

to forget the obvious and indisputable Mexican origins. The Mexicanist,

on the other hand, impressed by the practical identity of fundamentals

and close resemblance in many details, is likely to see Southwestern

culture only as a mutilated copy of the higher civilization to the south.

Correct understanding requires the balancing of both views.

Close equivalents of the culture-areas of American ethnologists are in

fact recognized by European archæologists. Thus, Déchelette distinguishes

seven “geographical provinces” in the Bronze Age of Europe, as follows:

1, _Ægean_ (Greece, islands, coast of Asia Minor); 2, _Italian_ (with

Sicily and Sardinia); 3, _Iberian_ (Spain, Portugal, Balearics); 4,

_Western_ (France, Great Britain, Ireland, Belgium, southern Germany,

Switzerland, Bohemia); 5, _Danubian_ (Hungary, Moravia, the Balkan

countries); 6, _Scandinavian_ (including northern Germany and the Baltic

coast); 7, _Uralic_ (Russia and western Siberia).

The fourteen hundred years generally allowed the Scandinavian Bronze Age

are divisible into five or six periods,[35] which become progressively

shorter.

2500-2100, Neolithic, with copper, and 2100-1900, with

occasional bronze, have already been mentioned.

1900-1600 B.C. Burial in stone cysts. Little decoration of

bronze, and that only in straight lines. Flat ax heads or

celts. Triangular daggers. Daggers mounted on staves like ax

heads.

1600-1400 B.C. Occasional cremation of corpses, the ashes

put into very small cysts. Decoration of bronze in engraved

spirals. Flanged and stop-ridged axes. Swords. Straight fibulas.

1400-1050 B.C. Cremation general. Axes of socketed type. Bowed

fibulas. Bronze vessels with lids.

1050-850 B.C. Spiral ornament decaying. Fibulas with two large

bosses. Ship-shaped razors.

850-650 B.C. Ornamentation plastic, rather than engraved, often

produced in the casting. Rows of concentric circles and other

patterns replace spirals. Fibulas with two large disks. Knives

with voluted antennæ-like handles. Sporadic occurrence of iron.

650-500 B.C. Iron increasing in use; decorative bronze

deteriorating.

236. PROBLEMS OF CHRONOLOGY

The dating of events in the Neolithic and Metal Ages is of much more

importance than in the Palæolithic. Whether an invention was made in

Babylonia in 5000 or in 3000 B.C. means the difference between its

occurring in the hazy past of a formative culture or in a well advanced

and directly documented phase of that culture. If the dolmens and other

megalithic monuments of northern Europe were erected about 3000 B.C.,

they are older than the pyramids of Egypt and contemporaneous with the

first slight unfoldings of civilization in Crete and Troy. But if their

date is 1000 B.C., they were set up when pure alphabetic writing and iron

and horses were in use in western Asia, when Egypt was already senile,

and the Cretan and Trojan cultures half forgotten. In the one case, the

megaliths represent a local achievement, perhaps independent of the

stone architecture of Egypt; in the other event, they are likely to be a

belated and crudely barbarian imitation of this architecture.

But in the Palæolithic, year dates scarcely matter. Whether the

Mousterian phase culminated 25,000 or 75,000 years ago is irrelevant: it

was far before the beginning of historic time in either case. If one sets

the earlier date, the Chellean and Magdalenian are also stretched farther

off; if the later, it is because one shrinks his estimate of the whole

Palæolithic, the sequence of whose periods remains fixed. It is really

only the relative chronology that counts within the Old Stone Age. The

durations are so great, and so wholly prehistoric, that the only value of

figures is the vividness of their concrete impression on the mind, and

the emphasis that they place on the length of human antiquity as compared

with the brevity of recorded history. Palæolithic datings might almost be

said to be useful in proportion as they are not taken seriously.

At the same time, the chronology of the Palæolithic is aided by

several lines of geological evidence that are practically absent for

the Neolithic and Bronze Ages: thickness of strata, height of river

deposits and moraines, depth of erosion, species of wild animals. The

Neolithic is too brief to show notable traces of geological processes.

Its age must therefore be determined by subtler means: slight changes

in temperature and precipitation; the thickness of refuse deposits; and

above all, the linking of its latter phases to the earliest datable

events in documentary or inscriptional history. By these aids, comparison

has gradually built up a chronology which is accepted as approximate

by most authorities. This chronology puts the beginning of bronze in

the Baltic region at about 1900 B.C., in Spain at 2500, the first Swiss

lake-dwellings at 4000, the domestication of cattle and grain in middle

Europe around 5500, the first pottery-bearing shellmounds about 8000

B.C. Of course, these figures must not be taken as accurate. Estimates

vary somewhat. Yet the dates cited probably represent the opinion of the

majority of specialists without serious deviation: except on one point,

and that an important one.

This point is the hinge from the end of prehistory to the beginning

of history: the date of the first dynasties of Egypt and Babylonian

Sumer. On this matter, there was for many years a wide discrepancy among

Orientalists. The present tendency is to set 3400 or 3315 B.C., with

an error of not over a century, as the time when upper and lower Egypt

began to be ruled by a single king, Mena, the founder of the “first

dynasty”; 2750 as the date of Sargon of Akkad, the first consolidator and

empire-builder in the Babylonian region; and about 3100 as the period of

the earliest discovered datable remains from the Sumerian city states.

The longer reckoning puts the Egyptian first dynasty back to about 4000;

according to some, even earlier; and Sargon to 3750. This last date rests

on the discovery by Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, successor of

Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century B.C., of a deeply buried inscription

in a foundation wall erected by Naram-sin, son of Sargon. Nabonidus had

antiquarian tastes, and set his archæologists and historians to compute

how long before him Naram-sin had lived. Their answer was 3,200 years—the

thirty-eighth century B.C., we should say; and this figure Nabonidus had

put into an inscription which has come down to us. All this looks direct

and sure enough. But did the king’s scholars really know when they told

him that just 3,200 years had elapsed since his predecessor’s reign, or

were they guessing? The number is a round one: eighty forties of years,

such as the Old Testament is fond of reckoning with. The trend of modern

opinion, based on a variety of considerations, is that the Babylonian

historians were deceiving either the king or themselves.

The bearing of the discrepancy is this. The scholars who are in more

or less agreement that bronze reached Mediterranean Europe about 2500

and Northern Europe about 1900, were generally building on the longer

chronology of the Near East. They were putting Mena around 4000 and

Sargon in 3750. This allowed an interval of over a thousand years in

which bronze working could have been carried to Spain, and two thousand

to Denmark. With the shorter chronology for Egypt and Babylonia, the

time available for the transmission has to be cut down by a thousand

years. Should the European dates, therefore, be made correspondingly more

recent? Or is the diminished interval still sufficient—that is, might

a few centuries have sufficed to carry the bronze arts from the Orient

to Sicily and Spain, and a thousand years to bear them to Scandinavia?

The interval seems reasonable, and is accordingly the one here accepted.

But it is possible that if the shorter chronology becomes proved beyond

contradiction for Egypt and Babylonia, the dates for the Neolithic and

Bronze Ages of Europe may also have to be abbreviated somewhat.

One famous time-reckoning has in fact been made by the Dane Sophus

Müller, who, without basing very much on any Oriental chronology,

shortens all the prehistoric periods of Europe. His scheme of approximate

dating is reproduced, with some simplifications, in Figure 42. It will

be seen that he sets the second or dolmen period of the Full Neolithic

in Scandinavia from about 1800 to 1400 B.C., whereas the more usual

reckoning puts it at 3500 to 2500; his earliest Kitchenmidden date is

4000, as against 8000.

[Illustration: FIG. 42. The development of prehistoric civilization in

Europe. Simplified from Sophus Müller. His absolute dates are generally

considered too low, but their relative intervals are almost undisputed.

The diagram shows very clearly the persistent cultural precedence of the

countries nearest the Orient, and the lagging of western and especially

of northern Europe.]

237. PRINCIPLES OF THE PREHISTORIC SPREAD OF CULTURE

This chronology has much to commend it besides its almost daring

conservatism; especially the clarity of its consistent recognition of

certain cultural processes. Five principles and three extensions are set

up by Müller:

1. The south [of Europe, with the Near East] was the vanguard

and dispensing source of culture; the peripheral regions,

especially in the north [of Europe] followed and received.

2. The elements of southern culture were transmitted to the

north only in reduction and extract.

3. They were also subject to modifications.

4. These elements of southern culture sometimes appeared in the

remoter areas with great vigor and new qualities of their own.

5. But such remote appearances are later in time than the

occurrence of the same elements in the south.

6. Forms of artifacts or ornaments may survive for a long time

with but little modification, especially if transmitted to new

territory.

7. Separate elements characteristic of successive periods in

a culture center may occur contemporaneously in the marginal

areas, their diffusion having occurred at different rates of

speed.

8. Marginal cultures thus present a curious mixture of traits

whose original age is great and of others that are much newer;

the latter, in fact, occasionally reach the peripheries earlier

than old traits.

The basic idea of these formulations is that of the gradual radiation of

culture from creative focal centers to backward marginal areas, without

the original dependence of the peripheries wholly precluding their

subsequent independent development. It is obvious that this point of

view is substantially identical with that which has been held to in the

presentation of native American culture in the preceding chapter.

It is only fair to say that a number of eminent archæologists combat the

prevalent opinion that the sources of European Neolithic and Bronze Age

civilization are to be derived almost wholly from the Orient. They speak

of this view as an “Oriental mirage.” They see more specific differences

than identities between the several local cultures of the two regions,

and tend to explain the similarities as due to independent invention.

Since knowledge of ancient cultures is necessarily never complete, there

is a wide range of facts to which either explanation is, theoretically,

applicable. But the focal-marginal diffusion interpretation has the

following considerations in its favor.

Within the fully historic period, there have been numerous undoubted

diffusions, of which the alphabet, the week, and the true arch may be

taken as illustrations. At least in the earlier portion of the historic

period, the flow of such diffusions was regularly out of the Orient;

which raises a considerable presumption that the flow was in the same

direction as early as the Neolithic. On the other hand, indubitably

independent parallelisms are very difficult to establish within historic

areas and periods, and therefore likely to have been equally rare during

prehistory.

Then, too, the diffusion interpretation explains a large part of

civilization to a certain degree in terms of a large, consistent scheme.

To the contrary, the parallelistic opinion leaves the facts both

unexplained and unrelated. If the Etruscans devised the true arch and

liver divination independently of the Babylonians, there are two sets of

phenomena awaiting interpretation instead of one. To say that they are

both “natural” events is equivalent to calling them accidental, that is,

unexplainable. To fall back on instinctive impulses of the human mind

will not do, else all or most nations should have made these inventions.

Of course it is important to remember that no sane interpretation of

culture explains everything. We do not know what caused the true arch to

be invented in Babylonia, hieroglyphic writing in Egypt, the alphabet

in Phœnicia, at a certain time rather than at another or rather than

in another place. The diffusion point of view simply accepts certain

intensive focal developments of culture as empirically given by the

facts, and then relates as many other facts as possible to these. Every

clear-minded historian, anthropologist, and sociologist admits that we

are still in ignorance on the problems of what caused the great bursts of

higher organization and original productiveness of early Egypt and Sumer,

of Crete, of ancient North China, of the Mayas, of Periclean Athens. We

know many of the events of civilization, know them in their place and

order. We can infer from these something of the processes of imitation,

conservatism, rationalization that have shaped them. We know as yet as

good as nothing of the first or productive causes of civilization.

It is extremely important that this limitation of our understanding be

frankly realized. It is only awareness of darkness that brings seeking

for light. Scientific problems must be felt before they can be grappled.

But within the bounds of our actual knowledge, the principle of culture

derivation and transmission seems to integrate, and thus in a measure to

explain, a far greater body of facts than any other principle—provided

it is not stretched into an instrument of magic and forced to explain

everything.