if = Biss | THE UNIVERSITY 7 OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY O73 CG2s5 ISOl | Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. A charge is made on all overdue books. | University of Illinois Library sata THE LIBRARY OF USEFUL STORIES Copyright, 1894, by F. Hanfstaeagl, Munich. ] [From the Painting by Gabriel Max. ANCESTORS OF MAN (Pithecanthropus A lalus). fame |ORY: OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN BY EDWARD CLODD PRESIDENT OF THE FOLK LORE SOCIETY AUTHOR OF THE STORY OF CREATION, A PRIMER OF EVOLUTION, THE CHILDHOOD OF RELIGIONS, ETC, WITH ILLUSTRA TIONS NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1901 Wheto weraei AWRY = Fate vinnie ~~ . ~4 n ‘ CopyRIGHT, 1895, i - By D. EEE AND COMPANY, — re F nd - 21 ‘ . t P é ‘ P i . ~ ~ > ay ‘ _ ye se te fife ar (A ey fo; Medicated (BY PERMISSION) TO SIR JOHN EVANS, Meet, C. 1... LL. De web Res, ETE WHOSE LABOURS IN een oe 18 Nov 42 ¢ WS Bayley THE COLLECTION OF EVIDENCE BEARING ON THE ANTIQUITY AND PRIMITIVE STATE OF MAN HAVE PLACED ALL STUDENTS OF ANTHROPOLOGY UNDER LASTING INDEBTEDNESS. ‘ 4 ¢ nt es itt ! ‘ er ae Ps a ‘ ’ A, ' 1 2 ward *~ 4 ‘ a* a . PREFATORY NOTE. TueE List of Books given at the end of this little volume fulfils the twofold purpose of indi- cating the authorities who have been consulted in its preparation, and of telling the reader where fuller information on the several subjects dealt with is to be found. My special acknowledgments are due both to Sir John Evans and Messrs. Longmans and Co. for their generous permission of the use of blocks from Sir John Evans’s “Ancient Stone Imple- ments of Great Britain,” and “ Ancient Bronze Im- plements of Great Britain.” Hee Co) I9, CARLETON ROAD, TUFNELL PARK, N. February, 1895. CONTENTS, CHAPTER ; I. THE PLACE OF MAN IN THE EARTH’S LIFE- HISTORY II. THE PLACE oF MAN IN THE EARTH’S TIME- HISTORY III. THe ANCIENT STONE AGE. I. Character of Remains found in the Drift 2. Character of Remains found in Caverns : IV. THE NEWER STONE AGE 1. General Character of the Newer eeu ee ; 2. Remains found in Coast-finds and Shell- Mounds 3. Races of the Newer Sion Nee 4. Earth and Stone Monuments 5. Primitive Ideas about Spirits and an After- Life 6. Stone Circles 7. Remains found in Lake- Wireline 8. Origin of the Lake-Dwellers : ° V. THeE AGE OF METALS. VI. CONCLUSION . SELECTED LIST OF BOOKS ON THE FOREGOING SUBJECTS . : : ‘ : INDEX . 5 : . ° ‘ . : PAGE CHAPTER I. THE PLACE OF MAN IN THE EARTH’S LIFE- HISTORY. In no branch of knowledge has there been more rapid advance during the past fifty years than in that which deals with the history of so- called “primitive” man. A generation or two ago, inquiry was rarely pushed beyond the sources of information supplied by. written docu- ments, coins, inscriptions, and such like materials. The possible existence of other materials throw- ing light on remote ages in which man had played a part—ages about which history was either silent, or recorded only myths and legends —was but here and there recognised. Apropos of “antiquarian research” Boswell reports Johnson as saying: “All that is really known of the ancient state of Britain is contained in a few pages. Wecaz know no more than what the old writers have told us.” That remark gauges the high-water level reached a little more than a century ago. And yet the evidence which Dr. Johnson declared non-existent was beneath the soil of his beloved London. Even at the time he spoke, there was lying in the Sloane Museum a rudely-chipped flint weapon which had been found, at the end of the seventeenth century, as- sociated with an elephant’s tooth “opposite to black Mary’s near Grayes inn lane,” in which 9 Io THE STORY OF ‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN, street once lived Johnson. But years passed be- fore it was known that these and other unheeded Fic. 2.,—Flint implement from Gray’s Jun Lane (Evans). relics epitomised the early history of man and the condition of the Thames valley when he and a strange group of animals lived there in a dim and dateless past. Until a few years ago our school histories of Britain began with the invasion of Julius Cesar. Both these and graver histories were silent about PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH’S LIFE-HISTORY. II man and his doings before that time. It seemed not to occur to the writers to inquire whether the “ancient Britons” were the original inhabitants of these islands; and if not, whence they came, and who lived here before them; and if the earlier folk had left any remains from which something could be known as to their civilised or barbaric state. All this is changed, and for the better. A new science has been born—the science of man. In other words, the same method of inquiry which is applied to origins generally is applied to him. He stands as an exception no longer: he is in- cluded in the universal order. The name “pre-historic” has been given to the vast period about which written records tell us nothing, because it lies outside the horizon of history, as we define it. There have been un- earthed from ancient river-beds, limestone cav- erns, lake-bottoms, and refuse-heaps; from rude sepulchres and stone structures an enormous mass of relics which‘reveal to us the story of man dur- ing periods when the Continent of Europe stretched beyond Great Britain and Ireland into the At- lantic, and was joined at more than one point to Africa. Besides the knowledge gained from these relics of man’s presence, much has been gathered in re- cent years about the blood-relationship of various races, and, more than this, about man’s place in the long chain of life on the globe. Therefore, not only has inquiry into his history been carried back to periods not to be reckoned by years, but he is no longer treated as a being apart from other living things. And that is what is meant by the science of man which we call ‘ anthro- pology.” 12 THE STORY OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN. A few elemental facts will help to make clear his place in the order and succession of life. The material basis and vehicle of life is a slimy stuff called “ protoplasm,” which builds for itself a thin-walled cell. Every plant and animal is made up of cells, the shape and arrangement of which are governed by the work which they have to do. The lowest life-forms consist of one cell, which does everything; that is, takes in food and air, casts out refuse, and responds to its sur- roundings. All life-forms above the lowest con- sist of many cells, of which the several parts of the body are built up, each part doing its own work on the principle of division of labour. The one-celled multiply by division; the lower many- celled by the congregation of lke cells; the higher by the more complex fusion of unlike cells, as the sperm-cell of the male with the germ-cell of the female, giving rise to a seed or egg whence grows offspring resembling the par- ents. The Vertebrates, or back-boned animals, stand at the head of the many-celled; the Mammals, or those that suckle their young, at the head of the Vertebrates; and the order of the Primates (pro- nounced Pri-ma-tes, to distinguish them from archbishops) at the head of the Mammals. This order includes lemurs, monkeys, apes, and man. The anthropoid or man-like apes—the gibbon, orang-outang, chimpanzee, and gorilla—are man’s nearest allies. Some of them resemble him more in one feature; some in another. The orang- outang has the most human-like brain; the chimpanzee has the most human-like skull; and the more savage gorilla has the most human-like feet and hands. Although the bones of aman PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH’S LIFE-HISTORY. 13 cannot be mistaken for those of an anthropoid ape, the skeleton of each, bone for bone, are identical. If we compare the skull of a horse with a human skull, we find the same number of bones. And whether it be man, or ape, or horse, depends not on differences in the plan of the general skeleton, but in the proportions, as, for example, dealing only with the skulls of each, in the size of the brain-case and the face. For the comparisons of structure make clear that all dif- ferences are of degree, not of kind. The lower apes vary more, especially in their brains, from the highest apes than these differ from man. The barest summary of the evidence in proof of the descent of all living things from a common ancestry is not possible, neither needful, here, and it must therefore suffice to say that the com- mon descent of man and apes is no longer to be doubted. But man is neither the offspring nor the brother of the apes; he is a sort of cousin more than “once removed.’ And the answer to the oft-put question, Where is the missing link between them? is, Thereisno missing link; there never has been one. As with the likenesses and differences between the apes themselves, so with those between apes and man. The likenesses are explained by descent from a common ancestry ; the differences have slowly arisen in subtle ways. The Primates form the upper branches of the life-tree, whose highest branch is man. This top- most place has been won by him in virtue of cer- tain advantages in his bodily structure, namely, his wholly erect posture, his hands, and his organs of speech. For, although the impassable gulf be- tween man and apes is especially manifest in his larger and more deeply furrowed brain, this is 14 THE STORY OF ‘“ PRIMITIVE” MAN, more an effect than a cause of the advantages just named. That without them there would not have been developed such difference of brain a brief explanation will show. The primary use of limbs is to enable an ani- mal to move about in search of food. This is accomplished in various ways among the lower life-forms; and, among the Vertebrates, by two pairs of limbs. These have been modified in various animals for different modes of action, as in the fore-limbs of the bat and bird for flight; in the flipper of the whale for propelling it through the water; and so on. But in these cases, the fore-limbs remain organs of locomotion. And they remain so among quadrupeds and the man- like apes. It is true that the gibbon can walk erect, but his gait is waddling and inconstant, his habits being arboreal; and his long arms used in his wide leaps from tree to tree. The other big apes are only semi-erect. Man alone has acquired the wholly upright position which has set his fore- limbs entirely free to act as organs for handling, grasping, and throwing things. The modification of the fingers, enabling them to be opposed singly, or all together, to the thumb, and thereby to act as hooks or clasps; to form a cuplike palm; to grasp things large or small, and thus learn some- thing about them; gave man a perfect organ without which he could never have won lordship over the earth. And we have but to cripple or lose a thumb to realise that in it hes the real power of the hand. The prehensile or grasping organs of some of the lower animals, as of the elephant, monkey, parrot, and opossum, whereby they can lay hold of an object and learn some- thing of its nature, raises them in the scale of PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH’S LIFE-HISTORY. 15 intelligence ; and when we contrast trunk or claw with the human hand, we see what a mighty agent this has been in development of brain. Obviously the attainment of the erect posture in- volved various changes in the structure of man’s body—as the thickening of the leg bones, the flattening of the feet, the curve of the spine, and the altered position of the skull as balanced on it. In all this there was the making of Man. His two-footed and upright posture involved ex- change of the tree-life of his ancestors for life on the ground, which brought him into new relations with his surroundings, and, finally, in the cease- less struggle for life which he had to wage, gave him the mastery over foes and the wide earth itself. That the wholly-erect posture was acquired late, speaking relatively, in man’s development from an ape-like ancestry is shown, among other ways, in the crawling of infants for some time after birth—which shows the quadrupedal instinct —and in the preference we all have for sitting down. Among civilised people the great toe is, not infrequently, opposable, like the great toe in apes; the Chinese can row with it, and the lower races use it for grasping. It has been ingeniously pointed out that one of the many proofs of man’s descent from a tree-dwelling ancestry is in his behaviour when he is in danger of drowning. He acts in the water as if trying to scramble to a place of safety, extending his arms above him as in climbing. Man’s acquisition of articulate speech is in itself sufficing evidence of his social habits. For language is wholly and strictly a social institu- tion; man speaks to impart his thoughts; a soli- tary man would not have developed a language, 16 THE STORY OF ‘* PRIMITIVE”: MAN, since the need for it would not have arisen. In the degree that animals are gregarious, they are higher in the scale—as ants, bees, and wasps among insects; dogs, elephants, &c., among mam- mals; and the instincts which led the apes and man to their several social ways of life were inherited from their common ancestors, and strengthened by practice, being, in fact, necessary to their ex- istence, and to the successful rearing of their off- spring. . The normal state of every living thing, from the lowest plant to the highest animal, is one of conflict, and the “weakest go to the wall.” Un- like the lion and other beasts of great muscular strength, the Primates had no powerful organs of attack or defence, and so took to living in trees, where their grasping organs stood them in good stead. Swiftness of motion was their safety; the need for alertness against wilder and fiercer beasts not only quickened their wits, but compelled them to unity. Whichever among them possessed any favourable variation, no matter how slight, in structure of brain or sense-organs or pliability of fore-limb, would secure an advantage over less- favoured rivals in the common struggle for life, and, transmitting their advantages to their off- spring, would in the long run wholly distance their competitors. Thus may be explained the advance of man’s progenitors over those of the highest apes. But, in the case of both man and ape, social bonds were strengthened by the de- pendence of their offspring. Among the lower animals the offspring are hatched or born fully equipped, so that their parents need trouble little about them. But among the highest animals the .offspring, for a longer or shorter period after PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH’S LIFE-HISTORY. 17 birth, are helpless, and dependent on the parents. That condition evokes the nurturing care of father and mother, as well as the sympathy and love which helplessness excites; hence the devel- opment of social relations, which, beginning with the family, extend to groups of families out of which are formed tribes and nations. The longer the infant stage, the more intelligent the animal, which explains why babyhood is longer in the offspring of man than of apes, and of apes than of monkeys. We may now, perhaps, better understand the causes which impel the development of articulate speech—indeed, of inarticulate speech also. For the social animals communicate with one another by sounds, which convey certain meanings. A dog. can often understand what we say to him, and therefore it is more than probable that he can still better understand what a fellow-dog means by a certain bark. As between the lan- guage of man and the language of animals the difference is one of degree; there is no mystery in either: the faculty of speech lies in brain and larynx, these organs undergoing marked modifi- cation in man at a very early period in his his- tory. Concerning the beginnings of speech, the Roman poet Lucretius made a shrewd guess when he said, “Nature impelled men to utter various sounds of the tongue, and use struck out the names of things.” For, when we pull words to pieces, a very large number are found to have their origin in sounds which are imitations of natural sounds or instinctive cries, whose cur- rency depended on their success in conveying the meaning intended by their users. No mystic 2 18 THE STORY OF ‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN: bond linked word and thought together; utility and convenience alone joined them. Of course, grimaces and gestures like those still largely em- ployed by both barbaric and demonstrative races, played no small supplemental part at the outset. While the language of the lower animals re- mains at the instinctive stage and is untrans- mitted, human speech, in addition to transmission, preserves, through the art of writing, the wisdom and experience of one generation for the benefit of the next, so that each starts where its fore- fathers left off, and in turn adds to the garnered intellectual wealth of the world. Language thus capitalises thought. Touching, as is here only possible, but lightly on man’s equipment in hand, and erect posture, and brain-power, perhaps enough has been said to show their interplay: brain, as controlling centre, guiding the organs to functions without which it was unable to develop and store up in its increas- ing folds and furrows the power which past overcame the brute forces of nature. For the quality of the brain in all animals is determined by the number of its furrows and ‘creases. The brains of the lower vertebrates, as of fishes, are smooth-surfaced as well as small. The brain of a monkey is a sort of “skeleton map” of the brain of man; but when we reach that of the man-like ape we find “ the details more and more filled in,” while, in weight of brain, the difference between the savage and the civilised man is far greater than that between the savage and the highest ape. Man’s brain-development is therefore due to his all-round activity; the nerves which ramify throughout the body con- veying sensation to the “head centre,” which, PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH’S LIFE-HISTORY. 19 packed within its bony case, becomes more puck- ered and infolded as the nerves transmit their messages to its keeping. But brain, and nerve connections, and hand, were all of small avail, lacking tool and weapon; and it was from the moment when man made choice of a sharp pointed flint to cut or kill something that his start in civ- ilisation began. A little experience taught him the value of the hardest materials within reach, and there needed no higher degree of adaptive intelligence than some of the lower animals ex- hibit to shape the materials to his purpose. The beaver builds his log-house where neither flood nor foe can reach it, cuts long canals, and even makes locks where the stream-levels render the canals useless. The tailor-bird, with - beak as needle, sews his nest of leaves with thread twisted of spiders’ webs and cotton shreds; the wasp chews the wood to pulp whereof it makes its nest; the bower-bird builds a love-abode of sticks and shells, and flowers and feathers, where he and his mate may flirt and dance; and as for the ants—well, everybody knows what astound- ing perfection in their social life has been reached by creatures whose brains are, perhaps, more wonderful than the brain of a man; reached, too, ages before he appeared. But all these only repeat, never surpass, the skill of their ancestors. Some explanation of man’s probable place in time-history will now follow the account of his place in life-history. 20 THE STORY OF ‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN, CHAPTERS THE PLACE OF MAN IN THE EARTH'S TIME- HISTORY. THE rocks which compose the crust of the globe are divided, speaking broadly, into two classes: Unstratified, or fire-fused; and Strati- fied, or water-laid. ‘The depth to which the for- mer and older extend is unknown, but as they contain no remains of plants or animals, they tell _ us nothing about the order and relation of life- forms. ‘The stratified rocks, which alone reveal that, are divided into the following epochs :— Estimated Typical Typical Depth. Plant. Animal. Rriniary seek 136,000 ft., or 72.0 Seaweeds & Fishes. Ferns. Secondary.... 25,000 ‘13, 40.P ines Reptiles. SDICTUAYY§« seretels 27,000 “14.6 Leaf-bearing Mammals. trees. Seed) es Existing Species. The shell-bearing, soft-bodied animals, calied mollusca, have been chosen as the most useful for the purpose of classifying the life-history of the globe, because they are more universally dis- tributed through strata of every age than any other organisms. Hence they have been named the “alphabet of palzontology.” In accordance therewith the Tertiary Epoch is divided into three systems: the Eocene (Gr. éos, dawn, and ainds, recent, or new); Miocene (Gr. meion, less), or less recent; and the Pliocene (Gr. pleton, more), or more recent. Sometimes the Pleistocene (Gr. f/ezstés, most) otherwise, known PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH’S TIME-HISTORY. 21 as the Post-Tertiary, or Quaternary, system, is grouped with the Tertiary Epoch. The several terms indicate the relative percentages of shells found in each system. All animals are probably vastly older than their earliest known fossil remains, and as far back as the Triassic, or oldest system of the Secondary Epoch, we find relics of small mam- mals of the marsupial or pouched type, like opossums and kangaroos. But it is in Eocene deposits that remains of quadrupeds, represent- ing most of the great mammals now existing, first appear. Both in the Old and New World —Europe and America being connected in Eo- cene times by way of Iceland and Greenland, and enjoying a tropical climate—there lived lemur-like creatures which had points of resem- blance to the hoofed quadrupeds from which are descended the horse, rhinoceros, and other odd- toed animals; and the deer, swine, and other even-toed animals. It was, therefore, not later than this period, when the several orders of mammals were in course of development, that the ancestors of lemurs, monkeys, anthropoid or man-like apes, and of man, appeared. The earliest-known fossil anthropoid apes have been found in Miocene strata. In Northern India these have yielded remains of the chim- panzee, and in Western Europe remains of apes as large as man; the Dryopithecus (Gr. drys, an oak, and pzthekos, an ape), found near oak trunks at Saint Gaudrus, in Haute Garonne, and the Pliopithecus, an extinct gibbon, at Sansan, in Gers. Monkeys also, under a variety of forms, were present, and the representatives of living genera of mammals abundant. ‘The land-connec- 22 THE STORY OF -“ PRIMITIVE” MAN; tions of the northern hemispheres remained un- broken, and the climate, though lowering in tend- ency, so warm that water-lilies grew within eight degrees of the Pole, and a rich evergreen flora flourished throughout high latitudes. Man is not, as has been shown already, the lineal descendant of his nearest relation, the ape, and it therefore follows that the division between the two cannot have been later than Miocene times. In fact, the evidence points to the diver- gence of the branch which includes monkeys and anthropoid apes, and of the branch which ends in man, about the close of the Eocene, or the begin- ning of the Miocene period. ‘The deposits of the latter are almost a blank in Britain. But Miocene beds at Thenay, in France, have yielded a few relics of supreme interest in some flint flakes, which appear to be of artificial workmanship, even to bearing traces of splintering by fire. Were this last indication certain, their human origin would be undoubted. ‘“ Worked” flints have also been dug from like deposits at Puy Courny in Cantal, and near the Tagus, in Portu- gal, and there is full warrant for the expectation that, as Miocene strata are explored in other parts, corresponding relics will come to light. But up to the present time the various reports as to the discovery of such relics in those deposits have proved unfounded. The absence or scarcity of the earliest-known tokens of man’s presence in one limited area are not evidence against his presence in other areas in Miocene times, and the rudely shaped flints of the Thenay and Tagus beds be- tray the “prentice hand” which must have pre- ceded that of the expert workman. Man passed PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH’S TIME-HISTORY. 23 through many intermediate stages of long dura- tion ere he became “the foremost in the files of time.” The Pliocene rocks tell us less about him than the Miocene. That is, so far as their con- tents have been examined—a very important qualification. They show great changes in this part of the globe in the sinking of the land be- Fic. 3.—F lakes from Pliocene beds, Yenangyoung, Burma (Natural Science, Nov., 1894). tween Norway and Iceland and between Britain and Greenland, thus sundering Europe from Amer- ica; in the union of the waters of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans, and of these with the shallow North Sea, the area of which was extended. Al- though the climate was slowly growing colder, tropical plants, as the bamboo and pomegranate, flourished in Central Europe. Species of mam- mals now living were numerous: elephants and apes tenanted the forests, hippopotamuses wal- 24 THE STORY OF ‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN, lowed in the swamps; the slow rhinoceros roamed the prairies, and the swift deer was the prey of hyenas. At the close of the Pliocene period the apes had disappeared from Europe, probably through the continued cooling of the climate, which resulted at last in the long reign of cold known as the Glacial Epoch, or the Great Ice Age, the causes of which—a change in the shape of the earth’s orbit, and in the position of its axis —are beyond the province of this book to deal with. It must here suffice to point out the place of the Ice Age in geological history, and to add that it probably began 240,000 years ago, and, with intermittent periods of milder climates, came to an end 80,000 years ago; that during its great- est intensity it swathed the northern hemisphere in a winding-sheet of ice to the fiftieth parallel of latitude, dinting and rounding its surface, scoring the rocks with scratchings which they bear to this day, and sweeping away the northern flora, never to return. The same mighty agent left the world the poorer, from the life standpoint, in the destruction of the largest and strongest mammals. The Glacial Periods—for there are at least three well-marked divisions—are included in the Pleistocene system. The plants and animals of the interglacial beds agree in all respects with those of non-glacial deposits, the interesting fea- ture of both being the commingling of arctic and tropical forms, together with the undoubted evi- dences of man’s presence associated with each. Animals, both extinct and living, inhabitants of widely separated areas, lived in the same region as the warmer and colder spells of climate alter- nated. The hippopotamus, rhinoceros, African lynx and elephant, lion, and hyzna—showing PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH’S TIME-HISTORY. 26 land connection between Europe and Africa— ranged as far north as Yorkshire; while the rein- deer, Arctic fox, woolly-haired rhinoceros, and mammoth or woolly-haired elephant, roamed over Spain and Italy, and Scotch firs grew as far south as the banks of Lake Varese in Lombardy. Among the extinct animals the huge mammoth deserves passing notice, if only from the associa- tion of its remains with relics of man in the valley of the Thames. Its name is derived from the Tatar mamma, the earth, the natives believing that it lived underground, and that its burrowing was the cause of earthquakes. The Chinese have a legend that it died if it breathed the outer air. It had a wide distribution both in time and space, ranging over more than half the land-surface of the globe, and living from before the first stage of the Ice Age to the late Pleistocene period. In Siberia, its native home, where it existed in enor- mous numbers, not only have its large tusks, known as fossil ivory, been extensively used in commerce for centuries, but whole and perfectly preserved carcasses have been preserved in Na- ture’s refrigerating chamber, the frozen layer of earth which underlies the surface soil of Siberia, extending not only beneath the treeless tundra, but also under forests and cornfields. In 1846, when the summer was unusually warm, a mam- moth, standing upright in the place where it had been bogged countless ages ago, was thawed out of the icebound soil. It will have been noted that the materials for tracing the presence and movements of man, or of a creature who was “little less than”? man, and “more than” ape, are too scanty and dubious to justify our saying positively that he lived in Western Europe before 26 THE STORY OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN. the first Glacial Epoch. The question remains open. But, on the theory.which all evidence con- firms as to the divergence of manlike ape and apelike man in the late Eocene or early Miocene period, he must have lived somewhere. This brings us to the interesting question, In what part of the globe did man—Homo sapiens—originate? And to that question there is no answer; only an approach to one. In the “ Descent of Man” Darwin deals with the subject very briefly. He says, “It is probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; > and, as these two species are now man’s nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere. But it is useless to speculate on this subject.” In an essay on the “ Aryan Question ’”’ Huxley says that during the Pleistocene period “there is no reason to suppose that the genus Homo was confined to Europe; it is much more probable that this, like other mammalian genera of that period, was spread over a large extent of the sur- face of the globe. At that time, in fact, the cli- mate of regions nearer the equator must have been far more favourable to the human species; and it is possible that, under such conditions, it may have attained a higher development than in the north. As to where the genus lomo originated, it is impossible to form even a probable guess. During the Miocene epoch one region of the present temperate zones would serve as well as another.” (“Collected Essays,” vii. p. 324.) In “ Darwinism,” an “exposition of the theory of natural selection,” of which he was the hon- PLACE OF MAN. IN EARTH’S TIME-HISTORY. 27 ourable and self-effacing co-originator, Wallace discusses the “probable birthplace of man” at greater length, but his views are too concisely stated to permit abbreviation, especially as they include theories on the obscure question of the tise Of svaricties or “races” of man. ‘It has usually been considered that the ancestral form of man originated in the tropics, where vegetation is most abundant and the climate most equable. But there are some important objections to this view. ‘The anthropoid apes, as well as most of the monkey tribe, are essentially arboreal in their structure, whereas the great distinctive character of man is his special adaptation to terrestrial locomotion. We can hardly suppose, therefore, that he originated in a forest region, where fruits to be obtained, by climbing arethe chief vegetable food. It is more probable that he began his ex- istence on the open plains or high plateaux of the temperate or sub-tropical zone, where the seeds of indigenous cereals and numerous herbivora, rodents, and game-birds, with fishes and molluscs in the lakes, rivers, and seas supplied him with an abundance of varied food. In such a region he would develop skill as a hunter, trapper, or fisher- man, and later as a herdsman and cultivator. In seeking to determine the particular areas in which his earliest traces are likely to be found, we are restricted to some portion of the eastern hemisphere, where alone the anthropoid apes exist, or have apparently ever existed. There is good reason to believe, also, that Africa must be excluded, because it is known to have been sepa- rated from the northern continent in early ter- tiary times, and to have acquired its existing fauna of the higher mammalia by a later union with that 28 THE STORY OF ‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN, continent after the separation from it of Mada- gascar, an island which has preserved for us a sample, as it were, of the early African mamma- lian fauna, from which not only the anthropoid apes, but all the higher quadrumana (or “ four- handed,” so called because the hind-feet can be used for grasping) are absent. There remains only the great Euro-Asiatic continent; and its enormous plateaux, extending from Persia right across Tibet and Siberia to Manchuria, afford an area some part or other of which probably offered suitable conditions in late Miocene or early Plio- cene times (it will be seen that Mr. Wallace fa- vours a more recent period than the Thenay and Indian flints appear to warrant) for the develop- ment of ancestralman. “It is in this area that we still find that type—the Mongolian—which retains a colour of the skin midway between the black or brown-black of the negro, and the ruddy or olive- white of the Caucasian types, a colour which still prevails over all Northern Asia, over the Ameri- can continents, and over much of Polynesia. From this primary tint arose, under the influence of varied conditions, and probably in correlation with constitutional changes adapted to peculiar climates, the varied tints which still exist among mankind. If the reasoning by which this conclu- sion is reached be sound, and all the earlier stages of man’s development from an animal form oc- curred in the area now indicated, we can better understand how it is that we have as yet met with no traces of the missing links, or even of man’s existence, during late tertiary times, because no part of the world is so entirely unexplored by the geologist as this very region. The area in ques- ‘tion is sufficiently extensive and varied to admit PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH’S TIME-HISTORY. 29 of primeval man having attained to a considerable population, and having developed his full human characteristics, both physical and mental, before there was any need for him to migrate beyond its limits. _One of his earliest important migrations was probably into Africa, where, spreading west- ward, he became modified in colour and hair in correlation with physiological changes adapting him to the climate of the equatorial lowlands. Spreading north-westward into Europe, the moist and cool climate led to a modification of an op- posite character, and thus may have arisen the three great human types which still exist. Some- what later, probably, he spread eastward into North America and soon scattered himself over the whole continent; and all this may well have occurred in early or middle Pliocene times. Thereafter, at very long intervals, successive waves of migration carried him into every part of the habitable world, and by conquest and in- termixture led ultimately to that puzzling grada- tion of types which the ethnologist in vain seeks to unravel.” We may now return to the sure ground as to man’s presence in Europe in mid-Pleistocene times, and through all the climatal and other changes which preceded what may be more strictly called the Human Period. On the thresh- old of this we must stay to learn that the peri- ods of time in Europe, from the unknown age of man’s first appearance there, till about the Chris- tian era, have been divided by Danish antiquaries into the “Ages” of Stone—sub-divided into the Paleolithic or Ancient Stone Age, and the Neo- lithic, or Newer Stone Age; of Copper or Bronze; and of /ron. This classification was anticipated 30 THE STORY OF * PRIMITIVE” MAN. by some ancient writers, notably by Lucretius in his great poem ‘De Rerum Natura,” in the pas- sage thus rendered by Mr. Munro: “Arms of old were hands, nails, and teeth, and stones, and boughs broken off from the forests, and flame and fire, as soon as they had become known. Afterwards the force of iron and copper was discovered; and the use of copper was known before that of iron, as its nature is easier to work and it is found in greater quantity.” (V. 1283- 1288.) In the peat deposits of Denmark, which range from ten to thirty feet in depth, three distinct layers of trees occur. In the lowest beds there are found trunks of Scotch fir, which has not been a native within historical times, and no longer thrives when planted. Near them flint weapons, and bones of the stag and primitive ox, were dis- covered... At a higher level layers of oak were found, and with them some bronze shields, which are deposited in the noble Museum of Northern Antiquities at Copenhagen. In the uppermost beds trunks of the common beech, which still flourishes in Denmark, were found. Hence the classification. By the Stone Age, as the term implies, is under- stood a period when metals were unknown, stone mainly, but also bone, shell, horn, wood, and such-like accessible materials, being used by man as tools and weapons. The implements of the Anctent Stone Age are alike in being of the rudest type, and neither ground nor polished; only roughly chipped. Some are found in the drift, or gravel-beds de- posited by ancient rivers; others, of rather higher type, under the floors of limestone caverns. The PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH’S TIME-HISTORY. 31 implements of the Mewer Stone Age are usually exposed upon or buried near the surface of the soil; they are found among the dédrzs of rubbish- heaps or coastfinds, and lake-dwellings; and also in earthworks, tombs, etc. They are markedly distinct from palzolithic implements, not only in being fashioned of other stones besides flint, of which material the older implements, for the most part, are shaped, but in exhibiting manufacturing skill of a gradually higher order, and in being ground to an edge and more or less polished. Of course, chipping still went on. Very great dif- ferences in the features of Europe, evidencing changes stretching over vast periods, mark the two Ages, and appear to imply immense intervals between them, but the evidence for and against this is alike inconclusive. Upon the several stages in the shaping of stone implements the following quotation from Lubbock’s “ Pre-historic Times” is apposite : “A very small step would lead man to the application of a sharp stone for cutting. When the edge became blunt the stone would be thrown away and another chosen, but after a while, acci- dent, if not reflection, would show that a round stone would crack other stones, and thus the sav- age would learn to make sharp-edged stones for himself. At first,as we see in the drift specimens, these would be coarse and rough, but gradually the pieces chipped off would become smaller, the blows would be more cautiously and thoughtfully given, and at length it would be found that bet- ter work might be done by pressure than by blows. From pressure to polishing would again be but a small step. In making flint implements sparks would be produced; in polishing them it would 32 THE STORY OF * PRIMITIVE” MAN: not fail to be observed that they became hot, and in this way it is easy to see how the two methods of obtaining fire may have originated.” The implements of the Copper or Bronze Age, when a great advance in human progress was made possible by the discovery of metals, were, in the earlier period, fashioned of copper, after- wards by the happy discovery of hardening it by mixing it with tin, of the compound bronze or “ gunmetal.” The implements of the Zvon Age were made of that yet harder and most valuable of all metals, which superseded bronze for cutting instruments, bronze being still used for the handles, and for ornamental purposes. No definite dates can be given to these several divisions; the only thing certain is the succession of the stages of culture which they imperfectly denote. The Great Ice Age gives us a rough- and-ready measure of the vast time during which man inhabited Western Europe, in the Paleolithic Age. Compared with this, the Neolithic Age, so far as indicated by the time taken to form certain deposits in which its relics occur, is recent, say 5,000 B.C. The early Bronze Age may date about four thousand years later, merging into the Iron Age, references to that metal being found in the Homeric poems (about 850 B. c.) and in the ‘Works and Days” of Hesiod, the shepherd-poet, who describes the five ages of the world—gold, silver, bronze, heroes or demi-gods, and, lastly, iron, in which he lives, casting envious glances on the heroic times. But the exact figures have little importance. The several stages overlap, intermingle, and shade off one into the other “like the colours of the rainbow.” They are not PLACE OF MAN IN EARTH’S TIME-HISTORY. 33 applicable to all parts of the world at one and the same time, as if there had been a universal aboli- tion of stone tools and weapons at a certain period in human history, and a universal adoption of bronze tools and weapons in their place. It is highly probable that in the Ancient Stone Age the whole of Europe may have been inhabited by races using chipped and unpolished stone imple- ments, but it is certain that in the later part of the Newer Stone Age it was occupied by races in very varying degrees of civilisation. The more fortunate people who had settled in Southern Europe were, by contact with older peoples who sailed the Mediterranean, far ahead of those who were scattered in regions north of the Alps. Polished stone implements and, ‘to some extent, bronze, which metal was exchanged in barter for the coveted amber washed on the Baltic shores, were in use among these long after iron was known to Greek and Roman. Widely as metals are distributed by commerce in the present day, barbarous people who make shift with stone tools and weapons still exist. But a few years ago there perished the last remnants of the aborigines of Tasmania, who in many respects nearly represented man of the Paleolithic Age. Further, the succession of the later ages is not universal, for some races, as in certain parts of Africa and Polynesia, passed direct from the use of stone to that of iron through the agency of traders. Attempts at exact chronological order are sometimes hindered by the retention of stone implements for ceremonial purposes. For ex- ample, the Egyptians, in ernbalming the bodies of their dead, made the first incision in the side of the corpse with a stone knife, and references oc- 3 34 THE HISTORY OF ‘* PRIMITIVE” MAN. cur in the Old Testament (Exodus iv. 25; Joshua v. 2) to the use of the same kind of instrument in the rite of circumcision, which, under certain con- ditions, is performed to this day with a fragment of flint or glass. The Brahman priest still kindles the sacrificial flame by the primitive method of producing fire—namely, rubbing two pieces of wood together till the sparks fly. In the most advanced times, in Mexico and Central America, the human sacrifice was slain with a stone knife on a stone slab, the neck and limbs being held down by a sacrificial collar and fetters of chased stone. These are a few specimens of abundant examples that, when the original purpose of a thing is forgotten or mystified, or when the use of it is restricted to a class, time and authority combine to invest it with sanctity. Dean Stanley has shown the operation of this in the case of certain vestments. ‘The a/b is but the white shirt or tunic, still kept up in the white dress of the Pope, which used to be worn by every peasant next his skin, and in southern countries was often his only garment. The overcoat in the days of the Roman Empire, as in ours, was constantly changing its fashion and its name. One such overcoat was the cape or cope, also called ‘ pluviale,’ the ‘waterproof.’ Another was the casula, the ‘little house,’ as the Roman labourer called the smock frock in which he shut himself up when out at work in bad weather, and which survives in the chasuble wherewith the Roman Catholic priest decks himself before celebrating mass.” Our “swallow-tails”’ are only the old cutaway hunting coats, and the now purposeless buttons on the back were formerly used to fasten the skirts behind when riding. Manis much morea THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 35 bundle of survivals than a “bundle of habits.” All our pleasures and our pastimes are the out- come of primitive instincts and primitive prac- tices. Our waltzes and quadrilles are the lineal descendants of barbaric religious dances; our conjuring is the comic offspring of tragic arts of sorcery; our plays and horse races are thé rep- resentatives of dramas and games respectively, which were instituted as festivals in honour of the gods. Our picnics and campings-out satisfy a primitive nomad instinct; our fencing and boxing the old fighting instinct; and our “ meets” the hunting instinct of remote ancestors who killed not for their pleasure so much as for their dinners. CTARTER ILL THE ANCIENT STONE AGE, I. Character of Remains found tn the Drift. The credit of the discovery of the meaning of certain objects found in old river-beds rests with a French savant, M. Boucher de Perthes. In 1839 he called the attention of other men of science to the finding of some rudely-shaped flint imple- ments in hitherto undisturbed pits which were being worked for sand and gravel in the valley of the river Somme, near Abbeville, in Picardy. They had been found at intervals during preced- ing years in such positions, and so far below the surface, as to convince him that they were of the same date as the deposits in which they were buried, and in which were also found bones of the mammoth, woolly-haired rhinoceros, and other ex- aN 36 THE STORY OF ‘PRIMITIVE Siar tinct mammals. He argued that these “shaped ” flints had been fashioned by man, and that they proved his great antiquity and low stage of civilisation. But, when he took his finds to Paris, © he met with the same scepticism which the Abbé Bourgeois encountered thirty years later when he exhibited his Thenay flints in the same city. English antiquarians and geologists also looked askance at the Somme relics, but in 1858-59 their doubts were removed by a visit to the beds in which the implements were said to have been found. ‘In addition to being perfectly satisfied with the evi- dence adduced as to the nature of the discov- eries, they had h the crowning (7p satisfaction of Wye seeing one of IN| the worked flints still 2 sztu in its undis- turbed matrix of gravel ata depth of 17 feet from the origi- nal surface of the ground.” All doubt being thus re- \\ moved, an im- Fic. 4.—Hackney Down gravels (Evans), petus was given to further re- search, and not only were discoveries of similar implements made in England in beds of gravel, THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 37 sand, and clay, but it was found that flint im- plements—with never a thought as to their deep significance — had been unearthed many years ago; and, like the famous specimen from the Thames drift “opposite to black Mary’s, near Grayes inn lane,’ put into a glass case, and labelled only ‘‘curious.” London and its neigh- bourhood, the old gravel beds of both Thames and Lea, have yielded abundant harvest—in short, 38 THE STORY OF ‘‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN. “by ‘many an ancient river’ whose banks and course so largely determined the direction of man’s wanderings, we find the tokens of his presence. We may take a run to the village of Caddington, A\\\F j ‘iis iy \y | A 8 i) ; ! My i vA \\ \ SEE = ce SSaSaaaasiiZZA ————— Bs aS LSSSSaz=zZZzA ————SSSSSF35 <= SS =a SSS ———$s=—— ——— tp Liat near Dunstable, and noting the ‘lakeside living place,’ where Palzolithic man settled to work for a while, follow the course of the Lea to its junc- tion with the Thames at Blackwall; gather chipped THE ANCIENT STONE AGE, 39 flints en route at Waltham, Edmonton, and Clap- ton, in short, all along the ancient clays and gravels, till we halt for a moment at Stoke New- ington on ‘an old surface floor which agrees well with the Paleolithic floor at Caddington.’”’ Sir John Evans, in his monograph on “ Ancient Stone Implements’—the standard and _ scarce work on the subject—divides the drift implements into three classes: 1. Flint flakes, apparently intended for arrow- heads or knives. The durability of flint, and the ease with which, after practice, it can be chipped into the required form, caused it to be more frequently used than any other stone. The flakes are removed either by blows or pres- sure, and were probably used by Paleolithic man as knives, and as scrapers for cleaning the skins of animals 2. Pointed weapons like lance or spear-heads. 3. Oval or tongue-shaped im- plements, presenting a cutting edge all round. The manufacture of gun-flints for export to Africa is still car- ried on at Icklingham, in Suffolk, and at Brandon, in Norfolk. The workmen are few, and, with les- Fic 7.—Flake Sening demand for the flints, de- Pressigny (Evans), Teasing. Son has succeeded fath- er through many _ generations, living the sombre, underground life which blanches their faces to the colour of their chalk 490 THE STORY OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN, surroundings. The production, attainable after a little practice, of stone implements with the aid of rough tools similar to those which the men of the Old Stone Age probably used, throws much light on the shaping of these earliest works of human skill. But these cores and flakes and rudely-pointed missiles and tools are as like as two peas, and to further dilate upon them would invest these pages with the interest and charm of a catalogue. It suffices to sav that there is a general resemblance of form between the implements found, not only in the river-drifts of southern England and France, but, Scandinavia excepted, of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. “ Their identity,” as Boyd Dawkins remarks, “shows that the Palzo- ; i AIAN lt —SSSS— = — = ———— Fic. 8.—Flint core with flakes replaced upon it (Zvans). lithic man who hunted the arnee (a variety of In- dian buffalo) and the extinct hippopotamus in the forests of India; who wandered over Pales- THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 4I tine and the valley of the Nile; who hunted the wild boar and stag, the. mammoth, and, probably, the pigmy rhinoceros in the Mediterranean, was in the same rude state of civilisation as the hunt- er of the reindeer, bison, woolly rhinoceros, and horse in the forests of France and Britain.” It should be explained that the drift is formed of alluvial deposits—gravel, sand, clay, and stones —brought down by that slow yet ceaseless action of rain and flood which is forever deepening the bed over which the waters flow. Since the time that the men of the Old Stone Age lived in France the Somme has scooped out its valley from 60 to too feet, a result which demands an enormous antiquity for the implements found in the gravels thus left high and dry, when we take into account the almost imperceptible rate at which our rivers are lowering their beds. For example, it is esti- mated that the Thames (apart from about 450,000 tons of chalk and other matter carried away an- nually in solution) lowers its basin at the rate of one foot in 11,700 years; the Boyne one foot in 6,700 years; the Forth one foot in 3,100 years; and the Tay one foot in 1,800 years. Britain was still part of the the relics of Palzolithic man fell to the bottom of the Somme. There were no Straits of Dover, and no English Channel. Lions prowled about the Mendips; droves of horses, herds of elk : . Kent’s cavern and reindeer, wild oxen, and (Evans). smaller animals roamed over the plains now covered by the North Sea. Through these there ran a river fed by the several’ streams now known as the Rhine and the Elbe, the Tyne, 42 THE STORY. OF ‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN, the Humber, and the Thames. Each tributary, deepening its bed as it flowed, entombed therein the stone tools and weapons of man, and the bones of animals which the smacksmen on the Dogger Bank bring up in their nets in countless numbers. ‘These fossil remains tell us what brute life surrounded man, and what varying climates prevailed. Il. Character of Remains found tn Caverns. All changes which have taken place in the relative position of sea and land have occurred within the present continental areas; in other words, the deep basins which are filled by the great oceans have probably been as they now are from the earliest stages in the formation of the crust of the globe. But within the limits of change the havoc has been enormous; the rain, the atmosphere, and the levelling sea working destruction and wiping out traces of the past. One among the many evi- dences of'this is that no caverns are earlier than mid-Pleistocene times. From immemorial ages, both to man and beast, overhanging cliffs and deep recesses in the hill and mountain-side have afforded “ready-made” shelters. And it is in caverns that, mingled with the bones of extinct and extant animals, further abundance of, and, compared with the river-drift, far more interest- ing, relics of man’s presence have been found. Caverns generally occur in limestone rock, their formation being due to surface water from above, which, finding its way through some crack, and coming charged with carbonic acid derived from the atmosphere and from decayed vegetable matter, dissolves the limestone and slowly eats out acavern. Then Nature, ever emptying the THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 43 streams she fills, true to her cyclical action, be- gins to choke up the hole she has made. The water, as it drips from the roof, deposits on the floor particles of lime held in solution, and these form the stalagmitic (Gr. stalagmos, a dropping) bed, which covers and hermetically seals-up any remains that may be lying about. ‘The portions of dissolved limestone hanging, icicle-like, from the roof, gradually form the stalactitic columns which add to the beauty of many caverns. A large proportion of the remains found in caverns have been swept-in by streams which once flowed at the same level as the cavern floor, the nature of the soil washed-in, and of the bones and other relics in it, giving the key to water action. Other causes explain the presence of objects which are so mixed as to confuse rather than instruct, but the greater number of accumu- lations can be accounted for only as due to the caverns having been used as the feeding-places and dwellings of man oranimals. The fragments of food, and the tools and weapons scattered among them, witness to the use of the cavern by hunters, while in the crushed bones of small animals, commingled with the bones of great fleshfeeders, we find the traces of both eater and eaten. The continued use of caves through long peri- ods, and the frequent disturbances of the soil and its contents, render the period to which remains can be assigned less certain than in the case of those in the drift. But wherever bones of man and beast, or rude implements, are found to- gether under lower beds of undisturbed stalag- mite the fact of their high antiquity is assured. As with the river-drift and its contents, so one A4 THE STORY OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN. cave is, speaking broadly, as good as another for the purpose of giving a common idea of the rest. Although many other caverns have been explored during recent years, the celebrated example known as Kent’s Hole near Torquay remains one of the best specimens of its kind. Entering that ancient haunt of man, we find the deposits in this order, beginning with the uppermost: 1. Blocks of limestone, weighing from a few pounds to upwards of one hundred tons, which have fallen from the roof at various times, and become more or less cemented by carbonate of lime. 2. A black muddy mould from three inches to a foot in thickness, composed almost entirely of = FIG. 10.—Hammer-stone, Kent's Fic, 11.—Bone needle, cavern (Z£vans),. Kent’s cavern (Z£vans). decayed vegetable matter. This is known as the Black Mould. 3. A floor of stalagmite of granular character, varying in thickness from three inches to upwards OT five feet. 4. A layer composed mainly of charred wood. This is about four inches in depth and occurs only in one part of the cavern. It is called the Black Band. : ; THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 45 5. A light red loam, called the Cave Earth. 6. Another stalagmitic floor, but of a crystal- line character, twelve feet thick in some places. 7. Below all these is a dark-red sandy deposit free from limestone, called breccia. The objects found in the black mould are, compara- tively speaking, modern, al- though belonging to differ- ent periods, such as bronze knives, fragments of rough- ly smelted copper, and Ro- man or pre-Roman pottery, but associated with stone and bone implements. The upper bed of stalagmite, the black band, and the cave earth yielded remains of a very mixed group of ani- mals: the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave lion, cave bear, reindeer, Irish elk, horse, &c., and numerous flint flakes and cores, 2. ¢., nuclei or remnants of flints from which flakes have been struck off by a blow or by pressure. Besides flint tools and flakes, the black band contained a bone awl, bone with well-formed eye. In FIG. 12.—Lance - shaped instrument, Kent’s cav- ern (vans). harpoon and needle the acaves: of ithe Dordogne, in France, the stone implements with which the eyes were drilled in the bone needles were found. The cave earth was richest of all the layers in remains; the lower stalagmite con- tained only bones of the fierce cave bear, and in 46 THE STORY OF ‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN, the breccia there were found associated with re- mains of that animal (which included a “ worked” fossil tooth) implements of flint and chert of much rougher type than those in the cave earth. These several accumulations represent an enormous antiquity for cave- man in Western Europe. Until seventy years ago, none of them had been disturbed since the time of their slow deposition; slow, be- cause a Stalagmitic floor cannot be formed quicker than the limestone overhead is dissolved, and the rate of that dissolution depends mainly on the amount of carbonic acid in the water. Air currents and other causes also affect the rate of de- position. The scribbling of one’s name on public monuments and elsewhere, presumably that the “world”? may know the momen- tous fact of our having visited such and such a place, is a senseless disfigurement of things, but, very rarely, it renders unwit- tingly a public service. This a certain “ Robert Hedges of Ireland”’ did on February 2zoth in the year of Revolu- | tion, 1688... Fort, entering Kent’s Hole, he cut his name on a boss of stalagmite, and a Roman Catholic clergyman, the Rev. J. MacEnery, one of the first explorers of the cavern, has left on rec- Fic. 13.— Bone awl, Kent’s cavern (Zvans.) THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 47 ord a description of the appearance of the letters in 1825. He says that they are “ glazed over and partly effaced,” a description which still ap- plies, although the water has been depositing carbonate of limestone on the boss—it being vertically beneath a stalactite—for almost sev- enty years since his visit. The film which has thus accreted in two centuries is about the one- twentieth of an inch in thickness. Assuming an even rate of deposit, the time demanded for the accumulation of the two layers of stalagmite, to say nothing of the cave earth between them and the breccia or older cave earth below them, is as- tounding. But it must suffice to convey the im- pression of high antiquity, and leave out figures, especially as a similar boss in the Ingleborough cave in Yorkshire has grown at the rapid rate of .2941 inch per annum, showing that thickness is not to be invariably taken as the measure of time. The likeness in general type of the imple- ments found in the lowest cave deposits to those of the river gravels evidences that the caves were used as shelters by the drift-men. ‘Then, after intervals whose duration is explained by the up- per deposits just referred to, the cave-men appear. Probably they were descendants of the drift-men, and they had certainly reached a somewhat high- er state of culture. This is shown in the more finished workmanship of their tools and weapons ; 48 THE STORY OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN. in the greater variety, both of materials and the application of them, and in traces of the arts of life which occur in the cave deposits. As dis- tinguished from the drift-men, who are identified with the Mammoth period, they are often spoken of as men of the Reindeer period, because, al- though the times in which both animals appear overlap, the reindeer, as the remains of the hunt- ing feasts show, was one of their chief sources of food. The range of the Palzolithic cave-dwellers— of course not necessarily during the same periods —was as wide as the habitable globe. ‘Traces of their presence occur in caverns from Yorkshire to Gibraltar, from France to Syria, and across the Pacific to America. But caverns are found only in limited areas; and in the shelterless open country and the beast-haunted forest man made his hut of earth or boughs, or dug his pit for refuge. Along the river-valleys of Western Eu- rope and elsewhere great heaps of refuse mark the sites of fugitive settlements of which all other traces have been long Swept away. The Abbé Bourgeois argued that the worked flints found in the Miocene beds at Thenay bore traces of having been fractured by the aid of fire, or used as “pot-boilers”’ for cooking. But the evidence is not conclusive, although supported by corresponding finds in deposits of sand near Orleans, because the flints may have been frac- tured by lightning or other natural causes. Less doubtful is the witness of some calcined stones in the gravels of Ealing, and certainty attaches to the knowledge of fire among the cave-men in the ashes, cinders, charred remains, and wholly or partly burnt bones amongst the debris. It would THE ANCIENT STONE AGE, 49 have been surprising if these people, who had certainly reached a stage of culture little, if at all, lower than the Fuegians and Tasmanians, had been ignorant of an art—one of the oldest inven- tions of man—with which no race of savages is known to be unacquainted. The original source whence man obtained fire, or the occasion which suggested its production, have given rise to a mass of myth and legend among the unlearned, and to much speculation among the learned. It seemed to the untutored mind that so mighty an agent in the progress of man—without which, indeed, no advance beyond the barbaric state was possible— must either be the gift of the gods, or have been stolen from them by some daring hero—one of the great culture-heroes to whom all races trace their arts and civilisation. Mysterious alike in nature and in origin, no wonder that it became the object of widespread worship; symbol of the divine, as among the so-called “ fire-worshippers,”’ the Parsis; and the mystic element whose guard- lanship was the prerogative of a sacerdotal caste —vestal virgin of Rome; Brahmin; priestess of Peru; or priest of Baal. Reference has been made to the Brahmanic production of the sacred flame by primitive methods, and if, through any neglect of a vestal priestess, the fire in the temple went out, a new flame was kindled by friction on a consecrated piece of wood. Friction was, of course, the earliest mode of its production, either by the laborious rubbing of two pieces of dry wood together, or by the more commonly used fire-drill, consisting of a stick placed in a cavity and twirled rapidly between the two hands. All other modes of procuring fire are but forms of friction based on the observation that motion 4 50° THE STORY OF ‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN, develops heat. Many things would show this, as, e. g., the drilling of a hole in a stone, the emission of sparks from a stone when struck, the striking of a tree by lightning, the rubbing of its branches together, or the personal sense of warmth in rub- bing the hands. As the cave-men had no pottery—such remains as occur belonging to the Neolithic Age—they must have cooked their meat in savage fashion; that is, either by putting it on a rough spit, or direct on glowing embers or red-hot stones, or by dropping-the stones into water poured into stone cavities, or into holes lined with clay or hide, and then popping-in the meat when the water boiled. This last was the method among the Red Indians or ‘‘stone-cookers,” as they were.called, before the traders supplied them with earthenware ves- sels. About three centuries ago heated stones were used in Ireland for warming milk, and within the same period meat was cooked in the skin of the animal in the Hebrides. The Polynesians wrapped the meat in leaves and put it on heated stones in a pit, a method which Mr. Romilly saw in practice at a cannibal feast in New Ireland ten years ago. The use of calabashes, coconut-shells, and of any other hollow natural object, as the skull or horn of an animal, for drinking purposes, is ob- vious. The word ‘“keramic,” applied to all fictile ware, comes from the Greek eras, which shows the use of horns for drinking-cups, evidencing what was their original shape and nature. ‘There. is little doubt that the invention of pottery was due to the practice of coating the outside or in- side of inflammable vessels, as bowls and baskets, gourd rinds, and so on, with clay to protect them hi, fy i! ii I Fic. 15.—Savage ornamentation. 52 THE STORY OF ‘ PRIMITIVE An from fire. When it was found that the clay not only stood the heat, but was baked hard by it, the material which it covered was discarded as needless. The most primitive ornamentation on pottery is made with the finger-nail, and is often a rude imitation of the traces left by the basket- work or rushes. Considering their rude weapons, the cave-men were “mighty hunters;”’ for the mammoth, wool- ly-haired rhinoceros, and other huge beasts, were their quarry. The reindeer’s antlers were con- venient daggers, the large pear-shaped flints pow- erful missiles, and the spears, tipped with sharply pointed stone or bone, were deadly darts. Small three-cornered flints from the drift—rough drafts of the exquisitely made arrow-heads of the Neo- lithic age—imply knowledge of the bow in early Paleolithic times; the barbed arrows, or spear- heads, so commonly found in the caves of France being used for fowling, and bone harpoons and barbed hooks for fishing. While the men were at the chase the women “kept house,” cooked the food, and made the clothing. This consisted of skins of the hunted animals—for as yet none were domesticated— sewn together by bone needles with threads of sinews or intestines. Passing by other dry and less needful details in the filling-in of a rough sketch, we come to a matter of deeper human in- terest in the genuine relics of primitive art found in the caves of Périgord and elsewhere in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. Here the Reindeer men have left “more vivid pictures of their life and times than those founded upon implements and weapons and the associated animal remains. Fortunately for us they employed the intervals of ‘2UZOPIO( 9} Ul 9AvO oUTLTEpR] eT ‘19]}Ue UO PasIoUI sasIOF{—'OI “OILY Ss St - SSSVxx~ 54 THE STORY OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN. leisure from the chase in engraving upon bone, antler, and, more rarely, on ivory and stone, the hunting scenes which most vividly impressed themselves upon their memory.” It is in the Fic. 17.—Group of reindeer; scratched on slate, La Madelaine. caves of the Dordogne that the most remarkable of these examples have been found. Grouping them together, without precise reference to place, we have in one sketch, cut on a piece of antler, a wild ox (urus) feeding, while behind him is a creeping man in the act of throwing a spear. In another, a naked hunter is also hurling a spear at a horse; another shows a group of reindeer, of which two are walking and three—probably cap- tured—are lying on their backs. In another, representing an ibex, “the fragment of antler on which it is engraved was probably broken after the artist had begun his work, without leaving room for the completion of the figure. But the THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 55 proportions are not sacrificed, nor is the animal deprived of its hind legs, which are doubled for- ward until they touch the under surface of the body.” One of the most spirited examples is the well-known figure of a mammoth scratched on a fragment of ivory, in which the artist has faith- fully drawn the animal’s shaggy ears, long hair, and upwardly curved tusks, concealing its feet in the high grass which covered them. ‘The preser- vation of entire carcasses of this creature, al- ready referred to, enables the accuracy of the picture to be verified. The list of specimens, in which the reindeer is the animal most frequent- ly represented, might be considerably length- ened, but it suffices to add that the discovery of the figure of a horse on a small fragment of rib in the Robin Hood cavern has “high value in bringing the cave-men of Britain into relation with those of France, Belgium, and Switzer- land.” Nothing has yet been said about the remains of man himself in skulls and other parts of his skeleton. Compared with his imperishable works in flint and such like substances, these are ex- tremely rare. For this there are sufficing causes. There is the fact, to which Sir John Lubbock re- fers, that in the gravel-beds of St. Acheul, near Amiens, “o trace has ever been found of any animal as small as man.” The larger and more solid bones of the elephant and rhinoceros, the ox, horse, and stag, remain, but every vestige of the smaller bones has perished. Not only were Pa- leolithic men widely scattered; their numbers, relatively to other animals, were small. Basing these on estimates of the proportions among hunting tribes, the figures would be about 750 56 THE STORY OF ‘'PRIMITIVE” MAN. to 1; and allowing for the length of man’s life as 4 to 1, it follows that about three thousand skele- tons of different animals of the chase would be left for one human skeleton. And of man’s bones Fic. 18.—Sketch of Mammoth on fragment of ivory, La Madelaine. the hyzenas would make short work. ‘Then there is the dissolving action of certain acids, especially in peat, to be taken into account; the floating of bodies to the sea; the small area of ground yet opened up in which human bones, or the less perishable teeth, may be imbedded; and, not to cite more reasons, the areas once occupied by man, but now submerged, and therefore inacces- sible to research. As bearing on the subject, there is the curious result of the draining of the Lake of Haarlem some forty years ago. Although a large population had lived on its banks, and al- though vessels had been wrecked in it, and naval battles fought on it, the engineers found no hu- man bones whatever in deposits which had con- stituted the bed of the great lake for three cen- turies. THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 57 So many of the assumed finds have occurred in deposits the period or disturbance of which is not beyond question, that reference will be made only to a few of the discoveries which are less disputed. The river-gravels of the Continent have, as yet, yielded no skeleton of man of the drift ; and those of Great Britain are alike barren. Such remains as have been recovered are found in the lower deposits of caves, of the use of which, as places of sepulture from early to later times, there are abundant traces. Among the most important discoveries was that yielded by the cave of Duruthy, in the West- ern Pyrenees, where a crushed human skull and some scattered finger-bones were found associated with the rudest types of flint implements—flakes and scrapers—all imbedded ina hitherto undis- turbed mass, above which was a sepulchral cham- ber containing numerous skeletons of the Newer Stone Age. Near the Paleolithic skull was a number of perforated teeth of bears and lions, lying in such a manner as to prove that they had formed part of a necklace. Moreover, the teeth are scratched with ornamental designs—barbed harpoons, arrow-heads, and the figures of a pike and eel, and of a pair of gloves. For man early betrayed the love of ornament; and the rouge pot, in the shape of oxide of iron, as well as the necklace of shells or teeth, have been found in cave deposits. “The Papuan, who swallows dirt and weapons, and decorates himself with coloured berries; the dancing Feejeeans (albeit converted to Wesleyism), who painted one half of the face red, and the other half black; the Admiralty Island natives, who were delighted at being cov- ered with stripes of yellow and green paint when \ 58 THE STORY OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN. they went on board the Challenger ; and the Es- quimaux, who wear a stud in the lower lip or cheeks, are one with the modern dandy and the powdered beauty of to-day in esthetic descent from the ornamented dwellers in Paleolithic caves. As to other skulls, one found at Canstadt, near Stuttgart, in 1700, but not examined till 135 years FIG. 19.—Tatoo on a Maori’s face. later, was pronounced to be that of a Paleolithic savage. Twenty years before the Duruthy bones came to light, skulls had been found in the Nean- derthal cave, in Germany, and in a cave at Engis, in Belgium. Bones of the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros were associated with the Engis crani- um, pointing to its great antiquity; but, concern- THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 59 ing both it and the Neanderthal specimen, Huxley says that neither of them fills up or lessens the structural interval between man and the man-like apes. Which is exactly what may be expected, since, as shown already, the divergence between man and ape occurred at a period remote enough to bring about the differences which mark the one from the other. The Engis skullis a fair average specimen; “it might have belonged to a philoso- pher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage.” The Neanderthal bones demonstrate the existence of a man whose skull may be said to revert somewhere towards the pithecoid (ape-like) type. Most of us, probably, have met people of whose heads the same might be said. If conclusive evidence were wanted, the two skeletons found in a cave in Spy, in Namur, in 1886, appear to supply it. Upon these their dis- coverers reported that although they possess a greater number of ape-like characters than any other race of mankind, “between them and an existing anthropoid ape there lies an abyss.” They add that “‘the distance which separates the man of Spy from the modern anthropoid ape is undoubtedly enormous; between the man of Spy and the Dryopithecus it is a little less. But we must be permitted to point out that if the man of the later Quaternary age is the stock whence exist- ing races have sprung, he has travelled a very long way. From the data now obtained it is per- missible to believe that we shall be able to pursue the ancestral type of men and the anthropoid apes still farther, perhaps as far as the Eocene, and even beyond.” Before we open another chapter of this history ) 60 THE STORY OF ‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN; it may be well to focus what has been said about the races of the Drift and Cave period, and at- tempt some picture of them from the vague and scattered materials we possess. Help thereto will come from knowledge of the condition of savage peoples who are still, or were quite recently, in the Stonem ce; It is needful to bear in mind that the term ‘primitive’? as applied to man, and, indeed, as applied to all higher forms of life, has no scientific accuracy; and is used only for convenience as denoting the highest point which our knowledge about the type described has reached. The man of the river-drift, as has been shown, was the de- scendant of a yet more primitive form. First, then, as to his body; next, as to his mental faculties; and, lastly, as to his social life. 1. Taking the skeletons of Spy as types, Palzo- lithic man was powerfully built, although of short or stunted stature, probably about five feet, like the Fuegians, Bushmen, Mincopies of the Anda- man Islands, and other extant savages. Broad- legged, with curved thigh-bones, his walk was shambling, as that of the gorilla or of bandy- legged persons. Huis long skull had a low, reced- ing forehead with overhanging brows, furnished with bushy hair; the nose was flat, the nostrils large; the ears somewhat pointed; the big heavy jaw “prognathous” or “snouty”; the canine teeth fang-like, and the chin very small and re- treating. The skin was probably copper-coloured, and largely covered with long, straight hair like that of the Ainu of Yezo, the northern island of Japan. If the females differed at all from the males it was probably only in being of rather shorter stature. | THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 61 2. Mentally, the “ape and tiger” were but little subdued in him. His feelings were rarely under control; the impulse of the moment ruled his life. ‘“ The mind of the child with the strength and passion of the man” were blended in him. Cunning he was, because he had to live by his wits; to kill and, probably, eat his foes, if he would not be killed and eaten by them; to fight without pause for food for himself, for the mate whom he had won, and for the child that she had borne him; the common need and common peril strengthening the social life which began in a re- moter past. This struggle involved the constant exercise of the senses; hence the sharpening of sight and hearing, so that he could see and hear things to which the civilised man, dulled by arti- ficial aid and by less need for alertness, is both deaf and blind. The earth was a telephone, to which, instinctively using the “method of Zadig,” he put his ear and listened to the distant tramp of his enemy. With unerring skill he could with a stone missile bring down the bird on the wing; transfix the fleeting prey with his flint or bone- tipped spear; and, diving into the water, bring up the fish with a finger. in each eye, like the South Sea Islanders or the Australians, who will dive, spear in hand, and come up with a trans- fixed fish. Living only for the day, he had no thought for a morrow which might bring starva- tion. Beyond his tools and weapons—and these often lost or cast away—he had no possessions to which to cling; for the wandering hunter has no hearth to protect. Outside the little family or group there was no pity or sympathy; because the enlargement of these comes only as the social life widens, } 62 THE STORY OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN, With reasoning faculty but little developed and centred on bodily needs, such ideas as things ~ around suggested to his twilight mind were a tan- gle of confusion, contradiction, and bewilderment. As he had but the dimmest idea of the relation of one thing to another, he could not group them under general facts. He knew nothing of the causal connection between a person or thing and its shadow; between sleep and dreams; between a cloud and its reflection in the water; between a sound and its echo from the hillside. He saw that the sun and stars came and went, that the water or big rivers fell and rose, or in the case of smaller streams sometimes disappeared altogether, and, falling from the sky, filled them again. In these anda hundred other events he dimly noted the differences which, in the long run, lead the mind to comparisons, and thereby lay the foundation of knowledge—of the relations between things which we call cause and effect. But to bring out of this the conception of law and order needs more than the experience of one life; ages passed before man could correct the first im- pressions of his senses and learn the facts about his surroundings. ‘If,’ as Pfleiderer says, “we require whole years to develop abstract ideas in the minds of our children, though they have the benefit of all their inheritance from the past, ‘which thought for them,’ it must have required centuries, and even millenniums, for primitive man to arrive at the same results.” Of course at the lowest stage that we can put him, ‘thinking without knowing that he thought,” he was picking up knowledge for the advantage of all who came after him. Knowledge of the haunts and habits of the prey which he sought; THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 63 of the fittest seeds and berries for food; of the times they fruited, and of the soil in which they grew; of the elemental differences in things, as the sinking of stone and the floating of wood; of the properties of things, their hardness or soft- ness; their sweetness or bitterness; of the strangeness of things, as when the struck flint emitted sparks that made him think fire dwelt in- side it, or that it was alive. Eye and ear and brain, thus kept alert, fed the sense of wonder which took the oddest shapes, to know which gives us the key to those workings of the primi- tive mind in which lie the beginnings of science and religion; the slow passage from guesses to certainties. For, at the start, man was befooled by his senses, and it has taken him, at a cost that makes the thoughtful weep, thousands of years to escape from the false impressions of things which they conveyed. His eyes told him that the earth is flat and fixed, and covered in by a dome-like vault, across which sun, moon, and stars pass. His ear told him that what we know to be the echo of our voice was made by mocking spirits, who also howled in the wind and roared in the thunder—spirits with which his imagination, ruled by his fears, peopled everything. For in the degree that he was able to reason at all, or to compare one thing. with another, he saw seem- ing likenesses in things most unlike, and so was led into all sorts of pitfalls of the mind. Be- cause he moved, he looked upon every moving thing as alive like himself. Rustling leaves, Waving grass, rolling stone, swirling water, drift- ing cloud, rising and setting bodies of the sky, all, to his thinking, were alive, and full of pas- sions and feelings as he was. Or, if not alive } 64 THE STORY OF ‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN, themselves, they were controlled by some life. Hence arose belief in spirits everywhere; at the first, baleful and malignant, because in the degree that the nature of a thing is unknown or misap- prehended, it is dreaded. Knowledge, like love, casts out fear. And since fear always magnifies the supposed power of that of which we are afraid, it is easy to see how stones and trees, water and stars, and a heap of other inanimate things, came to have offerings and sacrifices made to them to appease their anger or win their favour. So we may say that with belief in spirits arises savage religion, and that in guesses about things —treal enough to their framers—arises savage science; the religion and the science being en- tangled and mixed together in the primitive mind. In what has been now said we may seem to have travelled a long way from the mental stand- point of man in the Old Stone Age. For he was certainly not in advance of the larger number of modern savages whom all travellers agree in re- porting not only as listless and incurious, but as unable to fix their attention for even a few mo- ments on anything out of the common. The dif- ficulty in all attempts to define the mental power of men so low in the scale is that we cannot put ourselves in the place of people whose language is made up of jabbers and gestures, who have the vaguest idea of a to-morrow, and who cannot count beyond three. But the power in man to develop into what the highest specimens of his kind have become was in him at his lowest, and it is needful to keep in mind that we are dealing with a series of mental stages in which there is no break, but at the lower of which man remained for an enormous period, THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 65 3. Although travellers nowadays buy stone implements as curiosities, the Stone Age has not FIG. 20.—Stone club, New Britain (Powe//). wholly passed away. ‘The hairy Ainu who, like the filthy Hottentots, never wash themselves from birth till death, use bone and bamboo arrow-points in hunting and fishing, and live on raw flesh, sea- 5 y —_ 66 THE STORY OF ‘*PRIMITIVE” MAN, weeds and roots. They have no marriage cus- toms, a man taking as many wives as he can af- ford. The natives of New Britain, until the quite recent introduction of iron by white traders, used stone tomahawks wedged between two pieces of wood, and tipped their spears with the bone of a slain enemy so that his power might be added to their own in hurling the weapon. The cannibal races of Queensland use wood for most of their weapons, but have toma- hawks of basalt or other hard stone, using sharp- edged implements to rip open the carcase of the ani- mals killed. They also eat beetles, grubs, and vermin. Amongst the Me- lanesians the adzes on one group of islands are of stone, on the other FIG. 21.—Shell adze, Torres Islands 81tOUP they are (Codrington). made of the giant clam shellisyiimere spears are armed with bone points. The Nicara- guan Indians fix their stone hatchets in stone- cut wooden handles. The Tasmanians, who in many respects most nearly represented the pre- THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 67 sumed general condition of Paleolithic man, and the extinction of whom is a reproach to “ civil- ised’ people, used weapons of chert of the rud- est make, which they grasped with their hands, being ignorant of the mode of hafting , them. © ‘Their canoes were a float or raft . of bark bun- dles which was propelled by a pole; "they lived under bough shelters, and made fire with the simplest and perhaps oldest of all inventions, the fire-drill. They drew rude pictures on bark, were quick and cunning in their own sphere, but stupid outside it. In their crude religious ideas they con- ceived of the shadow of anything as its ghost; the echo was the “ talk- ing shadow,” and they believed in evil spirits. They buried their dead and avoided their graves, a custom which, as will be shown presently, indicates fear of the ghost. These few examples, taken hap- hazard, might be extended, but they supply sufficing material to fill up FIG. 22.—Shell adze, Santa Cruz (Codrington). some gaps in our sketch. Man in the Ancient Stone Age was in the hunter stage of culture, but without any domesticated animal as his help. His temporary homes depended upon seasons 68 THE STORY OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN. and places: the Veddahs of Ceylon make their huts of boughs and bark; the Hottentots use sticks and mats; the Esquimaux in summer-time stretch skins upon bones lashed together to make posts; in winter they build huts of wood or drift timber; the wretched Fuegians sleep on the un- FIG. 23.—Native house, Teste Island, New Guinea (Powel). from their caves on hunting excursions, bury them- selves in the sand, broadly speaking; for the no- mad, the tent or the cave, from either of which he shifts easily; for the tiller, the settled homestead. As with shelter, so with clothing; climate and zone rule that. Nakedness is not necessarily im- modesty, and the gift of clothing to a savage peo- THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 69 ple has sometimes been their ruin. Different races cover different parts of the body; in the East women conceal their faces, and a strict Mos- lem would be shocked at the bare neck and shoul- ders of Western women in evening dress. The simplest form of clothing among natives of warm " Al TT i es : Ni Heed oath x Si = a =¢ a on Qs Sea i > ( Ra) 4 a : = SOS 7 MES { ie fray — Nett kK : , a yu 4. he x cai oe J = A yintlimaak’” WAN ’ yk S & b, *y a NS Neth! yp ip reas SS = NaN ‘§ i 4 , \ i EP RAN YI het. Wj, bid rae.) { = » Fic. 24.—Esquimaux winter hut (native drawing). (From Rink’s Tales of the Esquimaux.) climates consists of leaves or twigs, or pendant strips or fringes round a girdle; in colder climates the skins of slain animals are the primitive dress. The delight of the savage in a painted or otherwise decorated skin has been already referred to. And this leads to the interesting parallels to the art of the cave-men furnished by other savages than the Tasmanians. The “black fellows” of Australia rank low in the scale, but they have depicted sharks, porpoises, lizards, weapons, and canoes on the faces of rocks; and on “grave” pillars have 7° THE STORY OF ‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN, sketched the doz/yas, or ghosts of dead men and animals. KK eS KS SS AV; a Fic, 25.—An Australian gravestone. “useless mouths ’”’ The Bushmen have also painted figures in red, brown, and other col- ours on cliffs, or etched them in light tints on a dark ground; and the drawings of North American tribes on stone and bark rank high in savage art. The beginnings of social life go back to a time be- fore man and monkey had branched off from their com- mon stem, and whether or not our prehuman ancestor had a special pairing season, man, as we know him, paired at all seasons of. the year, and remained faithful to his mate as food-winner and pro- tector, at least during the in- fancy of the offspring. Even the anthropoid apes do that, and in man, as the germs of sympathy on which family life depends developed, and as the period of infancy of the offspring was lengthened, there was cultivated the deep- er social feeling. Thus loose and fitful relations tended to become lasting. But that advance was slow; among a wandering hunting tribe are an encumbrance, conse- ———— = a ee E SSS ———————— = SS —SS —————— | \ i | Vidette Pe aon | Hal 1 Hit wil ul De {) | ij i mF ——————————————————————— ES == Fic, 26.—Bushman wall-painting. 42 THE STORY OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN; quently infanticide, especially of females and puny or sick children, was largely practised, and a blow with a stone axe settled the fate of many an aged burden, the dead being probably left to be devoured by hyzenas and other wild beasts. There is no trustworthy clue to the mode of dis- posal of his dead by Paleolithic man; the relics of funeral feasts which point to cannibalism— broken skulls and human bones split to extract the marrow—are in early neolithic deposits; and perhaps he was on a level with the cave-dwellers by the Red Sea, of whom Diodorus Siculus tells as “mocking at all manner of sepultures, for as soon as any of them is dead, they tie his head be- tweene his legs with a withe of hawthorne or wil- low, and dragging the corpse to the highest place they can finde, with laughter and jeering, they overwhelme it with stones, and then putting a goat’s horn on the top of the stones, they leave it there without any pitty or compassion at all.” The weeding-out process which man, in all stages of civilisation—whether savage of the Stone Age, barbaric Gaul, cultivated Greek or Roman—has carried out, and which still prevails among a large portion of the human race, has been aided by the continuous action of “natural selection.” ‘That action, it is almost needless to say, is involved in the tendency of all species to multiply beyond the means of subsistence; and in the variations, for the most part slight, of off- spring from their parents. The first cause gives rise to ceaseless struggle for existence among ad/ living things, for, as Darwin points out, ‘even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate in less than a thousand years there would literally not be standing-room THE ANCIENT STONE AGE. 73 for his progeny.”” And in this struggle the de- structive agencies of nature intervene. They who win in the merciless competition do so in Fic. 27.—Paintings on a Crow (North American Indian) robe (Cathn). virtue of some favourable variation which the vanquished lack; for the race is to the swift, and 74 THE STORY OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN, the victory to the strong. But exception to the unchecked action of natural selection arises in man at a certain stage—necessarily a high one— of his development as a social being. His asso- ciation into civilised groups enlarges the sympa- thetic feelings and, as one among other results, brings to no mean state of perfection, faculties, as the mathematical and musical, the development of which is not due to “natural selection,” or to the struggle between man and man. But this matter, apart from the obscurity which veils it, veiling also the processes which result in what is called ‘ genius,” lies outside our limits, and it suffices to say that when a certain point is reached in social evolution, the old conditions reassert their power, and the truce to the strug- gle ends. Perhaps enough material has been collected together to set the Ancient Stone Age men be- fore the mind’s eye as gathered into wandering tribes dependent for food on the chase: camping- out by the river-side under trees, or dwelling in huts built of branches, and resorting, as need arose or vicinity permitted, to the protection of cavern and rock-shelter. With the barbed spears and arrows they caught fish and shot fowl; with the more ponderous stone weapons they slew bigger game: mammoth, bison, rhinoceros, rein- deer, and horse. The flesh, cut into pieces with flint knives, was cooked in vessels of wood or skin, into which were dropped hot stones as “ pot- boilers.”” The bones were split for the marrow. The skins, scraped with flints, and sewn with bone needles threaded with sinew, covered the bodies against the often severe cold; even the hands, as THE ANCIENT STONE AGE, 75 portraits from the Pyrenees caves show, being protected with long gloves. The few and graphic touches in which Tacitus describes the Fennic (or Finnish) tribes may be applied to the earlier folk of drift and cave. ‘They are wonderfully sav- age, and miserably poor. Neither arms nor homes have they; their clothing is skins, their bed the earth. Their arrows, for want of iron, are tipped with bone. ‘The women live by hunt- ing, just like the men; for they accompany the men in their wanderings, and demand a share of the prey. And they have no other refuge for their little children against wild beasts or storms than to cover them up in a nest of interlacing boughs. Such are the homes of the young; such the resting-place of the old. Yet they count this greater happiness than groaning over field labour, toiling at building, and poising the fortunes of themselves and others between hope and fear. Heedless of men, heedless of gods, they have attained that hardest of results, the not needing so much as a wish,” or, as it may also be trans- lated, they ‘‘ are beyond the need of prayer.” The scarcity of human bones in the Ancient Stone Age is of minor importance in presence of the proofs of man’s tenancy of the globe during an enormous period, and at a low stage—indeed, the lowest stage—of culture. For the tools and weapons of drift and cavern are products of human skill; they have defined purposeful shapes ; they evidence selection on the part of their mak- ers, since they cannot be fashioned from every kind of flint. They are found, in striking corre- spondence of form, wherever man is known, or may be presumed, to have wandered over the 76 THE STORY OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN. earth, the extremes of the northern hemisphere excepted—in the alluvials of the East, the laterite or brick-earth of Madras; the river-gravels of sacred and classic lands; by the Sea of Galilee, and along the valley of the Tiber—in briefin wellnigh every explored part of the world ‘from China to Peru.” CHAPTER ve THE NEWER STONE AGE. ALTHOUGH this division is retained for con- venience, it is more than probable that no hard and fast line can be drawn between the two Stone Ages. Stress is laid in most treatises on the sub- ject upon the immense interval which separates the periods. The evidence of this is based on the different conditions, as the changes of .climate; the altered distribution of land and water; the disappearance of old species of plants and ani- mals, and the appearance of new species. In the Neolithic Age Great Britain and Ireland no longer formed part of the continent. The val- leys that had united those islands and the main- land had become submerged, a change which only a vast lapse of time brought about. The outlines of the map of Europe presented nearly the same features as at present. The area of the Mediter- ranean had sunk, separating Europe from Africa, the higher ground remaining as islands which are left like fragments of a sunken bridge. The big mammals, as the woolly rhinoceros and mammoth, were extinct; others had retreated to more north- ern and southern latitudes; the musk sheep to THE NEWER STONE AGE, fey) arctic zones; the lion, hippopotamus, and lynx to tropical zones. The animals found associated with Neolithic man represented—some survivals, as the Irish elk, wild ox, wild boar excepted— species familiar to us. While the stone relics of Fic. 28.—Polished oval FIG. 29.—Polished celt (with cavity on celt, Whitwell, York- each side for the finger), Duggle- - shire (Zvans). by, Yorkshire (Zvazs). Paleolithic times are found underground, in an- Cient river-gravels and in “caves and dens of the earth’’; those of Neolithic times are above ground, or at slight depth; insurface remains, cave floors, camps, rubbish heaps, pile-dwellings, tumuli, and other burial-places. And while long and inter- 78 THE STORY OF ‘“ PRIMITIVE” MAN, mittent breaks appear to disturb the sequence of man’s presence, at least in Europe, beyond the period of the cave-dwellers, his history, from the unknown time of the appearance of the earliest Neolithic people, is continuous to the present day? but, notwithstanding the enormous gap caused by the period during which the subsidence of land beneath the sea was going on, x = ily: ‘i Mi Mi rt li Hi : | t == ee ee SSS = =. ———S————Se = SSS SS : SS = = —————== SSS SSS =a = ——S Se SS —— a= ZZ = <—— = —=—— SS SSS i i SS SSS —————> == FIG. 30.—Polished celt, Coton, Fic. 31.—Celt from gravel- Cambridge (Zvams). pit, near Malton, York- shire (Evans). there is evidence which points to a continuous occupation of the British Isles, and of Europe and Asia, by the same race who gradually ad- vanced in stages of culture, and who adopted the civilisation of somewhat higher races as this reached them by peaceful intercourse. THE NEWER STONE AGE. 79 So that, weighing one thing with another, the balance tilts in favour of fusion between Palzo- Not only are there lithic and Neolithic Ages. FIG. 32. —Polistied celt, Guernsey (Evans). FIG. 33.— Polished celt and original handle, Cum- berland (Zvans). abundant types of tools and weapons that are intermediate in’ character ;*but the oldest forms of cop- per and bronze im- plements, are mod- elled on the patterns of the earlier stone and bone implements. Andalthough changes brought about the ex- tinction or migration of the older fauna, those of 80 THE STORY OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN. the newer period may be survivors of animals who were contemporaries of the chipped flint workers cr mY ; ; i Fic. 35.— Axe in stag’s-horn socket, concise, L. of Neu- Yorkshire (Zvans). chatel (Zvans). of the Somme valley. The remains found in the cave of Duruthy show transition between the ages of ground and unground implements, as do like THE NEWER STONE AGE. 8I {\ r rR AN Ge LA I il i i i WN coe 4 / i i " Pe Fic. 37.—Perforated hammer, Scar- borough (Zvazs),. Fic. 36. — Axe-head, Potter Brompton Wold (£vans). Fic. 38.—Hammer-store, Fic. : — in Tena ier, Helmsley, Yorkshire Shetland (A£vans), (Evans). 82 THE STORY OF ‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN. finds in the river-gravels of Sussex; and discoy- eries of a corresponding kind may be expected as researches are carried on. The supporters of the theory of continuity have suggested the name “ Mio- lithic’ or “ Mesolithic” for the connecting period. I. General character of the Newer Stone Age Implements, As ob- served above, Neolith- ic implements do not occur in deep-lying or yy sealed-up deposits like- ¢ stalagmitic beds, but either on the surface or very near it. Where the soil has been used only for tillage or pasture, it has been but su- perficially dis- turbed ; where it is rocky and barren it has often not been disturbed = at all. Consequently, an enormous number of implements either meet the eye or are turned up by plough and harrow, or uncovered by the ac- tion of rain. As recollection of a Stone Age died away, they have been looked upon with venera- Fic. 40.—Scraper, Rudstone, Yorkshire (Evans), THE NEWER STONE AGE. 83 tion, and have given support to a mass of crude ideas and superstitions, about which more pres- ently. The most common form of Neolithic im- plements is that known as the celt, probably so Fic. 41.—Narrow adze, or pick, FIG. 42.—Flake saw, Wil- Burwell, Cambridge (£vazs). lerby Wold, Yorkshire (Zvans). called from the Latin celts, or celles, a chisel. The shape of this instrument is generally that of a flat blade, approaching an oval in section, with the sides more or less straight, and with 84 THE STORY OF ‘*PRIMITIVE” MAN. i) Z ) ts FIG. 43.—Borer, cap HA Yorkshire Wolds ANA ( y (Evans). YY } CI % Fic. 45.—Curved knife, Fimber, Yorkshire, Fic. 44.—Knife, Ford, Northumberland (Zvans). > THE NEWER STONE AGE. 85 one end broader and also sharper than the other. The length varies from two to sixteen inches, and the stone of which celts are made chisels and gauges, perforated axes, some Sharp at the end, others shaped like adzes, saws, hammers and hammer - stones, grinding stones, querns, sink - stones for nets, whetstones, : scrapers, borers, awls, Fic. 46.—Lance- drills, and _ knives. leet The purposes _ to shire (Zvans), Which these would be applied are as num- erous as the needs of man. Mod- ern savages use like tools for cut- ting timber, scooping out canoes, dressing posts for huts, grubbing up roots, killing animals, and scrap- ing the flesh from their bones. Then there are the implements re- quired for domestic purposes, while for war and the chase there were daggers, javelin-heads, sling- varies according to the kind most accessible. A representative set of Neolithic implements would com- prise, in addition to the celts, stone tools allied to picks, small hand- i ’ i li N . i nn Fic. 47.—Knife, Saffron Walden (Zvans). stones, bolts, lance and arrow-heads, some of these last of exceeding beauty and finish. Bone lance-heads, pins and needles, were also used, and staghorn was made into hammers and axes. 86 THE STORY OF ‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN. The women’s spindle-whorls were of stone, and their personal ornaments, the simplest form of which was the button or stud, were of jet, shale, Fic. 48.—Dagger, Thames Fic. 49.—Notched Spear-head, (Evans). Burnt Fen, Ely (#vazs), and amber. The antiquities thus briefly summa- rised occur in the upper layers of cave-deposits, in peat bogs, coast-finds, refuse-heaps, and pile- THE NEWER STONE AGE. 87 dwellings; in tumuli, barrows, and various stone structures, as cromlechs, dolmens, &c., scattered over the world. Fic. 50.—Indian axe from the Rio Frio, Texas. Fic. 51.—Flint knife, Australia (Zvans). The superstitions just referred to have gathered round celts, which are known among rustics as “thunderbolts”’ or “ thunder axes; round: arrow-heads, ‘or “elf-shot’’; and round spindle- whorls, called “ fairy-millstones ” and ‘“ pixy’s grindstones”’ by Brit- ish peasantry. For ages it was a belief shared by the learned and unlearned that with the flash of lightning there fell a solid body, which is called the thunderbolt or thunder-stone, as expressed in the dirge in ‘“ Cymbeline ”— “Fear no more the lightning flash Nor the all-dreaded thunderstone”’; and it is these Neolithic relics— 88 THE STORY OF ‘ PRIMITIVE” MAN. axes and arrow-heads—to which celestial origin has been assigned. ‘They were known to both Greeks and Romans, as they are to the Indians of Nicaragua, as thunderbolts; the Germans and Fic. 52.—Esquimaux scraper (vans). Scandinavians called them Thor’s hammers, and both among them and other European peoples they were credited with miraculous powers in THE NEWER STONE AGE. 89 healing the sick and warding off the dire effects of the evil eye. The natives of the Gold Coast, when finding them.on the ground after heavy rains have washed them out of the soil, use them as medicine by scraping the dust from them into water, and laying them in places sa- cred to the gods. In Brittany the travel- ling umbrella-mender asks on his rounds for plerres de tonnerre, and takes them in payment for repairs. In India they are valued as charms whose possession brings good luck to their owner, and whose loss is the signal of his ill-for- tune. The arrow-heads Fic. 53.—War axe, Noctka Sound are also called elf- ied shot and elf-stones by the country folk of Britain and Ireland, in out-of-the way places, it being their belief that these flint weapons were shot by the elves, or fairies, at men and cattle. Thus Robert Gor- don, of Straloch, an accomplished country gentle- go THE STORY OF “PRIMITIVE” MAN. man of the north of Scotland, writing in 1654, tells how one of his friends, travelling on horseback, ~ Sc cn lide | | (i nea ay Ml ell AMZ) WDA UY AN} Yl Yy ASA) eS) Wwe Zu) i aN ; Si w