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 Prehistoric Men 
 
Prehistoric Men 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD 
 
 RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, OLD WORLD PREHISTORY 
 
 ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR 
 
 ORIENTAL INSTITUTE AND DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 
 
 Drawings by SUSAN T. RlCHERT 
 
 ™* UBItm OF THE 
 
 CHICAGO NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM 
 POPULAR SERIES 
 
 ANTHROPOLOGY, NUMBER 37 
 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 BY CHICAGO NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM PRESS 
 
 Copyright 1948 by Chicago Natural History Museum 
 

 Preface 
 
 Like the writing of most professional archaeologists, mine 
 has been confined to so-called learned papers. Good, bad, 
 or indifferent, these papers were in a jargon that only my 
 colleagues and a few advanced students could understand. 
 Hence, when I was asked to do this little book, I soon found 
 it extremely difficult to say what I meant in simple fashion. 
 The style is new to me, but I hope the reader will not find it 
 forced or pedantic; at least I have done my very best to tell 
 the story simply and clearly. 
 
 I have taken a middle road in matters of dating. There 
 is no certain way of fixing a direct chronology, either for the 
 Pleistocene Ice Age generally or for most of the later pre- 
 historic materials. My dates fall between the extremes 
 currently offered. In any case, since the "periods ,, are all 
 named, new dates may be written in if new and better dating 
 systems appear. 
 
 Many friends have aided in the preparation of the book. 
 The whimsical charm of Miss Susan Richert's illustrations 
 add enormously to the spirit I wanted. She gave freely of 
 her own time on the drawings and in planning the book with 
 me. My colleagues at the University of Chicago, especially 
 Professor Wilton M. Krogman (now of the University of 
 Pennsylvania), and also Mrs. Linda Braid wood, Associate of 
 the Oriental Institute, and Professors Fay-Cooper Cole and 
 Sol Tax, of the Department of Anthropology, gave me counsel 
 in matters bearing on their special fields, and the Department 
 of Anthropology bore some of the expense of the illustrations. 
 From Mrs.' Irma Hunter and Mr. Arnold Maremont, who are 
 
not archaeologists at all and have only an intelligent layman's 
 notion of archaeology, I had sound advice on how best to tell 
 the story. I am deeply indebted to all these friends. 
 
 I wish to thank Colonel Clifford C. Gregg, Director of 
 Chicago Natural History Museum, for the opportunity to 
 publish this book. My old friend, Dr. Paul S. Martin, Chief 
 Curator in the Department of Anthropology, asked me to 
 undertake the job and inspired me to complete it. I am also 
 indebted to Miss Lillian A. Ross. Associate Editor of Scientific 
 Publications, and to Mr. George I. Quimby, Curator of 
 Exhibits in Anthropology, for all the time they have given 
 me in getting the manuscript in proper shape. 
 
 On pages 46 and 98. I have added notes concerning per- 
 tinent materials which appeared after the manuscript was in 
 press. 
 
 Robert J. Braidwood 
 
 - Tiber 12, 1948 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 How We Learn about Prehistoric Men 7 
 The Changing World in Which Prehistoric Men Lived 15 
 
 Prehistoric Men Themselves 19 
 
 Cultural Beginnings 33 
 
 More Evidence of Culture 47 
 
 Early Moderns 59 
 
 The First Revolution 86 
 
 The Conquest of Civilization 100 
 
 Summary 108 
 
 List of Books 112 
 
 Index 114 
 
HOW WE LEARN about Prehistoric Men 
 
 Prehistory means the time before written history began. 
 Actually, more than 99 per cent of man's story is prehistory. 
 Man is at least half a million years old, but he did not begin 
 to write history (or to write anything) until about 5,000 years 
 ago. 
 
 The men who lived in prehistoric times left us no history 
 books, but they did leave unintentionally a record of their 
 presence and their way of life. This record is studied and 
 interpreted by different kinds of scientists. 
 
 SCIENTISTS WHO FIND OUT ABOUT 
 PREHISTORIC MEN 
 
 The scientists who study the bones and teeth and any other 
 parts they find of the bodies of prehistoric men, are called 
 physical anthropologists. Physical anthropologists are trained, 
 much like doctors, to know all about the human body. They 
 study living people, too; they know more about the biological 
 facts of human "races" than anybody else. If the police find 
 a badly decayed body in a trunk, they ask a physical anthro- 
 pologist to tell them what the person originally looked like. 
 
 • 7 • 
 
The physical anthropologists who specialize in prehistoric 
 men work with fossils, so they arc sometimes called human 
 paleontologists. 
 
 ARCHAEOLOGIS I S 
 
 There is a kind of scientist who studies the things that pre- 
 historic men made and did. Such a scientist is called an 
 archaeologist. It is the archaeologist's business to look for the 
 stone and metal tools, the pottery, the graves, and the caves 
 or huts of the men who lived before history began. 
 
 But there is more to archaeology than just looking for 
 things. In Professor V. Gordon Childe's words, archaeology 
 "furnishes a sort of history of human activity, provided always 
 that the actions have produced concrete results and left 
 recognizable material traces." You will see that there are 
 at least three points in what Childe says: 
 
 1. The archaeologists have to find the traces of things 
 left behind by ancient man, and 
 
 2. Only a few objects may be found, for most of these 
 were probably too soft or too breakable to last through 
 the years. However, 
 
 3. The archaeologist must use whatever he can find to 
 tell a story — to make a "sort of history" — from the 
 objects and living-places and graves that have escaped 
 destruction. 
 
 What I mean is this: Let us say you are walking through 
 a dump yard, and you find a rusty old spark plug. If you 
 want to think about what the spark plug means, you quickly 
 remember that it is a part of an automobile motor. This tells 
 you something about the man who thrcw r the spark plug on 
 the dump. He either had an automobile, or knew or lived 
 near someone who did. He can't have lived so very long ago, 
 you'll remember, because spark plugs and automobiles are 
 only about fifty years old. 
 
 When you think about the old spark plug in this way you 
 have just been making the beginnings of what we call an 
 archaeological interpretation; you have been making the spark 
 
 • 8 • 
 
plug tell a story. It is the same way with the man-made 
 things we archaeologists find and put in museums. Usually, 
 only a few of these objects are pretty to look at; but each of 
 them has some sort of story to tell. Making the interpretation 
 of his finds is the most important part of the archaeologist's 
 job. It is the way he gets at the sort of "history of human 
 activity" which is expected of archaeology. 
 
 SOME OTHER SCIENTISTS 
 
 There are many other scientists who help the archaeologist 
 and the physical anthropologist find out about prehistoric men. 
 The geologists help us tell the age of the rocks or caves or 
 gravel beds in which human bones or man-made objects are 
 found. There are other scientists with names which all begin 
 with "paleo" (the Greek word for "old"). The paleontologists 
 study fossil animals. There are also, for example, such 
 scientists as paleobotanists, and paleoclimatologists, who study 
 ancient plants and climates. These scientists help us to know 
 the kinds of animals and plants that were living in prehistoric 
 times and so could be used for food by ancient man; and what 
 the weather was like; and whether there were glaciers. Also 
 when I tell you that prehistoric men did not appear until 
 long after the great dinosaurs had disappeared, I go on the 
 say-so of the paleontologists. They know that fossils of men 
 and of dinosaurs are not found in the same geological period. 
 The dinosaur fossils come in early periods, the fossils of men 
 much later. 
 
 HOW THE SCIENTISTS FIND OUT 
 
 So far, this chapter has been mainly about the people who 
 find out about prehistoric men. We also need a word about 
 how they find out. 
 
 All our finds came by accident until about a hundred 
 years ago. Men digging wells, or digging in caves for fertilizer, 
 often turned up ancient swords or pots or stone arrowheads. 
 People also found some odd pieces of stone that didn't look 
 like natural forms, but they also didn't look like any known 
 tool. As a result, the people who found them gave them 
 
queer names; for example, "thunderbolts.'* The people 
 thought the strange stones came to earth as holts of lightning. 
 We know now that these strange stones were prehistoric stone 
 tools. 
 
 Many important finds still come to us by accident. In 
 1935, a British dentist. A. T. Marston, found the first of two 
 fragments of a very important fossil human skull, in a gravel 
 pit at Swanscombe, England. He had to wait nine months, 
 until the face of the gravel-pit had been dug eight yards 
 farther back, before the second fragment appeared. They 
 fitted! In 1928 workmen who were blasting out rock for the 
 breakwater in the port of Haifa began to notice flint tools. 
 Thus the story of cave men on Mount Carmel, in Palestine, 
 began to be known. 
 
 Planned archaeological digging is only about a century 
 old. Even before this, however, a few men realized the signi- 
 ficance of objects they dug from the ground; one of these 
 early archaeologists was our own Thomas Jefferson. The first 
 real mound-digger was a German grocer's clerk. Heinrich 
 Schliemann. Schliemann made a fortune as a merchant, first 
 in Europe and then in the California gold-rush of 1849. He 
 became an American citizen. Then he retired, and had both 
 money and time to test an old idea of his. He believed that 
 the heroes of ancient Troy and Mycenae were once real 
 Trojans and Greeks. He proved it by going to Turkey and 
 Greece and digging up the remains of both cities. 
 
 Schliemann had the great good fortune to find rich and 
 spectacular treasures, and he also had the common sense to 
 keep notes and make descriptions of what he found. He 
 proved beyond doubt that many ancient city mounds can be 
 stultified. This means that there may be the remains of many 
 towns in a mound, one above another, like layers in a cake. 
 
 You might like to have an idea of how mounds come to 
 be in layers. The original settlers probably chose the spot 
 because it had a good spring and there were good fertile lands 
 nearby, or perhaps because it was close to some road or river 
 or harbor. These settlers probably built their town of stone 
 and mud-brick. Finally, something would have happened 
 
 • 10 • 
 
to the town — a flood, or a burning, or a raid by enemies— 
 and the walls of the houses would have fallen in, or would have 
 melted down as mud in the rain. Nothing would have re- 
 mained but a low mound of one layer. 
 
 The second settlers would have wanted the spot for the 
 same reasons the first settlers did — good water, land, and 
 roads. Also, the second settlers would have found a nice low 
 mound to build their houses on, a protection from floods. 
 But again, something would finally have happened to the 
 second town, and the walls of its houses would have come 
 tumbling down. This makes the second layer. And so on. . . . 
 
 In Syria I once had the good fortune to dig on a large 
 mound which had no less than fifteen layers. Also, most of 
 the layers were thick, and there were signs of rebuildings and 
 repairs within each layer. The mound was more than a 
 hundred feet high. In each layer, the building material used 
 had been a soft, unbaked mud-brick, and most of the debris 
 consisted of fallen or rain-melted mud from these mud-bricks. 
 
 This idea of stratification, like the cake layers, was already 
 a familiar one to the geologists by Schliemann's time. They 
 could show that their lowest layer of rock was oldest or earliest, 
 and that the overlying layers became more recent as one moved 
 upward. Schliemann's digging proved the same thing at 
 Troy. His first (lowest and earliest) city had at least nine 
 layers above it; he thought that the second layer contained 
 the remains of Homer's Troy. We now know Homeric Troy 
 was layer Vila; also we count eleven layers or sub-layers in 
 total. 
 
 Schliemann's work marks the beginnings of modern archae- 
 ology. Scholars soon set out to dig on ancient sites, from 
 Egypt to Central America. 
 
 ARCHAEOLOGICAL INFORMATION 
 
 As time went on, the study of archaeological materials — found 
 either by accident or by digging on purpose — began to show 
 certain things. Archaeologists began to get ideas as to the 
 kinds of objects that belonged together. If you compared a 
 mail-order catalogue of 1900 with one of today, you would 
 
 • 11 • 
 
see a lot of differences. If you really studied the two catalogues 
 hard, you would also begin to see that certain objects "go 
 
 i her." Horseshoes and metal buggy tires and pieces of 
 harness would begin to fit into a picture with certain kinds 
 of coal stoves and furniture and china dishes and kerosene 
 
 ps. Our friend the spark plug, and radios and electric 
 refrigerators and light bulbs would fit into a picture with 
 different kinds of furniture and dishes and tools. You probably 
 won't be old enough to remember the kind of hats that women 
 wore in 1900, but you've probably seen pictures of them, and 
 you know very well they couldn't be worn with the fashions 
 of today. 
 
 This is one of the ways that archaeologists study their 
 materials. The various tools and weapons and jewelry, the 
 pottery, the kinds of houses, and even the ways of burying 
 the dead tend to fit into pictures. Some archaeologists call 
 all of the things that go together to make such a picture an 
 assemblage. The assemblage of the first layer of Schliemann's 
 Troy was as different from that of the seventh layer as our 
 1900 mail-order catalogue is from the one of today. 
 
 The archaeologists who came after Schliemann began to 
 notice other things, and to compare them with occurrences 
 in modern times. The idea that people will buy better mouse- 
 traps goes back into very ancient times. Today, if we make 
 good automobiles or radios, we can sell some of them in China 
 or even in Timbuktu. This means that a few present-day 
 types of American automobiles and radios form part of present- 
 day "assemblages" in both China and Timbuktu. The total 
 present-day "assemblage" of China is quite different from both 
 that of Timbuktu and that of America, but they have at least 
 some automobiles and some radios in common. 
 
 Now these automobiles and radios will eventually wear out. 
 Let us suppose we could go to China or Timbuktu in a dream. 
 We don't know what the date is, in our dream, but we see all 
 sorts of strange things and ways of living in both places. No- 
 body tells us what the date is. But suddenly we see a 1926 
 Ford : so we know that in our dream it has to be at least the 
 year 1926, and only as many years after that as we could 
 reasonably expect a Ford to keep in running order. The 
 
 • 12 • 
 
Ford would probably break down in twenty years' time; so 
 the Chinese or Timbuktu "assemblage" we're seeing in our 
 dream has to date at about A.D. 1926-46. 
 
 Archaeologists not only "date" their ancient materials in 
 this way; they also see over what distances and between which 
 peoples trading was done. It turns out that there was a good 
 deal of trading in ancient times, probably all on a barter and 
 exchange basis. 
 
 EVERYTHING BEGINS TO FIT TOGETHER 
 
 Now we need to pull these ideas all together, and see the com- 
 plicated structure the archaeologists can build with their 
 materials. With any luck, they do their digging in a layered, 
 stratified site. They find the remains of everything that would 
 last through time, in several different layers. They know that 
 the assemblage in the bottom layer was laid down earlier 
 than the assemblage in the next layer above, and so on up 
 to the topmost layer, which is the latest. They look at the 
 results of other "digs," and find that some other archaeologist 
 200 miles away has found ax-heads in his lowest layer, exactly 
 like the ax-heads of their fifth layer. This means that their 
 fifth layer must have been lived in at about the same time as 
 was the first layer in the site 200 miles away. It also means 
 that the people who lived in the two layers may have known 
 and traded with each other. Or it could mean that they 
 didn't necessarily know each other, but simply that both 
 traded with a third group at about the same time. 
 
 You can see that the more we dig and find, the more clearly 
 the main facts begin to stand out. We begin to be more sure 
 of which people lived at the same time, which earlier and 
 which later. We begin to know who traded with whom, and 
 which people seemed to live off by itself. We begin to find 
 enough skeletons in burials so that the physical anthropologists 
 can tell us what the people looked like. We get animal bones, 
 and a paleontologist may tell us they are all bones of wild 
 animals; or he may tell us that some or most of the bones are 
 those of domesticated animals, for instance, sheep or cattle, 
 and therefore the people must have kept herds. 
 
 • 13 • 
 
More important than anything else — as our structure grows 
 more complicated and our materials increase — is the fact that 
 "a sort of history of human activity" docs begin to appear. 
 The habits or traditions that men formed in the making of 
 their tools and in the ways they did things, beyin to stand out 
 for us. How characteristic were these habits and traditions? 
 What areas did they spread over? How long did they last? 
 We watch the different tools and the traces of the way things 
 were done how the burials were arranged, what the living- 
 places were like, and so on. We wonder about the people 
 themselves, for the traces of habits and traditions are useful 
 to us only as clues to the men who once had them. So we 
 ask the physical anthropologists about the skeletons that we 
 found in the burials. Were the skeletons all from exactly the 
 same type of people? Was there a "pure race" here? In 
 ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, we are told that there was 
 not a "pure race." And in the cases where the skeletons do 
 show close resemblance, it is only because we have found so 
 few that we cannot compare them for differences. The 
 physical anthropologists show us differences in the skeletons 
 from our burials, and tell us that the people were not all of 
 exactly the same type. 
 
 We become particularly interested in any signs of change- 
 when new materials and tool types and ways of doing things 
 replace old ones. We watch for signs of social change and 
 progress in one way or another. 
 
 We must do all this without one word of written history 
 to aid us. Everything we are concerned with goes back to 
 the time hrfore men learned to write. That is the prehistorian's 
 job — to find out what happened before history began. 
 
 14 
 
THE CHANGING world in which Prehistoric Men Lived 
 
 Mankind is at least a half million years old. It is very hard 
 to understand how long a time half a million years really is. 
 If we were to compare this whole length of time to one day, 
 we'd get something like this: The present time is midnight, 
 and Jesus was born just five minutes and thirty-six seconds 
 ago. Earliest history began less than fifteen minutes ago. 
 Everything before 11 :45 was in prehistoric time. 
 
 Or maybe we can grasp the length of time better in terms 
 of generations. As you know, primitive peoples tend to marry 
 and have children rather early in life. So suppose we say 
 twenty years will make an average generation. At this rate 
 there would be 25,000 generations in a half-million years. 
 But our United States is much less than ten generations old, 
 twenty-five generations take us back before the time of 
 Columbus, Julius Caesar was alive just 100 generations ago, 
 David was king of Israel less than 150 generations ago, 250 
 generations take us back to the beginning of written history. 
 And there were 22,500 generations of men before written 
 history began. 
 
 • 15 • 
 
( : 1 1 A N G I . S I N F. N \' I R O NMENT 
 
 The earth probably hasn't changed much in the last 5,000 
 years (250 generations). Men have built things on its surface 
 and dug into it and drawn boundaries on maps of it, but the 
 places where rivers, lakes, seas, and mountains now stand 
 have changed very little. 
 
 In earlier times the earth looked very different. Geologists 
 call the last great geological period the Pleistocene. It began 
 somewhere between a million and a half million years ago, 
 and was a time of great changes. Sometimes we call it the 
 Ice Age, for in the Pleistocene there were at least four times 
 when large areas of the earth were covered with glaciers. 
 
 Glaciers are great sheets of ice, sometimes over a thousand 
 feet thick, which are now known only in Greenland and 
 Antarctica and in high mountains. During several of the 
 four glacial periods in the Ice Age, the glaciers covered all 
 of Canada and the northern United States and reached down 
 to southern England and France in Europe. Smaller ice 
 sheets sat like caps on the Rockies, the Alps, and the Himalayas. 
 
 As you know, the amount of water on and about the earth 
 does not vary. These large glaciers contained millions of 
 tons of water frozen into ice. Because so much water was 
 frozen and contained in the glaciers, the water level of lakes 
 and oceans was lowered. Flooded areas were drained and 
 appeared as dry land. There were times in the Ice Age 
 when there was no English Channel, so that England was 
 not an island, and land bridges probably divided the Mediter- 
 ranean. 
 
 GLACIERS CHANGE THE WEATHER 
 
 Great sheets of ice also change the weather. When the front 
 of a glacier stood at Milwaukee, the weather must have been 
 bitterly cold in Chicago. The climate of the whole world 
 would have been different, and you can see how animals and 
 men would have been forced to move from one place to another 
 in search of food and warmth. 
 
 On the other hand, it looks as if only about 13 per cent 
 of the whole Ice Age was really taken up by times of glaciation. 
 
 • 16 • 
 
In between came the interglacial periods. During these times 
 the climate around Chicago was as warm as it is now, and 
 sometimes even warmer. It may interest you to know that 
 the last great glacier melted away less than 10,000 years ago. 
 Professor Ernst Antevs thinks we may be living in an inter- 
 glacial period, and that the Ice Age may not be over yet. 
 So if you want to make a killing in real estate for your several 
 hundred times great-grandchildren, you might buy some land 
 in the Arizona desert or the Sahara. 
 
 The reason I tell you about the glaciers is simply to remind 
 you of the changing world in which prehistoric men lived. 
 Their surroundings — the animals and plants they used for 
 food, and the weather they had to protect themselves from— 
 were always changing. On the other hand, this change 
 happened over so long a period of time and was so slow that 
 people could not have noticed it. Glaciers, about which they 
 themselves probably knew nothing, moved in hundreds of 
 miles to the north of them. The people must simply have 
 wandered ever more southward in search of the plants and 
 animals on which they lived. Or some men may have stayed 
 where they were and learned to hunt different animals and 
 eat different foods. The scientists would say that prehistoric 
 men had to keep readapting themselves to new environments 
 and those who were most adaptive were most successful. 
 
 OTHER CHANGES 
 
 Changes also took place in the men themselves and in the 
 ways they lived. As time went on, they made better tools and 
 weapons. Then, too, we begin to find signs of how they started 
 thinking of other things than food and the tools to get it with. 
 We find that they painted on the walls of caves, and decorated 
 their tools; we find that they buried their dead. 
 
 At about the time when the last great glacier was finally 
 melting away, men in the Near East made the first basic 
 change in human economy. They began to plant grain and 
 they learned to raise and herd certain animals. This meant 
 that they could store food in granaries and "on the hoof" 
 against the bad times of the year. This first really basic change 
 
 • 17 • 
 
iii men's way of living has been called the "food-producing 
 revolution." By the time it happened, a modern kind of 
 climate was beginning. Men had already grown to look as 
 they do now. Know-how in ways of living had developed 
 and progressed, slowly but surely, up to a point. It was 
 impossible for men to go beyond that point if they only hunted 
 and fished and gathered wild foods. Once the basic change 
 was made — once the food-producing revolution became effec- 
 tive technology leaped ahead and civilization and history 
 soon began. 
 
 18 
 
Prehistoric Men themselves 
 
 DO WE KNOW WHERE MAN ORIGINATED? 
 
 For a long time some scientists thought the "cradle of man- 
 kind" was in central Asia. Other scientists insisted it was in 
 Africa, and still others said it might have been in Europe. 
 Actually, we don't know where it was. We don't even know 
 that there was only one "cradle." It seems most likely that 
 the creatures who were the ancestors of men were spread all 
 over Europe, Africa, and Asia before the Ice Age began. It 
 is pretty certain they weren't in North or South America, or 
 we would have found some trace of them by now. The 
 earliest fossil bones of men we've yet found are only about 
 half a million years old. The bones come from the Far East— 
 from China and Java. In western Europe and in Africa we 
 have tools made by man half a million years ago, but not the 
 bones of the men who made them. 
 
 Let me say it another way. How old are the earliest 
 traces of men we now have? About 500,000 years old. What 
 have we found so far? In China we have found the bones of 
 men and the tools they made; in Java we have found only 
 the bones; in Europe and Africa, we have found only the tools. 
 
 • 19 • 
 
So this is the situation. The earliest traces of man are all 
 about the same age, as nearly as we can tell. They come 
 from the far coiners of the Old World — Europe, Africa, and 
 eastern Asia. There are also traces in the middle ground — no 
 earlier in date, either. Many great areas have not yet been 
 well explored (for example, the Sahara, Arabia, central Asia), 
 but there is no really good reason to suspect that these areas 
 had earlier men than did the thinks of the Enrafrasian continents. 
 
 Professor Franz Weidenreich believes that creatures who 
 were immediate ancestors of men had already spread out over 
 Europe, Africa, and Asia by the time the Ice Age began. It's 
 sure that mankind is older than a half million years, but no 
 fortunate accident of discovery has yet given us evidence to 
 prove it. 
 
 BRAINS, HANDS, AND TOOLS 
 
 We don't yet know what forces determined the development 
 of these early creatures into men. Three important things are 
 probably involved. These are: 
 
 1. The increasing si/e and development of the brain. 
 
 2. The increasing usefulness (specialization) of the thumb 
 
 and hand. 
 
 3. The use of tools. 
 
 Nobody knows which of these three is most important, or 
 which came first. Most probably the growth of all three 
 things was very much blended together. If you think about 
 each of the things, you will see what I mean. Unless your 
 hand is more flexible than a paw, and your thumb will work 
 against (or oppose) your fingers, you can't hold a tool very 
 well. But you wouldn't get the idea of using a tool unless 
 you had enough brain to help you see cause and effect. And 
 n is rather hard to see how your hand and brain would develop 
 unless they had something to practice on like using tools. 
 In Professor Krogman's words, "the hand must become the 
 obedient servant of the eye and the brain." It is the coordina- 
 tion of these things that counts. 
 
 • 20 • 
 
Many other things must have been happening to the bodies 
 of the creatures who were the ancestors of men. Our ancestors 
 had to develop organs of speech. More than that, they had 
 to get the idea of letting certain sounds made with these speech 
 organs have certain meanings. They had to develop special 
 kinds of feet, and legs, and a different sense of balance, and 
 many other things before they really became men. 
 
 All this must have gone very slowly. Probably everything 
 was developing little by little, all together. Men became men 
 very slowly. 
 
 WHEN SHALL WE CALL MEN MEN? 
 
 What do I mean when I say "men"? People who looked 
 pretty much as we do, and who used different tools to do dif- 
 ferent things, are men to me. We'll probably never know 
 whether the earliest ones talked or not. They probably had 
 vocal cords, so they could make sounds, but did they know 
 how to make sounds work as symbols to carry meanings? But 
 if the fossil bones look like our skeletons, and if we find tools 
 which we'll agree couldn't have been made by nature or by 
 animals, then I'd say we had traces of men. 
 
 THE EARLIEST MEN WE KNOW 
 
 At the moment, we can't be any more accurate than to say 
 we have two lots of bones of the earliest known men, from about 
 the same time. The time is a half million years ago or slightly 
 less. One lot comes from China, the other from Java. The 
 Chinese lot comes from near Peking, and is called "Peking 
 man" or Sinanthropus pekinensis. The Javanese lot is called 
 "Java man" or Pithecanthropus erectus. Let's call them Peking 
 man and Java man. Recently, some physical anthropologists 
 have decided that both Peking and Java "man" should be 
 lumped together as two parts of one group, Homo erectus. 
 
 Java man was found first, and there are now bones enough 
 to account for four skulls. There are also four jaws and some 
 odd teeth and legbones. All these bits quite clearly belong 
 to only one species. Java man was about five feet six inches 
 tall, and didn't hold his head very erect. His skull was very 
 
 • 21 • 
 
thick and heavy and had room for little more than two-thirds 
 as large a brain as we have. He had big teeth and a big jaw 
 and enormous eyebrow ridges of bone. 
 
 No tools were found in the river terraces where the bones 
 of Java man appeared. There are some tools in the same 
 genera] area, but they come a bit later in time. One reason 
 we accept the Java man as man is because he looks so much 
 like the tool-using Peking man. 
 
 Peking man lived in a cave, made tools, cracked animal 
 bones to get the marrow out, and used fire. Incidentally, the 
 bones of Peking man were found because Chinese dig for 
 what they call "dragon bones" and "dragon teeth." Un- 
 educated Chinese buy these things in their drug stores, and 
 grind them into powder for medicine. The "dragon teeth" 
 and "bones" are really fossils of ancient animals, and sometimes 
 of men. The people who supply the drug stores have learned 
 where to dig for strange bones and teeth. Paleontologists who 
 get to China go to the drug stores to buy fossils. In a round- 
 about way, this is how the fallen-in cave of Peking man was 
 discovered. 
 
 Peking man was not quite as tall as Java man but he 
 probably stood straighter. His skull looked very much like 
 that of the Java skull except that it had room for a slightly 
 larger brain. His lace was less brutish than was Java man's 
 face, which isn't saying much. 
 
 ANCESTORS FOR PITHECANTHROPUS ERECTUS 
 AND SINANTHROPUS PEKINENSIS? 
 
 These two types of men were closely related, and probably 
 had common ancestors. We don't know who the ancestors 
 were, but Professor Weidenreich has hints of some strange 
 things from the area, and from the same general geological 
 layers. One of the skulls in the Java lot was very large. An 
 even larger jaw was found nearby in Java. Largest of all, so 
 far, are three molar teeth, which Professor Weidenreich insists 
 are human. Professor C H. R. von K.oenigswald found the 
 teeth in a drug store in Hong Kong just before World War II. 
 The top of these teeth the grinding area — has six times the 
 
 . 99 . 
 
area of our molars. Professor Weidenreich insists that men 
 who were gigantic in size lived in those clays. He also thinks 
 this "gigantism," as he calls it, tended to "breed out" or dis- 
 appear with time. If he is right, the "breeding out" had 
 
 SINANTHROPUS 
 
 PITHECANTHROPUS 
 
 NEANDERTHAL 
 
 MODERN SKULL 
 
 CRO-MAGNON 
 
 COMBE-CAPELLE 
 
 PRINCIPAL KNOWN TYPES OF FOSSIL MEN 
 
 already been completed by the time of Java and Peking man, 
 for they were not big people. 
 
 The physical anthropologists don't all agree on the reasons 
 for the disappearance of these giants. Perhaps they came to 
 a dead end, like the dinosaurs, and left no descendants. There 
 are also several fossil finds from Africa that puzzle us ; we have 
 few details about them yet. What everyone does agree on is 
 that the Java and Peking skeletons are man-like, and the 
 oldest examples of human skeletons that we have. 
 
 23 
 
WIIAI HAPPENED Id JAVA AND PEKING MEN 
 
 Professor Weidenreich thinks there are at least a dozen ways 
 in which the Peking man resembled the modern Mongoloids. 
 This would seem to indicate that Peking man was really just 
 a very early Chinese 
 
 Several later fossil men have been found in the Java- 
 Australian area. It looks as if we can he pretty certain of the 
 line of evolution from Java man to the modern Australian 
 natives. He probably had other descendants, too. 
 
 A POSSIBLY PARLY ENGLISHMAN 
 
 The next "man" to look at is "Piltdown man" {Eoanthmpus 
 dawsoni). lie is Kngland's best claim to the possession of bones 
 of early prehistoric men. but he's a pretty shaky claim. The 
 find contains a number of fragments of a skull, some teeth, 
 and half a lower jaw. Most people think the skull is that of 
 a woman; hence, Piltdown "man" isn't really a man. The 
 jaw, however, seems to belong to a fossil ape. Piltdown man 
 was found very near the surface, in a shallow gravel pit, and 
 so the geologists are not able to give us an accurate date for 
 the bones. 
 
 While the Piltdown skull does not look exactly like out- 
 modern skulls, it is much more like ours than are those of Java 
 and Peking. Sir Arthur Keith, one great authority, believes 
 Piltdown was an early man. Professor Wcidcnreich wants 
 to remove Piltdown from "the list of human fossils," because 
 he thinks the find is too recent and too questionable to count. 
 Beyond this, we needn't go. You can see how much chance 
 there is for argument about Piltdown. Since there is an even 
 chance that either scientist may be right, I thought this 
 English find should be mentioned. 
 
 TYPICAL "CAVE MEN" 
 
 The next men we have to talk about are all members of a 
 related group. These are the Neanderthaloids. "Neanderthal 
 man" himself was found in the Neander Valley, near Dussel- 
 dorf, Germany, in 1856. He was the first human fossil to 
 be recognized as such. 
 
 • 24 • 
 
A large number of remains of Neanderthal-type men have 
 been found in Europe and elsewhere. Some are earlier than 
 the main group. One example is a jaw found near Heidel- 
 berg, Germany. It dates to the second glaciation of the Ice 
 Age (about 450,000 years ago). A skull found in Rhodesia, in 
 Africa, has also been claimed as early, but it may be no earlier 
 than the main group. In the Solo River Valley, in Java, 
 eleven skulls were found which date at about the same time 
 as the main group. These three fossil types — Heidelberg, 
 Rhodesia, and Solo — are generally called "Neanderthaloid," 
 but they differ somewhat from the main group. 
 
 There are at least a dozen good examples in the main 
 group in Europe. They date to just before, and in the earlier 
 part of the last great glaciation (about 100,000-70,000 ago). 
 Many of the finds have been made in caves. The "cave men" 
 the movies and the cartoonists show you are probably meant 
 to be Neanderthalers. I'm not at all sure they dragged their 
 women by the hair; the women were probably pretty tough, 
 too! 
 
 Neanderthal men had large bony heads, but plenty of 
 room for brains. Some had brain cases even larger than the 
 average for modern man. Their faces were heavy, and they 
 had eyebrow ridges of bone, but the ridges were not as big 
 as those of Java man. Their foreheads were very low, and 
 they didn't have much chin. They were about five feet three 
 inches tall, but were heavy and barrel-chested. Neander- 
 thalers didn't stand up as straight as we do, either. 
 
 One important thing about the Neanderthal group is that 
 there are a fair number of them to study. Just as important 
 is the fact that we know something about how they lived, and 
 about some of the tools they made. 
 
 EARLY MODERN MEN 
 
 Next on my list is modern man {Homo sapiens), the "wise man." 
 But first there are one or two early finds of pre-modern types 
 that we need to catch up on. Like Piltdown, there was another 
 questionable find made long ago in England. This was a 
 skull and skeleton (badly broken), found at Galley Hill in 
 
 • 25 • 
 
gravels of the second interglacial period. The bones looked 
 almost too modern to be so old, for the time is that between 
 the second and third great <j,laciations of the Ice Age (about 
 275,000 yens a»o). But in 1935 the bones of a similar pre- 
 modern skull appeared in gravels of the same geological age, 
 at Swanscombe, in England. Also, an equally early skull, 
 although even less modern in appearance, turned up in 
 Steinheim, Germany. So it seems pretty certain that a 
 partially modern type of man was already alive a long time 
 ago. In fact these man were alive even before the main 
 Neanderthal group. 
 
 There is one other very interesting pre-modern type of 
 man. People lived in caves on Mount Garmel, in Palestine, 
 probably at about the same time as the main Neanderthal 
 group was living in Europe. Some of these Palestinians looked 
 like Ncanderthalers, but others looked much more like modern 
 man —or at least "intermediate" between Neanderthal and 
 modern men. Professor T. D. McCown and Sir Arthur Keith 
 figured out thai this second Mount Carmel group may be as 
 much as 70 per cent modern. 
 
 While the most modern-lookino, of the pre-modern human 
 bones vve have talked about so far are those of Galley Hill 
 and Swanscombe, completely modern skeletons begin turning 
 up in the European caves dating to 50,000 years ago. This is 
 the time of the second stage of the last great glaciation. These 
 skeletons belonged to types of people no different from many 
 people we sec today, and, like people today, not everybody 
 looked alike. (The positions of the more important fossil men 
 of Europe are shown in the chart on page 61.) 
 
 DIFFERENCES IX THE EARLY MODERNS 
 
 Professor C. Coon divides the main early European moderns 
 into two groups, the Cro-Magnon group and the Combe 
 Capelle-Brunn group. Cro-Magnon people were tall and 
 big-boned, with large, long, and rugged heads. They must 
 have been built like many present-day Scandinavians. The 
 Combe Capelle Brunn people were shorter; they had narrow 
 heads and faces, and big eyebrow ridges. Of course we don't 
 
 • 26 • 
 
find the skin or hair of these people. But there is little doubt 
 they were Caucasoids ("Whites"). 
 
 Another important find came in the Italian Riviera, near 
 Monte Carlo. Here, in a cave near Grimaldi, there was a 
 grave containing a woman and a young boy, buried together. 
 The two skeletons were those of Negroids; that is, the bones 
 of the Grimaldi skeletons closely resemble modern Negro 
 bones. There are as yet no sure cases of Negroid bones in 
 Africa that are as early as those of Grimaldi in Europe! 
 
 From a place called Wadjak, in Java, we have "proto- 
 Australoid" skulls that closely resemble those of the modern 
 Australian natives. Other skulls found in South Africa, 
 especially the Boskop skull, look like those of modern Bush- 
 men, but are much bigger. Neither Australians nor Bushmen 
 are Negroes; neither the Wadjak nor the Boskop skulls look 
 nearly as much like Negro skulls as do the Grimaldi skulls. 
 
 As we've already mentioned, Professor Weidenreich be- 
 lieves that Peking man was already on the way to becoming a 
 Mongoloid. Anyway, the Mongoloids were certainly present 
 by the time of the "Upper Cave" at Chokoutien. There is a 
 possibility — but not a very strong one — that there were 
 Mongoloids in late Ice Age times in Europe. The Chancelade 
 skull, found in France, has been said to resemble closely the 
 skulls of Eskimos, who are Mongoloids. 
 
 What does all this mean? It means that the bone structure 
 typical of the three great stocks of mankind — "Black," 
 "White," and "Yellow"— was already here at least 35,000 
 years ago, and possibly earlier. The "Australoid" type is 
 sometimes called a fourth stock; it was here, too. The Cauca- 
 soid type was in Europe. The earliest traces we have of the 
 Negroid type were also found in southern Europe. It's less 
 probable that there were Mongoloids in Europe, but they were 
 already in the Far East. By 20,000 years ago, these Mon- 
 goloids were probably moving, by way of Siberia and Alaska, 
 into the New World. 
 
 THE STOCKS OF MANKIND 
 
 What are these three great stocks I speak of? I've given you 
 names that approximately correspond with present-day skin 
 
 • 27 • 
 
color: Black, Negroid; White. Caucasoid; Yellow, Mongoloid. 
 But hair form and color arc important, too. So are the build 
 of the head and of the face, the breadth of the nose, the set 
 of the eyes, and the height of the cheek-bones. Of course a 
 
 skeleton doesn't have skin and hair, so the skin color and hair 
 form can't be identified; but the skull and a few other parts 
 of the skeleton will show the original build. As far as the 
 skeletons are concerned, we've just seen that bone structures 
 typical of each of the three different stocks have been found at 
 least as early as 35,000 years ago. Even if the stocks had been 
 "pure" then (which they certainly weren't), they would all 
 be mixed up by now. Human beings don't breed for purity. 
 
 1 he only thing the idea of a stock can do is to give us a 
 notion of tin- general appearance of large groups of people; that 
 is, a description of a stock is a description of an average person, 
 a happy medium, or an ideal type. 1 No one person in the 
 stock will fit the description exactly, but thousands may fit 
 it in a general way. Remember, too, that many details have 
 to be taken into account. Some Hindus (whom we class as 
 Caucasoids) have blacker skins than many Negroes, but in 
 hair, head, and facial builds they resemble Italians. So we 
 can't base our description of a stock on only one detail. 
 
 Now you'll see why I was careful not to say that the 
 Grimaldi skeletons were those of Negroes. I said the skulls 
 and skeletons were Negroid in type. Nobody knows what color 
 skin or kind of hair they had. The bony structure is so close 
 to that of Negroes that we can make a guess about skin color, 
 but we might be wrong. 
 
 SI B-STOCKS, GROUPS, OR RACES 
 
 Starting with the fact that all modern human beings belong 
 to one species. Homo sapiens. Professor W. M. Krogman treats the 
 three great stocks as subspecies. J He then goes on to describe 
 the groups, "races," or sub-subspecies into which the stocks may 
 be roughly divided. Under the Caucasoids, he describes nine 
 
 imething which grows in the mind of the person who is making 
 the description. You've no doubt seen such a thing tried for an "ideal" 
 movie actress, foi example, I. ana Turner's hair, Lauren Bacall's eyes, 
 < ringei Rogei s J nose, eti . 
 
 • 28 • 
 
groups or races, under the Negroids seven groups, and under 
 the Mongoloids seven groups. He says that he probably gets 
 fewer Negroid and Mongoloid groups than he does Caucasoids, 
 simply because we know more about the Caucasoids. He 
 then goes on to make three important statements that are 
 based on our knowledge of the Caucasoids, since we know 
 them best. He says: 
 
 1. There is no "pure" race. 
 
 2. No single state or nation is composed of a single race. 
 
 3. All peoples of Europe are the product of an age-old 
 mixture of races. 
 
 We might understand better what these races or groups 
 mean to Professor Krogman, if we looked at two of his modern 
 examples: 
 
 1. The Mediterraneans are a group of Caucasoid stock. 
 They live mainly in southern Europe, northern and 
 northeastern Africa, the Near East (the Arabs), and 
 northern India. There are, however, peoples of other 
 groups living side by side with those of Mediterranean 
 type in all these areas. Also, the Mediterraneans have 
 spread out over the edges of these areas to all parts of 
 the world. 
 
 2. The German nation is made up of the following groups 
 and possibly others: the Mediterraneans, the Nordics, 
 the Alpines, the Dinarics, and the East Baltics. Also, 
 remember that none of these groups is "pure" in itself. 
 
 Almost every physical anthropologist has tried to classify 
 the groups of the peoples of the world. I've given you Pro- 
 fessor Krogman's scheme, but it's not the only scheme, or even 
 the only good one. The value of a scheme depends on the 
 care with which the physical anthropologist has judged the 
 details he used to set it up. Suppose you try to make a classi- 
 fication of automobiles, for example. You have first to decide 
 what should count most heavily in your classification. Shall 
 it be the make, or the body color, or the number of cylinders, 
 or the horsepower, or the number of people the car can carry? 
 
 • 29 • 
 
After you decide on the detail that is to be most important in 
 your classification, you'll have to decide on the next most im- 
 portant, and so on. I imagine you won't decide that body 
 color is very important! 
 
 In the end, when an anthropologist has set up a group, 
 each real person in the group will fit the standard only ap- 
 proximately. This is because (like the stocks) the groups are 
 averages, mediums, or ideal types. There is nothing "pure" 
 and nothing individual about the modern groups or races. 
 Nor is there evidence to show that there ever have been "pure" 
 groups or races. 
 
 HOW ABOUT MODERN RACES? 
 
 Since this little book is about prehistory, I'm going to leave 
 the problem of modern races to the physical and social anthro- 
 pologists. I've just given you enough of Professor Krogman's 
 ideas on the subject so that you may see how a physical 
 anthropologist thinks about race. As a physical anthropologist, 
 Krogman is talking about biological race when he uses the word 
 "race" he says no human races are pure. The kind of 
 anthropologists who study culture and society (we call them 
 "social" or "cultural" anthropologists) find that the word 
 ••race" is used in another way too. This kind of race could be 
 called "sociological" race. 
 
 The term "sociological" race is simply an admission (by 
 the social anthropologists — who are realists) of a fact. When 
 enough people decide to think there is such a thing as a race, 
 then there is such a thing as a race -for the people who think 
 it. Habits, customs, choice of clothes, ways of fixing food, and 
 even odder things gel mixed into such ideas of race. It is this 
 sort of notion of race on which the thing we know as race 
 prejudice gets built. It is a wrong idea, but it certainly exists. 
 ( )ne problem we anthropologists have is in knowing how to 
 fight it. As Professor I.. A. While says, you can't convince a 
 crazy man that he's not Napoleon by showing him scientifically 
 that this is 1948, not 1812, that he doesn't speak French, and 
 that his wile's name is not Josephine. So far, science hasn't 
 been much more effective in re-educating the people with race 
 prejudice. 
 
 • 30 • 
 
This is really not part of the subject at all. What I can 
 tell you as a prehistorian is that we have no evidence of 
 "pure" race — of any kind — in prehistoric times. 
 
 SUMMARY OF FOSSIL MEN AND HUMAN 
 PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES 
 
 We started this chapter with Java man and Peking man, who 
 lived about a half million years ago. Peking man used tools, 
 and it's almost certain that Java man used them too; hence 
 they were men, for animals don't use tools. 
 
 Weidenreich thinks there was a straight line of evolution 
 from Java man to Solo (the Java "Neanderthaler") to Wadjak 
 (the Java proto-Australoid) to the modern Australian natives. 
 Weidenreich also sees in Peking man twelve characteristics 
 that look like modern Mongoloid traits. Since Peking man 
 was found in caves near Peking, China, it looks as if he were 
 already an ancestral Chinese. It also looks as if stock differ- 
 ences were already beginning half a million years ago. 
 
 We haven't yet found fossil men in Europe who are cer- 
 tainly as old as the Asiatic forms that we have described. But 
 by 275,000 years ago, the quite modern Swanscombe (and 
 probably Galley Hill) men were already in England. The 
 Neanderthal-like Heidelberg man had already been in Ger- 
 many, and it's quite likely there was not. an English Channel 
 at the time. There certainly were times later when there 
 wasn't, and when these different types of people could wander 
 around freely and mix. 
 
 Men of one Neanderthal type or another have turned up 
 all over the Old World. They made tools, and some of them 
 lived in caves and also buried their dead. This was happening 
 at least 100,000 years ago. 
 
 Really modern men appear some time after 75,000 years 
 ago. But there are bones, which probably should be dated 
 earlier than this, of mixed Neanderthal-modern types, at 
 least from Mount Carmel in Palestine. This means either 
 (1) that Neanderthalers and modern types were breeding 
 together, or (2) that here is just one case where the Neander- 
 thaler was in the direct process of evolving into modern man. 
 
 • 31 • 
 
Or, both processes may have been working together. Krog- 
 iii. in says: "Of one thing we may be certain, viz., that Nean- 
 thropic Man (Cro-Magnon, fully modern man) evolved from 
 Paleanthropic Man (the Neanderthalers)." 
 
 The first modern men we know in Europe are not all alike. 
 There arc at least two kinds of ancestral Caucasoids in Europe, 
 the Cro-Magnon and the Combe Capclle types. There are 
 a bo the Negroids of Grimaldi, and the possibility that the 
 ( lhancelade skull of France may be Mongoloid (or at least 
 like an Eskimo). We know other early modern types, in 
 China, Java, and Africa. These were either more Mongoloid 
 or more Australoid; they are not Caucasoids or Negroids. 
 
 Some of the more special types of modern Europeans began 
 to move into place about 6,000 years ago. Others came later. 
 But this is a very complicated story of movements and mixings; 
 there had already been mixing beforehand, and we know the 
 result is mixed. 
 
 People have been mixing and cross-breeding for so long 
 that any such notion as a "pure race" is nonsense. That is, 
 if we're really talking about biological race — about flesh and 
 germ plasm and brain and bones. But if we're thinking up a 
 "sociologicar' race, that's another matter. That's like think- 
 ing up a belief in Santa Clans: if we all believe it, then it's 
 so in terms of our beliefs. What is not so is that a "sociological" 
 race has a biological basis. There is no basis of fact to support 
 such a belief. 
 
 32 
 
Cultural BEGINNINGS 
 
 Men, unlike the lower animals, are made up of much more 
 than flesh and blood and bones; for men have "culture." 
 
 WHAT IS CULTURE? 
 
 "Culture" is a word with many meanings. The doctors 
 speak of making a "culture" of a certain kind of bacteria, and 
 ants are said to have a "culture." Then there is the Emily 
 Post kind of "culture" — you say a person is "cultured," or 
 that he isn't, depending on whether or not he eats peas with 
 his knife. 
 
 The anthropologists use the word too, and argue heatedly 
 over its finer meanings; but they all agree that every human 
 being is part of or has some kind of culture. Each particular 
 human group has a particular culture; that is one of the ways 
 in which we can tell one group of men from another. In 
 this sense, a culture means the way the members of a group 
 of people think and believe and live, the tools they make, and 
 the way they do things. Professor Robert Redfield says a 
 culture is an organized or formalized body of conventional 
 understandings. "Conventional understandings" means the 
 whole set of rules, beliefs, and standards which a group of 
 people live by. These understandings show themselves in art, 
 and in the other things a people make and do. The under- 
 
 • 33 • 
 
Standings continue to last, through tradition, from one genera- 
 tion to another. They arc what really characterize different 
 human groups. 
 
 SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF CULTURE 
 
 A culture lasts, although individual men in the group die off. 
 ( )n the other hand, a culture changes as the different conven- 
 tions and understandings change. You could almost say that 
 a culture lives in the minds of the men who have it. But 
 people are not born with it; they get it as they grow up. 
 Suppose a day-old Dutch baby is adopted by a family in Osh- 
 kosh, Wisconsin, and the child is not told that he is Dutch. 
 He will grow up with no more idea of Dutch culture than 
 anyone else in Oshkosh. 
 
 So when I speak of ancient Egyptian culture, I mean the 
 whole body of understandings and beliefs and knowledge 
 possessed by the ancient Egyptians. I mean their beliefs as 
 to why grain grew, as well as their ability to make tools with 
 which to reap the grain. I mean their beliefs about life after 
 death. What I am thinking about as culture is a thina: which 
 lasted in time. If any one Egyptian, even the Pharaoh, died, 
 it didn't affect the Egyptian culture of that particular moment. 
 
 PREHISTORIC CULTURES 
 
 For that long period of man's history that is all prehistory, we 
 have no written descriptions of cultures. We find only the 
 tools men made, the places where they lived, the graves in 
 which they buried their dead, fortunately for us, these tools 
 and living places and graves all tell us something about the 
 ways these men lived and the things they believed. But the 
 story we learn of the very early cultures must be only a very 
 small part of the whole, for we find so few things. The rest 
 of the story is gone forever. We have to do what we can with 
 what we find. 
 
 For all of the time up to about 100,000 years ago, which 
 was the time of the main Neanderthal group of men, we have 
 found only one living place of very early prehistoric men. 
 This is the fallen-in cave where Peking man was found, near 
 
 • 34 • 
 
Peking. On page 49, you will note how the Abbe Breuil 
 suspects that the deepest layer in the French cave of La 
 Micoque is also very early. We know little about it yet, 
 but the Fontechevade finds may help us (p. 46). 
 
 You can see that we know very little about the home life 
 of earlier prehistoric men. We find different kinds of early 
 stone tools, but we can't even be really sure which tools may 
 have been used together. 
 
 WHY LITTLE HAS LASTED FROM EARLY TIMES 
 
 Except for the find-spot of Peking man, all our very early finds 
 come from geological deposits, or from the wind-blown surfaces 
 of deserts. Here is what the business of geological deposits 
 really means. Let us say that a group of people were living 
 in England about 300,000 years ago. They made the tools 
 they needed, lived in some sort of camp, almost certainly 
 built fires, and perhaps buried their dead. While the climate 
 was still warm, many generations may have lived in the same 
 place, hunting, and gathering nuts and berries; but after some 
 few thousand years, the weather began very gradually to grow 
 colder. These early Englishmen would not have known that 
 a glacier was forming over northern Europe. They would 
 have noticed only that the animals they hunted seemed to be 
 moving south, and that the berries grew larger toward the 
 south. So they would have moved south, too. 
 
 The camp site they left is the place we archaeologists would 
 really have liked to find. All of the different tools the people 
 used would have been there together — many broken, some 
 whole. The graves, and traces of fire and the tools would 
 have been there. But the glacier got there first! The front 
 of this enormous sheet of ice moved down over the country, 
 crushing and breaking and plowing up everything like a 
 gigantic bull-dozer. You can see what happened to our 
 camp site. 
 
 Everything the glacier couldn't break, it pushed along in 
 front of it or plowed beneath it. Rocks were ground to gravel, 
 and soil was caught into the ice, which afterwards melted 
 and ran off as muddy water. Hard tools of flint sometimes 
 
 • 35 • 
 
remained whole. Human hones weren't so hard; it's a wonder 
 any of them lasted. ( rushing streams of melt water flushed out 
 the debris from underneath the glacier, and water flowed off 
 the surface and through great crevasses. The hard materials 
 these waters carried were even more rolled and ground up. 
 Finally, such materials were dropped by the rushing waters 
 as gravels, miles from the front of the glacier. At last the 
 "lacier reached its greatest extent; then it melted backward 
 inward the north. Debris held in the ice was dropped where 
 the ice melted, or was flushed off by more melt water. When 
 the glacier had withdrawn to the sea, north of Scotland, great 
 hunks of ice were broken off as icebergs. These icebergs 
 probably dropped the materials held in their ice wherever 
 they floated and melted. There must be many tools and 
 fragmentary bones of prehistoric men on the bottom of the 
 Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. 
 
 Remember, too, that these glaciers came and went at least 
 four times during the Ice Age. Then you will realize why the 
 things we find are all mixed up. Stone tools from one camp 
 site got mixed up with stone tools from many other camp sites- 
 tools which may have been made tens of thousands or more 
 years apart. The glaciers mixed them all up, and so we can- 
 not say which particular sets of tools belonged together in the 
 first place. 
 
 "EOLITHS" 
 
 But what sort of tools do we find? For almost a century, 
 people have been picking up odd bits of flint and other stone 
 in the oldest Ice Age gravels in England and France. There 
 is a great question as to whether these odd bits of stone were 
 worked by prehistoric men. The stones are given a name, 
 eoliths, or "dawn stones." You can see them in many museums; 
 but you can't be sure they were really worked by men. 
 
 Anyway, it doesn't matter very much. It is very hard to 
 pick out "eoliths" that seem to be made in any one tradition. 
 By "tradition" I mean a set of habits for making one kind of 
 tool for some particular job. No two "eoliths" look very 
 much alike; tools made as part of some one tradition all 
 
 ■ 36 • 
 
look much alike. Now it's easy to suppose that the very 
 earliest prehistoric men picked up and used almost any sort 
 of stone. This wouldn't be surprising; you and I do it when 
 we go camping. In other words, some of these "eoliths" may 
 actually have been used by prehistoric men. They must have 
 
 ABBEVILLIAN 
 
 B 1 FAC E 
 
 used anything that might be handy when they needed it. 
 We could have figured that out without the "eoliths." 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF STANDARDIZATION 
 
 What does matter is that by half a million years ago, just 
 after the first glaciation was finished, men began making tools 
 according to a certain set tradition. There are three such 
 very early traditions, or sets of habits, in making stone tools. 
 All three seem already to have been established by 500,000 
 years ago; we don't know which of the three is actually oldest. 
 
 CORE-BIFAGE TOOLS *J 
 
 The first tradition is the core or biface one. The tools in this 
 tradition are large pear-shaped pieces of stone trimmed flat 
 on opposite sides or "faces." Hence "biface" has been used 
 to describe these tools. The front view is like that of a pear 
 
 • 37 • 
 
with a rather pointed top, and the back view looks almost 
 exactly the same. Look at them side on, and you can see 
 that the front and back faces are the same and have been 
 trimmed to a thin tip. The real purpose in trimming down 
 the two faces was to get a good cutting edge all around. You 
 can see all this in the illustration (p. 37). 
 
 CLACTONIAN FLAKE 
 
 We have very little idea of the way in which these core- 
 bifaces were used. They have been called "hand axes," but 
 this probably gives the wrong idea, for an ax, to us, is not a 
 pointed tool. All of these early tools must have been used 
 for a number of jobs -chopping, scraping, cutting, hitting, 
 picking, and prying. Since the core-bifaces tend to be pointed, 
 it seems likely that they were used for hitting, picking, and 
 prying. But they have rough cutting edges, so they could 
 have been used for chopping, scraping, and cutting. 
 
 FLAKE TOOLS 
 
 The second tradition is the flake tradition. The idea was to 
 get a tool with a good cutting edge by simply knocking a nice 
 large flake off a big block of stone. You had to break off 
 the flake in such a way that it was broad and thin, and also 
 had a good sharp cutting edge. Once you really got on to 
 the trick of doing it, this was probably a simpler way to make 
 a good cutting tool than preparing a biface. You have to 
 
 • 38 • 
 
know how, though; I've tried it and have mashed my fingers 
 more than once. 
 
 The flake tools look as if they were meant for chopping, 
 scraping, and cutting jobs alone. The people who made flake 
 
 _7 
 
 \6 
 
 AN YATH IAN 
 CHOPPER TOOL 
 
 tools seem to have been trying to produce a broad, sharp, 
 cutting edge. 
 
 The core-biface and the flake traditions were spread, from 
 earliest times, over much of Europe, Africa, and western Asia. 
 The map on page 43 shows the general area. Over much of 
 
 • 39 • 
 
this greal region, there was flint. Both of these traditions seem 
 well adapted to Him. although good core-bifaces and Hakes 
 were made from other kinds of stone. 
 
 ( HOPPER I OOLS 
 
 The third very early tradition is found in southern and 
 eastern Asia, from northwestern India through Java and 
 Burma into China. The prehistoric men in this area mostly 
 used quartz and tuff and even petrified wood for their stone 
 tools (see illustration, p. 39). 
 
 This third great early tradition is called the chopper tool 
 tradition. There are several kinds of tools in this tradition, 
 but all differ from the western core-bifaces and flakes. There 
 are broad, heavy scrapers or cleavers, and tools with an adze- 
 like cutting edge. These last-named tools are called "hand 
 adzes," just as the core-bifaces of the west have often been 
 called "hand axes." The section of an adze cutting edge is 
 Z shaped: the section of an ax is < shaped. 
 
 There are also some pointed tools. Thus the tool kit of 
 these early south and east Asiatic peoples seems to have in- 
 cluded tools for doing as many different jobs as did the tools 
 of the Western traditions. 
 
 Dr. H. L. Movins believes that the tools which were found 
 in the Peking cave with Peking man belong to the chopper 
 tool tradition. This is the only case as yet where the tools 
 and the man have been found together from very earliest 
 times. 
 
 DIFFERENCES WITHIN THE TOOL-MAKING 
 TRADITIONS 
 
 These three great traditions in the manufacture of stone tools 
 are all we have to show of the cultures of the men of those 
 times. Changes happened in each of the traditions. As time 
 went on, the tools in each tradition were better made. There 
 could also be slight regional differences in the tools within 
 one tradition. Thus, tools with small differences, but all 
 belonging to one tradition, can be given special group (facies) 
 names. 
 
 • 40 • 
 
This naming of special groups has been going on for some 
 time. Here are some of these names, since you may see them 
 used in museum displays of flint tools. They are listed, begin- 
 ning with the earliest, under the traditions to which they 
 belong: 
 
 Core-biface : 
 
 Abbevillian (or Chellean) 
 
 Acheulean I to V 
 
 Acheulean VI and VII (or Micoquian) 
 
 Some blended elements in "Mousterian" 
 
 Flake : 
 
 Clactonian 
 Tayacian 
 
 Levalloisian I to VII 
 Levalloiso-Mousterian 
 "Typical Mousterian" 
 
 Chopper tool: 
 
 Soan (Early and Late) 
 Anyathian (Early and Late) 
 Patjitanian 
 Choukoutienian 
 
 The first two traditions fit in at the bottom of the chart 
 on page 61. 
 
 The early archaeologists had many of the tool groups 
 named before they ever realized that there were broader tool 
 preparation traditions. This was understandable, for in deal- 
 ing with the mixture of things that come out of glacial gravels 
 the easiest thing to do first is to isolate individual type groups. 
 First you put a bushel-basketful of tools on a table and begin 
 matching up types. Then you give names to the groups of 
 each type. The groups and the types are really matters of 
 the archaeologists' choice ; in real life, they were probably less 
 exact than the archaeologists' lists of them. We now know 
 pretty well in which of the three early traditions the various 
 early groups belong. 
 
 • 41 • 
 
THE MEANING OF DIFFERENT IRADITIONS 
 
 What do the traditions really mean, beyond persistent habits 
 in the manufacture of tools? Until not very long ago, some 
 archaeologists still believed that the tools of the flake tradition 
 were all made by Neanderthal-like Paleanthropic men. The 
 .Wander dialers were supposed to have died out about 70,000 
 years ago, and their tools were supposed to have died with 
 them. The core-bifaces were supposed to have been made 
 only by Neanthropic (modern) men. The chopper tool tradi- 
 tion wasn't actually known as such until a few years ago. 
 
 Remember that all the groups and types of tools we're 
 talking about were simply sorted out of the glacial gravels 
 (except for those in the cave of Peking man. which belong 
 in the chopper tool tradition). Archaeologists spoke of the 
 different tool groups as "cultures."' No one thought that the 
 same prehistoric man who made and used bifaces for one job 
 could also have made and used (lake tools for another job. 
 
 This theory is now breaking down. The physical anthro- 
 pologists are helping to break it; you saw (p. 32) how Pro- 
 fessor Krogman's ideas disagree with the notion that Neander- 
 thal man became extinct. Also the archaeologists themselves 
 are waking up. From South Africa, from Morocco, from 
 Portugal, news comes of new finds of early tools. Some of 
 these tools individually show blendings of the flake and biface 
 traditions. Others may be of either tradition but are found 
 together in an undisturbed geological bed. 
 
 ONE GROUP OF MEN PROBABLY HAD MORE 
 I HAN ONE TOOL-MAKING TRADITION 
 
 It looks very much as though the same early men may have 
 had different habits for making different kinds of tools, and 
 that these habits probably lasted long enough to become 
 traditions. The men no doubt had other set habits that were 
 used in making tools of wood, bone, shell and other materials 
 which have not lasted long enough for the archaeologists 
 to find them. Mr. Harper Kelley has now restudied some 
 of the early core-bifaces of France, and he believes that flake 
 tools also fit into the same group. If you will now look at 
 
 • 42 • 
 
Q 
 
 z 
 
 fa 
 
 fa 
 
 J 
 
 n 
 
 O 
 
 O 
 
 
 
 H 
 
 < 
 
 C/3 
 
 o 
 
 < 
 
 fa 
 
 o 
 
 
 < 
 
 fa 
 
 fa 
 
 M 
 
 1— 1 
 
 Q 
 
 H 
 
 
 fa 
 
 
 — 
 Q 
 
 
 
 — 
 
 1 
 
 csi 
 
 
 
 fa 
 
 H 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 H 
 
 
 
 43 
 
the map on page 43 you will sec that the core-biface tradition 
 and the Hake tradition are spread out over Europe, Africa, 
 and western Asia together. You will see that the chopper tool 
 tradition is found only in the Far East. But all three happen 
 to meet in northwest India, and perhaps in southeastern 
 Africa. 
 
 The above paragraph may need some qualification. There 
 may he some cases in Europe where the only jobs that men had 
 to do with stone tools called for tools that were made in just 
 one tradition. There is certainly such a case in one of the 
 Mount Carmel caves of Palestine. Here, in the very level 
 where the blended Neanderthal-modern skulls were found, 
 there were 9,784 tools. Only three tools, obviously strays, 
 were core-bifaces; the rest were all flake tools or flake chips. 
 So apparently there are cases where only tools of one tradition 
 are found. (This particular case argues against the old 
 Neanderthal-flake tradition theory, for the men found in this 
 particular level had skulls much more modern than Neander- 
 thal skulls. The implications of Fontechevade are similar 
 [p. 46].) 
 
 LIFE IN THE EAREIEST TIMES 
 
 What do we actually know of life in these early times? In 
 the glacial gravels, or in the terrace gravels of rivers once 
 swollen by floods of melt water, or on the windswept deserts, 
 we find stone tools. There is an occasional roughly worked 
 piece of bone. There are also the chance finds of fossil human 
 bones themselves, of which we spoke in the last chapter. Out- 
 side of the cave of Peking man, there is nothing else until the 
 time of the main Neanderthal group (see p. 26). 
 
 The stone tools we find in each of the three traditions are 
 the simplest kinds of all-purpose tools. Almost any one of 
 them could be used for hacking, chopping, cutting, and scrap- 
 inn; so the men who used them must have been living in the 
 most rough and ready sort of way possible. They found or 
 hunted their food wherever they could. In the anthropological 
 jargon, they were '"food-gatherers," pure and simple. 
 
 Because of the mixture in the gravels and in the materials 
 they carried, we can't be sure which animals these men hunted. 
 
 • 44 • 
 
Bones of the larger animals turn up in the gravels, but they 
 could just as well belong to the animals who hunted the men, 
 rather than the other way about. We don't know. 
 
 During a great part of this time the climate was warm and 
 pleasant. The second interglacial period (the time between 
 the second and third great glaciations) lasted about 200,000 
 years, and during much of this time the climate may have 
 been even better than ours is now. We don't know that 
 earlier prehistoric men in Europe or Africa lived in caves. 
 They may not have needed to ; much of the weather may have 
 been so nice that they lived in the open. Perhaps they 
 didn't wear clothes either! 
 
 WHAT THE PEKING CAVE-FINDS TELL US 
 
 The one early cave dwelling we have found is that of Peking 
 man, in China. Peking man had fire. He probably cooked 
 his meat, or used the fire to keep dangerous animals away 
 from his den. In the cave were bones of dangerous animals, 
 members of the wolf, bear, and cat families. Some of the cat 
 bones belonged to beasts larger than tigers. There were also 
 bones of other wild animals : buffalo, camel, deer, elephants, 
 a horse, sheep, and even ostriches. It's much too cold and 
 dry in north China for all these animals to live there today. 
 So this list helps us know that the weather was reasonably 
 warm, and that there was enough rain to grow grass for the 
 grazing animals. The list also helps the paleontologists to 
 date the find. 
 
 Peking man also seems to have eaten plant food, for there 
 are hackberry seeds in the debris of the cave. His tools were 
 made of sandstone and quartz and sometimes of a rather bad 
 flint. As we've already seen, they belong in the chopper-tool 
 tradition. It seems fairly clear that some of the edges were 
 chipped by right-handed people. There are also many split 
 pieces of heavy bone. Peking man probably split them so he 
 could eat the bone marrow, but he probably also used some 
 of them as tools. 
 
 Now hold your breath! Many of these split bones were 
 the bones of Peking man himself! Each one of the skulls had 
 
 • 45 • 
 
already had the base broken out of it. In no case were any 
 of the hones resting together in their natural relation to one 
 another. There is nothing like a burial; all of the bones are 
 scattered. Now it's true that animals could have scattered 
 bodies that were not cared for or buried. But splitting bones 
 lengthwise and carefully removing the base of a skull call for 
 both the tools and the people to use them. It's pretty clear 
 who the people were. Peking man was a cannibal. 
 
 This rounds out about all we can say of the life and times 
 of early prehistoric men. In those clays life was rough. You 
 evidently had to watch out not only for dangerous animals 
 but also for your fellow men. You ate whatever you could 
 catch or find growing. But you had sense enough to build 
 fires, and you had already formed certain habits for making 
 the kind of stone tools you needed. That's about all we know. 
 But I think we'll have to admit that cultural beginnings had 
 been made, and that these early people were really men. 
 
 After the manuscript was in press (see p. 98), a prelim- 
 inary note appeared on the finding of two fragmentary pre- 
 modern skulls in the basal layer of Fontechevade cave in 
 France. The Tayacian flint tools and the animal bones in 
 the basal layer indicate a third interglacial date for the finds, 
 which are thus somewhat later than the Swanscombe and 
 other groups mentioned on page 26. On the other hand, 
 this is a case of pre-modern human fossils in a very early cave 
 layer; its appearance thus qualifies my statements (pp. 26, 
 34, 44, 45, 54). The full publication of the Fontechevade 
 finds will doubtless give greater substance to the early La 
 Micoque layers (pp. 35, 49, 50) and will also elaborate our 
 knowledge of the Tayacian industry (p. 50). Apparently 
 Fontechevade is an important find. 
 
 46 
 
MORE evidence of Culture 
 
 The material that we get from caves in Europe can be dated 
 from about 120,000 years ago, the time of the main Neander- 
 thal group. We don't know why there is no earlier material 
 in the caves; apparently they were not used before the last 
 interglacial phase (the period just before the last great glacia- 
 tion). We know that men of the main Neanderthal group 
 were living in caves from about 100,000 to 70,000 years ago. 
 Probably some of the more modern types of men also lived in 
 caves already, but we have found their bones only in Palestine. 
 
 THE CAVE LAYERS 
 
 Many generations of people lived in caves. In parts of France, 
 peasants still live in them. As a result, many caves have deep 
 layers of debris in them. The first people moved in and lived 
 on the rock floor. They threw whatever they didn't want on 
 the floor, and they tracked in mud ; nobody bothered to 
 clean house in those days. Their debris — junk and mud and 
 garbage and what not — became packed into a layer. As time 
 went on, and generations passed, the layer grew thicker. Then 
 there might have been a break in the occupation of the cave 
 for a while. Perhaps the game animals got scarce and the 
 people moved away; or maybe the cave became flooded. Later 
 on, other people moved in and began making a new layer. 
 
 • 47 • 
 
Perhaps this went on in the same cave for a hundred thousand 
 years; you can see what happened. The drawing on this page 
 shows a section through such a cave. The earliest layer is on 
 the bottom, the latest one on top. They go in order from 
 
 SURFACE DEBRIS 
 
 Middle Aurignacian 
 "Lower" Aurignacian 
 
 "Typical" Mousterian 
 Flood Sand 
 
 "Mousterian of 
 Acheulean 
 Tradition" 
 
 San d 
 
 Gravel (small) 
 
 Gravel (medium) 
 "Typical" Mousterian 
 
 Sand 
 
 bed ROCK 
 
 L ^^\ 
 
 
 
 K 1 At,, 
 
 J ;//% 
 
 
 
 nriiriiiiiiiiiririi'iiii'iiiiiiiiii'iiiiiii 
 
 H 
 
 G == 
 
 
 
 
 
 F 
 
 [r "::::: : 
 
 
 e :'■;'.••'• 
 
 
 D .-;■'" 
 
 C ° Oq 
 
 B V/7? 
 
 
 //777//7/////////////////7777777m7m7//////r/. 
 
 A 
 
 
 
 1 — \rm^ 
 
 ^wMjissmfA ■■ ■• • • 'filial 
 
 WAWC^S^Ilie^ 
 
 SECTION OF SHELTER ON LOWER TERRACE, LA MOUSTIER 
 
 bottom to top, earliest to latest. This is the stratification we 
 talked about (p. 11). 
 
 While we may find a mix-up in caves, it's not nearly as 
 bad as the mixing up that was done by glaciers. The animal 
 bones and shells, the fireplaces, the bones of men, and the 
 tools the men made all belong together, if they come from one 
 layer. That's the reason why the cave of Peking man is so 
 important. It is also the reason why the caves in Europe and 
 the Near East are so important. We can get an idea of which 
 
 48 
 
things belong together and which lot came earliest and which 
 latest. 
 
 In most cases, prehistoric men lived only in the mouths 
 of caves. They probably didn't like the dark inner chambers. 
 They also lived at the bases of overhanging cliffs, if there was 
 enough overhang to give shelter. When the weather was good, 
 they no doubt lived in the open air as well. 
 
 The most important European cave sites are in Spain, 
 France, and central Europe; there are also sites in England 
 and Italy. A few caves are known in the Near East and 
 Africa, and no doubt more sites will be found when the out-of- 
 the-way parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia are studied. 
 
 AN "INDUSTRY" DEFINED 
 
 According to the Abbe Breuil, the earliest European cave 
 materials are those from the cave of La Micoque, in France. 
 Breuil believes that the bottommost layer of this cave probably 
 goes back to the time before the Riss (next to the last) glacia- 
 tion. This material consists of an industry of stone tools, 
 apparently all made in the flake tradition. This is the first 
 time we have used the word "industry." It is useful to call 
 all of the different tools found together in one layer and made 
 of one kind of material an industry; that is, they must be found 
 together as men left them. Tools taken from the glacial 
 gravels (or from windswept desert surfaces or river gravels 
 or any geological deposit) are not "together" in this sense. 
 We might say the latter have only "geological" not "archae- 
 ological" context. Archaeological context means finding 
 things just as men left them. We can tell what tools go 
 together in an "industrial" sense only if we have archaeological 
 context. 
 
 Up to now, the only things we could have called "in- 
 dustries" were the worked stone industry and perhaps the 
 worked (?) bone industry of the Peking cave. We couldn't 
 use the term for the stone tools from the glacial gravels, be- 
 cause we never knew which tools belonged together. But 
 when the cave materials begin to appear in Europe, we can 
 begin to speak of industries. 
 
 • 49 • 
 
THE EARLIEST EUROPEAN CAVE LAYERS 
 
 We've just mentioned the industry from what is said to be the 
 oldest inhabited cave in Europe; that is, the industry from the 
 deepest layer of the cave at I.a Micoque. Apparently it 
 doesn't amount to much. The tools are made of stone, in 
 the flake tradition, and are very poorly worked. This in- 
 dustry is called Clactonian II. The earlier Clactonian I has not 
 been found in any cave. It comes only from the glacial 
 gravels, so it is thus not an industry in the sense in which we 
 use the word. There is a picture of a Clactonian flake tool 
 on page 38. 
 
 None of the La Micoque tools are really good. There are 
 scrapers, and more or less pointed tools, and tools that may 
 have been used for hacking and chopping. Many of the tools 
 from the earlier glacial gravels are better made than those of 
 this first industry. There is so little of this material available 
 that we do not know which is typical, and which is not. You 
 would probably find it hard to see much difference between 
 this industry and the one in the next layer above it. Both 
 industries appear in the very ancient cave of La Micoque. 
 
 The industry of the second earliest layer at La Micoque 
 cave also contains stone tools in the flake tradition. These 
 tools are as poor as those of the earliest level and they are 
 also generally smaller. This industry is called the Tayacian. 
 The stone industry of the bottommost layer of the Mount 
 Carmel cave, in Palestine, where somewhat similar tools were 
 found, has also been called Tayacian. The Tayacian industry 
 and La Micoque are not yet very well known (but see p. 46). 
 
 > c 
 
 THE AC H EL" LEAN INDUSTRY 
 
 Both in France and in Palestine, the next layers in the deep 
 caves have an industry in both the core-biface and the flake 
 traditions. The core-biface tools usually make up less than 
 half of all the tools in the industry. However, the name of 
 the biface type of tool is generally L r ivcn to the whole industry. 
 It is called the Acheulean, actually a late form of it, as "Acheu- 
 lean" is also used for earlier core-biface tools taken from the 
 glacial gravels. In western Europe, the name used is Upper 
 
 • 50 ■ 
 
Acheulean or Micoquian. The same terms have been borrowed 
 to name layers E and F in the Tabun cave, on Mount Carmel 
 in Palestine. 
 
 The Acheulean core-biface type of tool is worked on two 
 faces so as to give a cutting edge all around. The outline of 
 
 ACH EULEAN 
 
 B I FAC E 
 
 its front view may be oval, or egg-shaped, or a quite pointed 
 pear shape. These tools are really the best and also the final 
 products of the core-biface tradition. We first noticed the 
 tradition in the early glacial gravels (p. 37) ; now we see its 
 end, but also its finest examples, in the deeper cave levels. 
 
 The flake tools, which really make up the greater bulk 
 of this industry, are simple scrapers and chips with sharp 
 cutting edges. The habits used to prepare them must have 
 been pretty much the same as those used for at least one of 
 the flake industries mentioned just above. 
 
 There is very little else in these early cave layers. We do 
 not have a proper "industry" of bone tools. There are traces 
 
 • 51 • 
 
 L. OF ILL* UB 3 
 
of fire, and of animal bones, and a few shells. In Palestine, 
 there are many more bones of deer than of gazelle in these 
 layers; the deer lives in a wetter climate than does the gazelle. 
 In the European cave layers, the animal bones are those of 
 beasts that live in a warm climate. They belonged in the last 
 interglacial period. We have not yet found the bones of fossil 
 men definitely in place with this industry. 
 
 I LAKE INDUSTRIES FROM THE CAVES 
 
 Two more stone industries — the Levalloisian and the "Mous- 
 terian'''- — turn up at approximately the same time in the 
 European cave layers. Their tools seem to be mainly in the 
 flake tradition, but according to some of the authorities there 
 is also some blending of the habits of the core-biface tradition. 
 
 Now notice that I don't tell you the Levalloisian and the 
 "Mousterian" layers are both above the late Acheulean layers. 
 Look at the cave section on page 48, and you'll find that some 
 "Mousterian of Acheulean tradition" appears above some 
 "typical Mousterian." This means that there may be some 
 kinds of Acheulean mixtures that are later than some kinds 
 of "Mousterian." The same is true of the Levalloisian. 
 
 There were now several different kinds of habits that men 
 used in making stone tools. These habits were based on 
 either one or the other of the two traditions — core-biface or 
 flake — or on a blend of both. All were popular at about the 
 same time. So we find that people who made one kind of 
 stone tool industry lived in a cave for a while. Then they 
 gave up the cave for some reason, and people with another 
 industry moved in. Then the first people came back — or at 
 least somebody with the same tool-making habits as the first 
 people. Or maybe a third kind of tool-makers moved in. 
 The people who had these different habits for making their 
 stone tools seem to have moved around a good deal. They 
 no doubt borrowed and exchanged tricks of the trade with 
 each other. There were no patent laws in those days. 
 
 THE LEVALLOISIAN AND MOUSTERIAN j fc 
 
 The easiest Levalloisian tool to spot is a big flake tool. The 
 trick in making it was to fashion carefully a big chunk of 
 
 • 52 • 
 
stone (called the Levalloisian "tortoise core," because it re- 
 sembles the shape of a turtle-shell) and then to whack this in 
 such a way that a large flake flew off. This large thin flake, 
 with sharp cutting edges, is the finished Levalloisian tool. 
 
 There are several "typical Mousterian" stone tools. There 
 are medium-sized flake "side scrapers." There are also some 
 small pointed tools and some small "hand-axes." The last 
 
 L E VA L L O I S 
 
 FLAKE 
 
 of these tool types is often a flake worked on both of the flat 
 sides (that is, bifacially). There are pieces of flint worked into 
 the form of crude balls. The pointed tools may have been 
 fixed on shafts to make short jabbing spears; the round flint 
 balls might have been used as bolas (see p. 56). Actually, we 
 don't know what either tool was used for. The points and side 
 scrapers are illustrated on pages 54 and 55. 
 
 THE MIXING OF TRADITIONS 
 
 Nowadays the archaeologists are less and less sure of the im- 
 portance of any one specific tool type and name. Twenty 
 years ago, they used to speak simply of Acheulean or Leval- 
 loisian or Mousterian tools. Now, more and more, all of the 
 tools from some one layer in a cave are called "industries," 
 and are given mixed names. Thus we have "Levalloiso- 
 Mousterian," and "Acheuleo-Levalloisian," and even"Acheu- 
 leo-Mousterian" (or "Mousterian of Acheulean tradition"). 
 
 • 53 • 
 
I he time of these late Acheuleo-Levalloiso-Mousterioid 
 industries is from perhaps as early as 120,000 years to 70,000 
 years ago. This was the time of the first phase of the last great 
 glaciation. It was also the time that the main group of 
 Neanderthal men was living in Europe. So far, none of the 
 early fossil examples of more modern men have been found 
 with these industries in Europe. A number of the Neanderthal 
 fossil finds do come from these cave layers, however. Before 
 the blending of habits was understood it used to be popular 
 
 MOUSTERIAN POINT 
 
 
 to say Neanderthal man was "Mousterian man." I think 
 this is wrong, for two reasons. First, what used to be called 
 "Mousterian" is now known to be a blend of both core-biface 
 and flake habits, and so mixed that the word "Mousterian" 
 used alone really doesn't mean anything. Second, it is prob- 
 ably pure accident that we haven't yet found the early modern 
 types of fossil men with these mixed industries. Remember, 
 we do have one or two much earlier examples of modern types 
 of men — Swanscombe and Galley Hill — who come from before 
 the time of the caves. We also have the modern-like Mount 
 Carmel people, found in a cave layer of Palestine with tools 
 almost entirely in the flake tradition, called "Levalloiso- 
 Mousterian," and the Fontechevade-Tayacian (p. 46). 
 
 OTHER SUGGESTIONS OF LIFE IN THE EARLY 
 ( AYE LAYERS 
 
 Except for the stone tools, what do we know of the way men 
 lived in the time range around 120,000 to 70,000 years ago 
 
 • 54 • 
 
Or even later? We know that in the area from Europe to 
 Palestine, at least some of the people (some of the time) lived 
 in the fronts of caves, and warmed themselves over fires. In 
 Europe, in the cave layers of these times, we find the bones of 
 different animals; the bones in the lowest layers belong to 
 animals that lived in a warm climate; above them are the 
 bones of those who could stand the cold, like the reindeer 
 and mammoth. Thus, the meat diet must have been changing, 
 
 MOUSTERIAN SIDE-SCRAPER 
 
 as the glacier crept farther south. Shells and possibly fish 
 bones have lasted in these cave layers, but not any trace of 
 the vegetable foods, the nuts and berries and other wild fruits 
 that must have been eaten when they could be found. 
 
 Bone tools have also been found from this period. Some 
 are called scrapers, and there are also long chisel-like leg-bone 
 fragments believed to have been used for skinning animals. 
 Larger hunks of bone, which seem to have served as anvils 
 or chopping blocks, are fairly common. 
 
 Bits of mineral, used as coloring matter, have also been 
 found. We don't know what the color was used for. 
 
 There are a small but certain number of cases of inten- 
 tional burials. These burials have been found on the floors 
 of the caves; in other words, the people dug graves in the 
 places where they lived. The holes made for the graves were 
 small. For this reason (or perhaps for some other?) the bodies 
 were in a curled-up or contracted position. Flint or bone tools 
 
 • 55 • 
 
or pieces of meat seem to have been put in with some of the 
 bodies. In several cases, flat stones had been laid over the 
 graves. 
 
 LIFE IN AFRICA ABOUT 100,000 YEARS AGO 
 
 Much less is known in detail about Africa during the time 
 when the late Acheulean, Levalloisian, and "Mousterian" in- 
 dustries were in use in Europe and Palestine. Few cave sites 
 of the European type have been found in Africa. This may 
 mean that many of the early Africans lived out in the open 
 or that we haven't found the sites because we just haven't 
 looked hard enough yet. 
 
 Recently, Dr. L. S. B. Leakey found in Kenya, in east 
 Africa, a convincing open camp site containing large core- 
 bifaces of the Acheulean type, and also "bolas." The "bolas" 
 are rounded stones, about the size of a baseball, and apparently 
 grooved. They were found in sets of threes. 
 
 Bolas, in sets of threes, are still used by the gauchos of 
 Argentina; the three stones are joined by thongs of leather. 
 Holding one stone in his hand, the hunter whirls the other 
 two about his head, and then lets the whole contraption fly 
 at the legs of a running animal. The thongs entangle about 
 the legs of the animal, and trip and bind it. Then it can be 
 approached and killed with a club. 
 
 So far, Leakey has not described flake tools from the site, 
 if there were any. He found no evidence of fire, but he did 
 find the bones of giant wild pigs and horses, giant baboons 
 and uirafies, and elephants and hippopotamuses. 
 
 This much is clear about Africa: From Casablanca and 
 Cairo to Capetown, there are tools in both the core-biface 
 and in the flake traditions (see map, page 43). Excellent 
 examples of the most typical Acheulean and Levalloisian types 
 have been found. But we are not yet sure how whole industries 
 were made up, or which tools belong with which other tools. 
 To get such information, we'll need to know all about more 
 camp sites like Dr. Leakey's. It is sure, however, that the 
 same general habits of tool-making that we saw in Europe 
 were in use in Africa. 
 
 • 56 • 
 
CULTURE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE LAST 
 GREAT GLACIAL PERIOD 
 
 The few things we have found must indicate only a very small 
 part of the total activities of the people who lived at the time. 
 All of the things they may have made of wood and bark, of 
 skins, of anything soft, are gone. The fact that burials were 
 made at least in Europe and Palestine is pretty clear proof 
 that the people had some notion of a life after death. But 
 what this notion really was, or what gods (if any) men believed 
 in, we cannot know. Probably they lived in small groups, as 
 hunting and food-collecting seldom provides enough food for 
 large groups of people. These groups probably had some kind 
 of leader or "chief." Very likely the rude beginnings of rules 
 for community life and politics, and even law, were being 
 made. But what these were, we cannot know. We can only 
 guess about such things, as we can only guess about many 
 others; for example, how the idea of a family must have been 
 growing, and how there may have been witch doctors who 
 made beginnings in medicine or in art, in the materials they 
 gathered for their trade. 
 
 The stone tools help us most. They have lasted, and we 
 can find them. As they come to us, from this cave or that, 
 and from this layer or that, the tools show a variety of blends 
 of the different basic habits or traditions. This seems only 
 natural, as the groups of people must have been very small. 
 The mixtures and blendings of the habits used in making stone 
 tools must mean that there were also mixtures and blends in 
 many of the other ideas and beliefs of these small groups. And 
 what this probably means is that there was no one culture of 
 the time. Nor is it likely that there were simply three cultures, 
 "Acheulean," "Levalloisian," and "Mousterian," as has some- 
 times been thought in the past. Rather there must have 
 been a great variety of loosely related cultures at about the 
 same stage of advancement. 
 
 Over how great an area did these loosely related cultures 
 reach in the time 120,000 to 70,000 years ago? We have 
 described stone tools made in one or another of the flake and 
 core-biface habits, for an enormous area. It covers all of 
 Europe, all of Africa, the Near East, Asiatic Russia to Lake 
 
 • 57 • 
 
Baikal, and parts of India. It is perfectly possible that the 
 Hake and core-biface habits lasted on after 70,000 years ago, 
 in some places outside of Europe. In northern Africa, for 
 example, we are nearly certain that they did (see chart, p. 61). 
 On the other hand, in the Far East (China, Burma, Java) 
 and in northern India, die tools of the old chopper-tool 
 tradition were still being made. Out there, we must assume, 
 there was a different set of loosely related cultures. At least, 
 there was a different set of loosely related habits for the 
 making of tools. But the men who made them must have 
 looked much like the men of the West. Their tools were 
 different, but just as useful. 
 
 As to what the men of the West looked like. I've already 
 hinted at all we know so far (pp. 24 ff.). The Xeandcrthalers 
 were present at the time. Some more modern-like men must 
 have been about, too, since they were already present earlier, 
 and since fossils of them have turned up at Mount Carmel in 
 Palestine, and at Teshik Tash, in Transcaspian Russia. It 
 is still too soon to know whether certain blends of tools were 
 made only by certain blends of men. But since tools of both 
 the core-biface and the flake traditions, and their blends, turn 
 up from South Africa to England to India, it is most unlikely 
 that only one type of man used only one particular habit in 
 the preparation of tools. Or. in other words, men in Africa 
 and men in India were making just as good tools in those days 
 as the men who lived in western Europe. Draw your own 
 conclusions. 
 
 • 58 
 
EARLY Moderns 
 
 From some time during the beginning of the last great glacia- 
 tion (say some time after 70,000 years ago), we have more 
 accurate dates for the European-Mediterranean area, and less 
 accurate ones for the rest of the Old World. This is probably 
 because the effects of the last glaciation have been studied in 
 the European-Mediterranean area more than they have been 
 elsewhere. 
 
 A NEW TRADITION APPEARS 
 
 Something new was probably beginning to happen in the 
 European-Mediterranean area 70,000 years ago, though all 
 the rest of the Old World may have been going on as it had 
 been. I can't be sure of this because the information we are 
 using as a basis for dates is very inaccurate for the areas out- 
 side of Europe and the Mediterranean. 
 
 We can at least make a guess. In Egypt and north Africa, 
 men were still using the old methods of making stone tools. 
 This was especially true of flake tools of the Levalloisian type, 
 save that they were growing smaller and smaller as time went 
 on. But at the same time, a new. tradition was becoming 
 popular in Palestine and in Europe. This was the blade tool 
 tradition. 
 
 • 59 • 
 
BLADE TOOLS 
 
 A stone blade is really just a long parallel-sided flake, as the 
 drawing shows. It has sharp cutting edges, and makes a 
 very useful knife. The real trick is to be able to make one. 
 It is almost impossible to make a blade out of any stone but 
 flint, or a natural volcanic glass called obsidian. And even 
 if you have flint or obsidian, you first have to work up a special 
 "blade-core," from which to whack off blades. To get a good 
 flint blade tool takes a great deal of know-how. 
 
 Remember that a tradition in stone tools means no more 
 than that some particular way of making the tools got started 
 
 PLAIN 
 
 BLADE 
 
 . 
 
 and lasted a long tinv. Men who made some tools in one 
 tradition or set of habits would also often make other tools for 
 different purposes ' means of another tradition or set of 
 habits. And the two sets of habits often got blended or mixed. 
 
 THE EARLIEST BLADL TOOLS 
 
 The oldest blade tools we have found were deep down in the 
 layers of the Mount Carmel caves, in Tabun Eb and Ea. 
 Some more or less parallel-sided flakes are known in the 
 Levalloisian industry in France, but they are probably no 
 earlier than Tabun E. The Tabun blades are part of a local 
 late "Aeheulean" industry, which is characterized by core- 
 biface "hand axes," but which has many flake tools as well. 
 Professor F. E. Zeuner believes that this industry may be more 
 than 120,000 years old; actually its date has not yet been 
 fixed, but it is very old — older than the fossil finds of modern- 
 like men in the same caves. 
 
 For some reason, the habit of making blades at Mount 
 Carmel was interrupted. Blades only reappeared in Palestine 
 at about the same time they were first made in Europe — 
 
 • 60 • 
 
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 61 
 
about 70,000 years ago. Professor D. A. Garrod thinks that 
 men found the way to make blade tools very early, "in some 
 .is yet unidentified Asiatic centre." She (Professor Garrod) 
 thinks such a center could have been in the highlands of Iran 
 or beyond. No prehistoric exploration has been done in this 
 
 BACKED BLADE 
 
 area, and we may some day find that Garrod is right. Her 
 guess is that the first borrowing of the habit of how to make 
 blade tools got only as far as Mount Carmel in early times, but 
 that for some reason, the habit (or the usefulness of the blade 
 tools themselves) didn't last. Later, however, it started spread- 
 ing again. This spread took it not only to Palestine (Mount 
 ( armel. Wad F) again, but also to Europe, and, at some 
 uncertain time, to Africa. It reached Europe at least by the 
 end of the second phase of the last great glaciation. By 60,000 
 years ago, it must have been well established in western Europe. 
 
 The production of blade tools did not immediately swamp 
 the set of older habits: the use of flake tools also continued. 
 
 We know a good deal about different blade industries in 
 Europe. Almost all of them come from cave layers, and I 
 have included a chart (p. 61) of some of the complicated details. 
 
 SPECIAL TYPES OF BLADE TOOLS 
 
 1 Ik- most useful tools that appear at this time are blade tools, 
 or were made from blades. 
 
 1. The "backed'* blade. This is a knife made of a flint 
 blade, with one cd^i- purposely blunted, probably to 
 save the user's fingers from being cut. 
 
 • 62 • 
 
2. The burin or "graver." The burin was the original 
 chisel. Its cutting edge is transverse, like a chisel's. 
 Some burins are made like a screw-driver, save that 
 burins are sharp. Others have edges more like the 
 
 BURI N S 
 
 blade of a chisel or push plane, with only one bevel. 
 Burins were probably used to make slots in wood and 
 bone; that is, to make handles or shafts for other tools. 
 
 The "shouldered" point. These stone points were used 
 to tip arrows or light spears. They were made from 
 blades, and they had a long tang at the bottom where 
 they were fixed to the shaft. At the place where the 
 tang met the main body of the stone point, there was 
 
 SHOULDERED POINT 
 
 a marked "shoulder," the beginnings of a barb. Such 
 points had either one or two shoulders. 
 
 4. The "notched" or "strangulated" blade. Along with 
 the points for arrows or light spears must go a tool to 
 
 • 63 • 
 
prepare the arrow or spear shaft. Today, such a tool 
 would be called a "draw-knife" or a "spoke-shave," 
 and this is what the notched blades probably are. Our 
 spoke-shaves have sharp straight cutting blades and 
 
 N OTC H E D 
 
 BLADE 
 
 really "shave." Notched blades of flint probably 
 scraped rather than cut. 
 
 The "awl," "drill," or "borer." These blade tools 
 are worked out to a spike-like point. They must have 
 been used for making holes in wood, bone, shell, or 
 other things. 
 
 DRILL OR. AW L 
 • 64 • 
 
6. The "end scraper on a blade" is a tool with one or 
 both ends worked so as to give a good scraping edge. 
 It could have been used to hollow out wood or bone, 
 scrape hides, remove bark from trees, and a number 
 of other things. 
 
 There is one very special type of flint tool, which is best 
 known from western Europe in an industry called the Solu- 
 trean. These tools were usually made of blades, but the best 
 examples are so carefully worked on both sides (bifacially) 
 that it is impossible to see the original blade. These are 
 
 7. The "laurel leaf" and "willow leaf" points. Some of 
 these tools were long and dagger-like, and must have 
 been used as knives or daggers. Others were small, 
 and must have been mounted on spear- or arrow- 
 shafts. Some of the "willow leaf" points are single- 
 shouldered, with a tang. Both types are illustrated 
 on page 66. 
 
 END-SCRAPER ON A BLADE 
 
 The industries characterized by tools in the blade tradition 
 also yield some flake and core tools. We will end this list 
 with two types of tools that appear at this time. The first is 
 made of a flake; the second is a core tool. 
 
 • 65 • 
 
The "keel-shaped" round scraper is usually small and 
 quite round, and has had chips removed up to a peak 
 in the center. It is called "keel-shaped" because it is 
 supposed to look (when upside down) like a section 
 through a boat. Actually, it looks more like a tent or 
 an umbrella. Its outer edges arc sharp all the way 
 around, and it was probably a general purpose scraping 
 
 tool. 
 
 LAUR EL LEAF 
 
 POINT i: ■- 
 
 Wl LLOW LEAF 
 POINT 
 • 66 • 
 
KEELED ROUND SCRAPER 
 
 SIDE VI EW 
 
 TOP VI EW 
 
 KEEL-ENDED SCRAPER 
 
 67 
 
9. The "keel-shaped nosed scraper" is a much larger and 
 heavier tool than the round scraper. It was made on 
 a core with a flat bottom, and has one nicely worked 
 end or "nose." Such tools are usually large enough 
 to he easily grasped, and probably were used like push 
 planes (see illustration, p. 67). 
 
 The stone tools (usually made of flint) we have just listed 
 are among the most easily recognized blade tools, although 
 they show differences in detail at different times. There are 
 
 SPLIT-BASED BONE POINT 
 
 also many other kinds. Not all of these tools appear in any 
 one industry at one time. Thus the different industries shown 
 in the chart on page 61 each have only some of the blade tools 
 we've just listed, and also a few flake tools. Some industries 
 even have a few core tools. The particular types of blade 
 tools appearing in one cave layer or another tell us which 
 industry we have in each layer. 
 
 OTHER KINDS OF TOOLS 
 
 By this time in Europe — say from just before 70,000 to about 
 20,000 years ago — we begin to find other kinds of material too. 
 Bone tools begin to appear. There are knives, pins, needles 
 with eyes, and little double-pointed straight bars of bone that 
 were probably fish-hooks. The fish-line would have been 
 fastened in the renter of the bar; when the fish swallowed the 
 bait, the bar would have caught cross-wise in the fish's mouth. 
 One quite special kind of bone tool is a long flat point 
 for a light spear. It has a deep notch cut up into the breadth 
 
 • 68 • 
 
of its base, and is called a "split-based bone point." We also 
 know examples of bone beads from these times, and of bone 
 handles for flint tools. Pierced teeth of some animals were 
 worn as beads or pendants, but I am not sure that elks' teeth 
 were worn this early. There are even spool-shaped "buttons" 
 or toggles. 
 
 Antler came into use for tools, especially in central and 
 western Europe. We do not know the use of one particular 
 antler tool that has a large hole bored in one end. One 
 suggestion is that it was a thong-stropper used to strop or work 
 up hide thongs (see illustration, p. 70). 
 
 Another interesting tool, usually of antler, is the spear- 
 thrower, which is little more than a stick with a notch or hook 
 on one end. The hook fits into the butt end of the spear, and 
 the length of the spear-thrower allows you to put much more 
 power into the throw. It's pretty much the same principle as 
 the sling. 
 
 SPEAR. - THROWER 
 
 BONE HARPOON 
 
Very fancy harpoons of antler were also made in the lat- 
 ter half of the period in western Europe. These harpoons 
 had barbs on one or both sides and a base which would slip 
 out of the shaft. Some have engraved decoration. 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF ART 
 
 In western Europe, at least, the period saw the beginnings of 
 several kinds of art work. It is handy to break the art down 
 
 THONG - STROPPER 
 
 into two great groups: the movable art, and the cave paintings 
 and sculpture. The movable art group includes the scratch- 
 ings, engravings, and modeling which decorate tools and 
 weapons. Knives, stroppers, spear-throwers, harpoons, and 
 sometimes just plain fragments of bone or antler are often 
 carved. Their surfaces may show animals, or rather abstract 
 floral designs, or geometric designs. 
 
 Some of the movable art is not done on tools. The most 
 remarkable examples of this class arc little figures of women. 
 These women seem to be pregnant, and their most female 
 characteristics are much emphasized. It is thought that these 
 "Venus" or " Mother-goddess' " figurines may be meant to 
 show the great forces of nature — fertility and the birth of life. 
 
 CAVE PAINTINGS 
 
 In the paintings on walls and ceilings of caves we have some 
 examples that compare with the best art of any time. The 
 
 • 70 • 
 
subjects were usually animals: the mammoth, the bison, the 
 reindeer, the wild horse, the bear, the wild boar, and wild 
 cattle. As in the movable art, there are different styles in the 
 cave art. The really great cave art is pretty well restricted 
 to southern France and Cantabrian (northwestern) Spain. 
 
 "VENUS" FIGURINE FROM WILLENDORF 
 
 There are several interesting things about the "Franco- 
 Cantabrian" cave art. It was done deep down in the darkest 
 and most dangerous parts of the caves although the men lived 
 only in the openings of the caves. If you think what they must 
 have had for lights (crude lamps of hollowed stone, which 
 must have burned some kind of oil or grease, with a matted 
 hair or fiber wick), and of the animals that may have lurked 
 in the caves, you'll understand the part about danger. Then, 
 too, we're sure the pictures these people painted were not 
 meant simply to be looked at and admired, for they painted 
 one picture right over other pictures which had been done 
 earlier. Clearly, it was the act of painting that counted. You 
 had to go way down into the most mysterious depths of the 
 earth, and create an animal in paint. Possibly you believed 
 that by doing this you gained some sort of magic power over 
 the same kind of animals when you hunted them in the open 
 air. It certainly doesn't look as if you cared very much about 
 
 71 
 
the picture you painted, lor you or somebody else soon went 
 down and painted another animal right over the one you had 
 done. 
 
 The cave art of the Franco— Cantabrian style is one of the 
 great artistic achievements of all time. The subjects drawn 
 are almost always the larger animals of the time: the bison, 
 wild cattle and horses, the woolly rhinoceros, the mammoth, 
 the wild boar, and the bear. In some of the best examples, 
 the beasts are drawn in full color, and the drawings are re- 
 markably alive and charged with energy. They come from 
 the hands of men who knew the great animals well — knew 
 the feel of their fur, the tremendous drive of their muscles, 
 and the danger one faced when he hunted them. 
 
 Another artistic style has been found in eastern Spain. It 
 includes lively drawings, often of people hunting with bow 
 and arrow. The East Spanish art is found on open rock 
 faces and in rock shelters. It is less spectacular than the 
 Franco— Cantabrian cave art. 
 
 LII F. AT THE END OF THE ICE AGE IN EUROPE 
 
 Life in these times was probably as good as a hunter could 
 expect it to be. Game and fish seem to have been plentiful; 
 berries and wild fruits probably were, too. From France to 
 Russia, great pits or piles of animal bones have been found. 
 Some of this killing may have been done as our Plains Indians 
 killed the buffalo — by stampede. There were also good tools 
 for hunting, however. In western Europe, people lived in 
 the openings of caves and under overhanging rocks. To the 
 east, on the great plains of Russia, very crude huts were being 
 built, half underground. The first part of this time must 
 have been cold, for it was the middle and end phases of the 
 last great glaciation. Northern Europe, from Scotland to 
 Scandinavia, northern Germany and Russia, and also the 
 higher mountains to the south, were certainly covered with 
 ice. But people had fire, and the needles and tools that were 
 used for scraping hides must mean that they wore clothing. 
 
 It is clear that men were thinking of a great variety of 
 things beyond the tools that helped them get food and shelter. 
 
 • 72 • 
 
Such burials as we find have more grave-gifts than before. 
 Beads and ornaments and some flint tools are included in the 
 grave, and sometimes the body is sprinkled with red ochre. 
 Red is the color of blood, which means life, and of fire, which 
 means heat. Professor Childe wonders if the red ochre was a 
 pathetic attempt at magic — to give back to the body the heat 
 that had gone from it. But pathetic or not, it is sure proof that 
 these people were already moved by death as men still are 
 moved by it. 
 
 Their art is another example of the direction the human 
 mind was taking. And when I say human, I mean it in the 
 fullest sense, for this is the time in which fully modern man 
 has appeared. On page 26, we spoke of the Cro-Magnon 
 group and of the Combe Capelle and Brunn group of Cauca- 
 soids, of the Grimaldi Negroids, and even of the possibility 
 of a Mongoloid strain in Europe. I doubt that any one of 
 these groups produced most of the achievements of the times. 
 It's not yet absolutely sure which particular group produced 
 the great cave art. The artists were almost certainly a blend 
 of several (no doubt already mixed) groups. The pair of 
 Grimaldi Negroids were buried in a grave with a sprinkling 
 of red ochre, and were provided with shell beads and orna- 
 ments, and with some blade tools of flint. The Grimaldians 
 seem to have shared equally in the cultural achievements of 
 the times for all that the archaeologist can say. 
 
 LATER BLADE-TOOL INDUSTRIES IN THE 
 NEAR EAST AND IN AFRICA 
 
 The blade tool industries we have just talked about were 
 spread from Europe to central Siberia. They also reached 
 down as far as Palestine. We have seen that Professor Garrod 
 thinks the whole blade tradition may have originated in some 
 part of the Middle East. 
 
 When we last spoke of Africa (p. 59), I told you that stone 
 tools there were continuing in the Levalloisian flake tradition, 
 and were becoming smaller. At some time during this process, 
 two new tool types appeared in northern Africa: one was a 
 point with a tang, and the other was a sort of "laurel leaf" 
 point. These two tool types are called the "Aterian" and the 
 
 • 73 • 
 
"Sbaikian" points. Professor Childe thinks they may have 
 been introduced into Europe in time to account for some of the 
 tanged points and the "Solutrean laurel leaf" points. What 
 does seem clear is that the Made tool tradition arrived late 
 
 in Africa. 
 
 MICROLITHS 
 
 When the habits of making blade tools finally did take hold 
 in Africa, at least one strange thing happened. People began 
 making blade tools of very small size. They learned how to 
 chip very slender and tiny blades from a prepared core. Then 
 they made these little blades into tiny triangles, half-moons, 
 trapezoids, and several other geometric forms. These little 
 tools are called "microliths." They are so small that most of 
 them must have been fixed in handles or shafts. 
 
 We have found several examples of microliths mounted 
 in shafts. In northern Europe, where their use soon spread, 
 the microlithic triangles were set in rows down each side of 
 a bone or wood point. One corner of each little triangle 
 stuck out, and the whole thing made a fine barbed harpoon. 
 In historic times in Egypt, the microlithic trapezoids were 
 still in use. They were fastened — blunt end out — on the end 
 of an arrow shaft. It seems queer to give an arrow a point 
 shaped like a "T." Actually, the little trapezoidal points 
 were very sharp, and must have pierced the hides of animals 
 very easily. We also think that the broader cutting edge of 
 the trapezoidal point may have caused more bleeding than a 
 pointed arrowhead would. In hunting fleet-footed animals 
 like the gazelle, which might run for miles after being shot 
 with an arrow, it was an advantage to cause as much bleeding 
 as possible, for the animal would drop sooner. 
 
 We are not really sure that microliths were first invented 
 in north Africa. They may have come first from Palestine, 
 Turkey, or the Middle East, where we've also found some. 
 So far, we've found them in greatest numbers in north Africa. 
 From there, they seem to have moved (probably over the 
 Strait of Gibraltar) up into Europe, by way of Spain. A few 
 microliths have been found in France, at the time of the later 
 
 • 74 • 
 
cave art. In much later times they even moved up into 
 Scotland and to the shores of the Baltic Sea. Those that 
 reached South Russia and central Europe probably moved 
 up out of the Near East. 
 
 Plain flake 
 
 BUR.IN 
 
 LUNATE 
 
 TRAPEZOID 
 
 M 
 
 PO! NT 
 
 ARROWH EAD 
 
 C R O L I T H S 
 
 Remember that the microliths we are talking about here 
 are made from little blades, and are usually geometric in 
 outline. Each microlithic industry is made up, in good part, 
 of such tiny blade tools. But there are also some normal-sized 
 blade tools and even some flake scrapers. 
 
 NETHER AFRICA 
 
 Blade tools and "laurel leaf" points and some other probably 
 late stone tool types also appear in central and south Africa. 
 There is as yet no good way of telling just where they belong 
 in time. Some people have guessed that they are as early as 
 similar European and Near Eastern examples, but I doubt it. 
 
 THE FAR EAST 
 
 India and the Far East still seem to be going their own way. 
 In India, some blade tools have been found, but these are not 
 
 75 
 
well dated. In the Far Fast it looks as if the old chopper tool 
 tradition was still continuing. For Burma, Dr. Movius feels 
 this is fairly certain : for China it is pure guess-work. Actually, 
 we know very little about the Far East at about the time of 
 the last great glaciation. This is a shame, too, as you will 
 soon agree. 
 
 Mil NEW WORLD BECOMES INHABITED 
 
 At some time toward the end of the last great glaciation — say 
 20,000 years ago — people began to move over Bering Strait, 
 from Asia into America. As you know, the American Indians 
 are basically Mongoloids. So must have been the first people 
 who came into the New World 20,000 years ago — the direct 
 ancestors of the historic American Indians. 
 
 The stone tool traditions of Europe, Africa, the Near and 
 Middle East, and central Siberia, did not move into the New 
 World. With only a very few special exceptions, there are 
 no core-bifaces, flakes, or blade tools of the Old World traditions 
 in all of the Indian flints in the New World. Such things just 
 haven't been found here. 
 
 This is why I say it's a shame we don't know more of 
 the end of the chopper tool tradition in the Far East. Accord- 
 ing to Weidenreich, the Mongoloids were in the Far East long 
 before the end of the last glaciation. And it was the Mongo- 
 loids who came to America. We know a little about the habits 
 for making stone tools which these first people brought with 
 them, and these habits don't conform with those of the western 
 Old World. We'd better keep our eyes open for whatever 
 
 ipened to the end of the chopper tool tradition in northern 
 China. Also we should watch future excavations in eastern 
 Siberia. Perhaps we shall find the chopper tool tradition 
 spreading up that far. 
 
 ( HANGES AT THE END OE THE ICE AGE 
 
 The last great glaciation of the Ice Age was a three part affair. 
 In Europe the third and last phase of this glaciation reached 
 its peak just before 20,000 years ago. Then the glaciers began 
 to melt back, for the last time. (Remember that Professor 
 Antevs [p. 17 isn't sure the Ice Age is over yet!) This 
 
 •76 • 
 
melting sometimes went by fits and starts, and the weather 
 wasn't always changing for the better; but there was at least 
 one time when European weather was even better than it is 
 now. 
 
 The melting back of the glaciers and the weather fluctua- 
 tions caused other changes too. We know a fair amount about 
 these changes in Europe. In an earlier chapter, we said that 
 the whole Ice Age was a matter of continual change over 
 long periods of time. It just happens that we know the most 
 about this last period of change, from 18,000 B.C. until now. 
 In this period some interesting things happened to mankind. 
 
 In Europe, along with the melting of the last glaciers 
 other things were changing. Britain and Ireland became 
 islands. The Baltic was sometimes a salt sea, sometimes a large 
 fresh-water lake. Forests began to grow where the glaciers had 
 been, and in what had once been the cold tundra areas in 
 front of the glaciers. The great cold-weather animals — the 
 mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros — retreated northward 
 and finally died out. It is probable that the efficient hunting 
 of the earlier people of 30,000-20,000 years ago had helped this 
 process along (see p. 72). Europeans of the post-glacial period 
 also had to keep changing to keep up with the times. 
 
 The archaeological materials for the time from 18,000 to 
 8,000 B.C. seem simpler than those of the previous ten thousand 
 years. The great cave art of France and Spain had gone; 
 so had the fine carving in bone and antler. Smaller, speedier 
 animals were moving into the new forests. New ways of 
 hunting them, or ways of getting other food, had to be found. 
 Hence new tools and weapons were necessary. Some of the 
 people who moved into northern Germany were successful 
 reindeer hunters. Then the reindeer moved off to the north, 
 and again new sources of food had to be found. 
 
 THE READJUSTMENTS COMPLETED IN EUROPE 
 
 After about ten thousand years, things began to look better. 
 Or at least we can say this: by about 8000 B.C., we again 
 get better archaeological materials. The best of these come 
 from the north European area: Britain, Belgium, Holland, 
 
 • 77 • 
 
Denmark, north Germany, southern Norway and Sweden. 
 Much of this north European material comes from bogs and 
 swamps where it had become water-logged and has kept very 
 well. Thus we have much more complete assemblages 1 than 
 for any time earlier. The besl known of these assemblages is 
 the Maglemosian, named after a great Danish peat-swamp where 
 much has keen found. 
 
 In the Maglemosian assemblage the Hint industry is still 
 very important. Blade tools, tanged arrow points, and burins 
 were still made. Rut there were also axes for cutting the trees 
 in the new forests. Moreover, the tiny microlithic blades, in 
 a variety of geometric forms, are also found. Thus, a special- 
 ized tradition that began either south or east of the Mediter- 
 ranean had reached northern Europe. There is also a ground 
 stone industry; some axes and club-heads were made by 
 grinding and polishing rather than chipping. The industries 
 in bone and antler show a great variety of tools: axes, fish- 
 hooks, fish spears, handles and hafts for other tools, harpoons, 
 and clubs. A remarkable industry in wood has been pre- 
 served. Paddles, sled runners, handles for tools, and bark 
 floats for fish-nets have been found. There are even fish-nets 
 made of plant fibers. Canoes of some kind were no doubt 
 made. Bone and antler tools were decorated with simple 
 patterns, and amber was collected. 
 
 It seems likely that the Maglemosian bog finds are remains 
 of summer camps, and that in winter the people moved to 
 higher and drier regions. Childe calls them the "Forest folk" ; 
 they probably lived much the same sort of life as did our 
 
 1 •Assemblage" is a useful \sortl when there are different kinds of 
 il materials belonging together, from one area and of one 
 An assemblage is made up of a number of "industries" (that is, 
 all the tools in chipped stone, all the tools in bone, all the tools in wood, 
 the traces of houses, etc.) and everything else that manages to survive, 
 such as the art, the burials, the bones of the animals used as food, and 
 the traces of plant foods; in fact everything that has been left to us and 
 can be used to help reconstruct the lives of the people to whom it once 
 belonged. Our own present-day "assemblage" would be the sum total 
 of all the objects in our mail-order catalogues, department stores and 
 supply houses of every sort, our churches, our art galleries and other 
 buildings, together with our roads, canals, dams, irrigation ditches, and 
 any other traces we might leave of ourselves, from graves to garbage 
 dumps. Not everything would last, so that an archaeologist digging us 
 up say 2. nnii years from now— would find only the most durable items 
 in our assemblage. 
 
 • 78 • 
 
Indians of the north central states. They hunted small game 
 or deer; they did a great deal of fishing; they collected what 
 plant food they could find. They had succeeded in domesti- 
 cating the dog; he was still a very wolf-like dog, but his long 
 association with mankind had now begun. Professor Coon 
 believes these people were direct descendants of the men of 
 the glacial age and that they had much the same appearance. 
 He finds that most of the Ice Age survivors still extant are 
 living today in the northwestern European area. 
 
 SOUTH AND CENTRAL EUROPE PERHAPS AS 
 READJUSTED AS THE NORTH 
 
 There is always one trouble with things that come from areas 
 where preservation is exceptionally good: the very quantity 
 of materials in such an assemblage tends to make things from 
 other areas look poor and simple although they may not have 
 been so originally at all. The assemblages of the people who 
 lived to the south of the Maglemosian area may also have 
 been quite large and varied; but, unfortunately, relatively 
 little of the southern assemblages has lasted. The water- 
 logged sites of the Maglemosian area preserved a great deal 
 more. Hence the Maglemosian itself looks quite advanced to 
 us, when we compare it with the few things that have happened 
 to last in other areas. If we could go back and wander over 
 the Europe of eight thousand years ago, we would probably 
 find that the peoples of France, central Europe, and south 
 and central Russia were just as advanced as those of the north 
 European-Baltic belt. 
 
 South of the north European belt the hunting-food-collect- 
 ing peoples were living on as best they could during this time. 
 One interesting group, which seems to have kept to the regions 
 of sandy soil and scrub forest, made great quantities of geo- 
 metric microliths. These are the materials called Tardenoisian. 
 The materials of the "Forest folk" of France and central 
 Europe are called Azilian. 
 
 HOW MUCH REAL CHANGE WAS THERE? 
 
 You can see that no really basic change in the way of life has 
 yet been described. The upsets that came with the melting 
 
 • 79 • 
 
of the last glaciers caused all sorts of changes in tools and in 
 food-getting habits, hut the people of Europe in 5000 B.C. or 
 even later were still just as much simple hunters, fishers, and 
 food collectors as they had been in 25,000 B.C. Childe sees 
 the problem that faced the Europeans of 18,000 to 5000 B.C. 
 as a problem in readaptation to the post-glacial forest environ- 
 ment. The Europeans solved their problem by making what- 
 ever changes they had to make, in order to go on living the 
 way they had been living — by simple food collection. In other 
 words, they changed just enough so that they would not have 
 to change, if you see what I mean. 
 
 CHANGES IN OTHER AREAS? 
 
 All this last section was about Europe. How about the rest 
 of the world, when the last glaciers were melting away? 
 
 We don't yet know much about this particular time in other 
 parts of the world except the Mediterranean basin and the 
 Middle East. People were certainly moving into the New 
 World by way of Siberia and the Bering Strait about this time. 
 But for the greater parts of Africa and Asia, we simply do not 
 know what was happening. Some day, we shall no doubt find 
 out; today, we are without information. 
 
 A REAL CHANGE IN THE NEAR EAST 
 
 The southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and 
 the area of the Middle East (as far as Iran and the valley of 
 the Indus River) turn out to be the most interesting region 
 of all, for it was somewhere here that the first basic change in 
 human life took place. This change amounted to a revolution, 
 just as important as the Industrial Revolution. In it, men 
 learned to domesticate plants and animals. In other words, 
 they began producing their food, instead of simply collecting it. 
 Professor Childe thus has reason to speak of the "food-produc- 
 ing revolution." Why did this change take place? 
 
 A THEORY AS TO THE CAUSE OF THE 
 REVOLUTION 
 
 The ten thousand years following 18,000 B.C. must have been 
 very difficult ones. These were the years when the most 
 
 • 80 ■ 
 
marked melting of the last glaciers was going on. While the 
 glaciers were in place, the climate to the south of them must 
 have been different from the climate in those areas today. 
 You have no doubt read that people once lived in regions 
 now covered by the Sahara Desert. This is true; just when is 
 not entirely clear. The theory is that during the time of the 
 glaciers, there was a broad belt of rain winds south of the 
 glaciers. These rain winds would have kept north Africa and 
 the Near and Middle East green and fertile. But when the 
 glaciers melted back to the north, the belt of rain winds is 
 supposed to have moved north too. Then the people living 
 south and east of the Mediterranean would have found that 
 their water supply was drying up, that the animals they hunted 
 were dying or moving away, and that the plant foods they 
 collected were dried up and scarce. 
 
 According to the theory, all this would have been true 
 except in the valleys of rivers, and in oases in the growing 
 deserts. Here, in the only places where water was left, the 
 men and animals and plants would have clustered. They 
 would have been forced to live close to one another, in order 
 to live at all. Then presently, the men would have seen that 
 some animals were more useful or made better food than 
 others, and so they would have begun to protect these animals 
 from their natural enemies. The men would also have been 
 forced to try new plant foods, foods which possibly had to be 
 prepared before they could be eaten. Thus, with trials and 
 errors, but by being forced to live close to them, men would 
 have learned to domesticate plants and animals. 
 
 THE THEORY STILL ONLY A THEORY 
 
 So far, this theory is pretty much all guess-work, and there 
 are some questions it leaves unanswered. For one thing, the 
 glaciers which began melting about 18,000 B.C. were merely 
 the last of three phases of the last great glaciation. There 
 had also been three earlier periods of great glaciers, and long 
 periods of warm weather in between. If the rain belt moved 
 north as the glaciers melted, after 18,000 B.C., it must have 
 moved in the same direction in earlier times. Thus the forced 
 neighborliness of men, plants and animals in river valleys and 
 
 • 81 • 
 
oases must also have happened earlier. Why didn't domestica- 
 tion happen earlier too, then? 
 
 One possible answer is that culture had not yet advanced 
 to a point where domestication could have been comprehended. 
 Another suggestion is that we don't yet have archaeological 
 assemblages in north Africa or the Near East that show 
 great changes during the ten thousand years after 18,000 B.C. 
 The little we have found shows only gradual alteration. It 
 seems fairly clear that in north Africa, Egypt, and Palestine, 
 the habits of making microlithic tools must have started well 
 before 18,000 B.C. It doesn't look as if there had been as much 
 technological change in this area as there was in northern 
 Europe. The great technological change, when we first see 
 it, is later, about 5500 B.C. 
 
 THE NATUFIAN, A FINAL FOOD-COLLECTORS' 
 ASSEMBLAGE 
 
 I am closing this chapter with a description of one of the best 
 known of the late food-collecting assemblages in the Near 
 East. This is the assemblage called the Natufian. It comes 
 from the upper layers of caves in Palestine, and we don't 
 know just how old it is. If we should guess that it probably 
 fills within two or three thousand years either way from 
 10,000 B.C., we probably shouldn't be far wrong. 
 
 As far as we know, the people who produced the Natufian 
 assemblage were still only cave dwellers. In the best-known 
 example, on Mount Carmel, they lived in the open mouth of 
 a lar<M' e.ive and on the terrace in front of it. On the terrace, 
 they had set at least two short curving lines of stones. But 
 these were hardly architecture; they seem more like benches 
 01 perh. ips the low walls of open pens. There were also one 
 or two small clusters of stones laid like paving, and a ring 
 of stones around a hearth or fireplace. One very round and 
 regular basin-shaped depression had been cut into the rocky 
 floor of the terrace, and there were other less regular basin- 
 like depressions. 
 
 Most of the finds in the Natufian layer of the Mount 
 ' innel cave were flints. About 80 per cent of these flint tools 
 
 • 82 • 
 
were microliths made by the regular working of tiny blades 
 into various geometric forms. The larger flint tools included 
 backed blades, burins, scrapers, a few arrow points, some larger 
 hacking or picking tools, and one special type. This last was 
 the sickle blade. 
 
 We know a sickle blade of flint when we see one, because 
 of a strange polish or sheen which seems to develop on the 
 cutting edge when the blade has been used to cut grasses or 
 grain. In the Natufian, we have even found the straight bone 
 handles in which a number of flint sickle blades were set in 
 a line. 
 
 There was a small industry in ground or pecked stone (that 
 is, abraded not chipped) in the Natufian. This included some 
 pestle and mortar fragments. The mortars are said to have 
 a deep and narrow hole, and some of the pestles show traces 
 of red ochre. We are not sure that these mortars and pestles 
 were used for grinding food. In addition, there were one or 
 two bits of carving in stone. 
 
 NATUFIAN ANTIQUITIES IN OTHER MATERIALS; 
 BURIALS AND PEOPLE 
 
 The Natufian industry in bone was quite rich. It included, 
 beside the sickle hafts mentioned above, points and harpoons, 
 straight and curved types of fish-hooks, awls, pins and needles, 
 and a variety of beads and pendants. There were also beads 
 and pendants of pierced teeth and shell. 
 
 A number of Natufian burials have been found; some 
 burials were grouped together in one grave. The people who 
 were buried within the Mount Carmel cave were laid on their 
 backs in an extended position, while those on the terrace 
 seem to have been "flexed" (placed in their graves in a curled- 
 up position). This may mean no more than that it was easier 
 to dig a long hole in cave dirt than in the hard-packed dirt 
 of the terrace. The people often had some kind of object 
 buried with them, and several of the best collections of beads 
 come from the burials. On two of the skulls there were traces 
 of elaborate head-dresses of shell beads. 
 
 The animal bones of the Natufian layers show beasts of 
 a "modern" type, but with some differences from those of 
 
 • 83 • 
 
presem-da\ Palestine. The bones of gazelle far outnumber 
 the deer bones; since gazelles like a much drier climate than 
 deer, Palestine must then have had much the same climate 
 that it has today. Some of the animal bones were those of 
 large or dangerous beasts: the hyena, the bear, the wild boar, 
 and the leopard. But the Natufian people had the help of 
 a large domesticated dog. If our guess at a date for the 
 Natufian is right, t His is an even earlier dog than was that in 
 the Maglemosian of northern Europe. 
 
 The study of the human bones from the Natufian burials 
 is not yet complete. Until Professor McCown's study becomes 
 available, we may note Professor Coon's assessment that these 
 people were of a "basically Mediterranean type with minor 
 Negroid affinities." 
 
 WIRE THE NATUFIANS FOOD-PRODUCERS? 
 
 It is clear that a great part of the food of the Natufian people 
 must have been hunted or collected. Shells of land, fresh- 
 water, and sea animals also appeared in their cave layers. 
 But, on the other hand, we have the sickles, the mortars, and 
 the domesticated dog. Had the great change to the domesti- 
 cation of plants and animals begun in the Natufian? 
 
 Professor Childe thinks the birth of the food-producing 
 revolution may already be happening in the Natufian, but 
 I am still skeptical. You might cut wild grasses or grains with 
 a sickle, without ever planting them. Mortars and pestles 
 might have been used for grinding only wild grain — if those 
 of the Natufian were used for food at all. The dog doesn't 
 worry us so much : we know he lived with simple food-collectors 
 in the north. But Professor Childe warns us that it will be 
 very hard for archaeologists to see the birth of the food- 
 producing revolution, because the people of those times may 
 have taken a long time to invent tools to go with their new 
 way of life. Unless we are lucky enough to find the actual 
 grain, or the bones of the domesticated animals, we may never 
 be able to put our fingers directly on the archaeological 
 materials that belong to the birth of food production. 
 
 Neither Professor Childe nor I mean to tell you that it 
 was the Natufians themselves, or their direct descendants, who 
 
 • 84 • 
 
alone invented food production. We are simply saying that 
 the change took place somewhere in the greater Near Eastern 
 area, and that we do not know exactly how it came about. 
 It does happen, however, that the Natufian assemblage appears 
 within the area and belongs to the range of time during which 
 food production began. 
 
 85 
 
the First Revolution 
 
 A basic change in human economy began to take place about 
 ten thousand years ago. I have used Childe's term for it— 
 the "food-producing revolution." 
 
 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FOOD-COLLECTORS 
 AND FOOD-PRODUCERS 
 
 Childe uses the word "revolution" because of the radical 
 change that took place in the habits and customs of man. 
 Food collectors — that is, hunters, fishers, berry- and nut- 
 gatherers — had to live in small groups or bands, for they had 
 to be ready to move wherever their food supply moved. Not 
 many people can be fed in this way in one area, and small 
 children and old folks are a burden. There is not enough food 
 to store, and it is not the kind that can be stored for long. 
 
 Do you see how this all fits into a picture? Small groups 
 of people — living now in this cave, now in that — or out in 
 the open, as they moved after the animals they hunted ; no 
 permanent villages, a few half-buried huts at best ; no breakable 
 utensils; no pottery; no sign of anything for clothing beyond 
 the tools that were probably used to dress the skins of animals; 
 no time to think of much of anything but food and protection 
 and disposal of the dead when death did come; an existence 
 
 • 86 • 
 
which takes nature as it finds it, which does little or nothing 
 to modify nature — all in all, a savage's existence, and a very- 
 tough one. A man who spends his whole life following animals 
 just to kill them to eat, or moving from one berry patch to 
 another, is really living just like an animal himself. 
 
 THE FOOD-PRODUCING ECONOMY 
 
 Against this picture let me try to draw another — that of man's 
 life after food production had begun. His meat was stored 
 "on the hoof," his grain in silos or great pottery jars. He lived 
 in a house; it was worth his while to build one, because he 
 couldn't move too far from his fields and flocks. In his 
 neighborhood enough food could be grown and enough 
 animals bred so that many people were kept busy. They all 
 lived close to their flocks and fields, in a village. The village 
 was already of a fair size, and it was growing, too. Everybody 
 had a more rounded diet; they were all stronger, and there 
 were more children. Children and old men could shepherd 
 the animals by day or help with the lighter work in the fields. 
 After the crops had been harvested the younger men might 
 go hunting, and some of them would fish, but the food they 
 brought in was only an addition to the food in the village ; the 
 villagers wouldn't starve, even if the hunters and fishermen 
 came home empty-handed. 
 
 There was more time to do different things, too. They 
 began to modify nature. They made pottery out of raw clay, 
 and textiles out of hair or fiber. People who became good at 
 pottery-making traded their pots for food, and spent all of 
 their time on pottery alone. Other people were learning to 
 weave cloth, or to make new tools. There were already 
 people in the village who were becoming full-time craftsmen. 
 
 Other things were changing, too. The villagers must have 
 had to agree on new rules for living together. The head man 
 of the village had problems different from those of the chief 
 of the food-collectors' band. If somebody's flock of sheep 
 spoiled a wheat field, the owner wanted payment for the grain 
 he had lost. The chief of the hunters was never bothered 
 with such questions. Even their gods had changed. The 
 
 • 87 • 
 
spirits and the magic that had been used by hunters weren't of 
 any use to the villagers. They needed gods who watched over 
 the fields and the flocks, and they began to erect buildings 
 where their gods might dwell, and where the men who knew 
 most about the gods might live. 
 
 WAS FOOD-PRODUCING A "REVOLUTION"? 
 
 If you can see the difference between these two pictures — 
 between life in the food-collecting stage and life after food 
 production had begun — you'll see why Professor Childe speaks 
 of a revolution. By revolution, he doesn't mean that it all 
 happened over night, or that it happened only once. We 
 don't know exactly how long it took. Some people think 
 that all these changes may have occurred in less than 500 
 years. But I doubt that. It probably took a thousand years 
 or more to really "get going." 
 
 MORE THAN ONE CASE OF THE FOOD- 
 PRODUCING REVOLUTION 
 
 The food-producing revolution must have happened several 
 times, and in different places. We're sure it occurred in- 
 dependently in the New World, and rather late (probably 
 after 1000 B.C.). We think it happened separately in China 
 about 3000 B.C., but we don't know whether the ideas that 
 started the revolution there were borrowed or not. There is 
 also a chance that rice was first cultivated in eastern India or 
 Malaysia, and that there may have been an independent 
 revolution there. But the earliest, and for our own history 
 the most important, birth of food production was in the Near 
 East. 
 
 WHEN AND WHERE IN THE NEAR EAST? 
 
 Food-production probably began in the Near East somewhere 
 about 8000 to 6000 B.C. There is no reason to believe that 
 the people who developed food-production were any dif- 
 ferent from the Natufians — that is, Professor Coon's "basic 
 Mediterranean type with minor Negroid affinities." We can't 
 say yet exactly where the first beginnings were made. Nor 
 is it likely that only one small region in the whole Near 
 
 • 88 • 
 
Eastern area was the original center. Different parts of our 
 new stage probably began in different regions of the area. 
 We know that the plants and animals which were to be 
 domesticated were all present in their wild forms in the greater 
 Near Eastern area. Everything we know so far makes it look 
 as if the time was right in the Near East for the revolution to 
 happen, and so it happened. 
 
 A GAP IN OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE 
 NEAR EAST 
 
 There is one rather disturbing gap in our knowledge of the 
 Near East in these times; for, following the Natufian cave 
 materials, the next step brings us to well-formed village 
 assemblages. Something must lie in between these two stages, 
 and that "something" will show the real beginnings of the 
 food-producing economy. We need to do more digging to 
 clear up this problem as well as others (see p. 98). 
 
 THE DIFFICULTIES INVOLVED IN 
 GIVING DATES 
 
 Dates in the early Near East are troublesome; we just guess. 
 These guesses are "informed," which means that we think we 
 know the various angles of our problem. I told you that the 
 Natufian probably falls somewhere within two or three thou- 
 sand years either way from 10,000 B.C., and this means that 
 the Natufian may fall anywhere from 13,000 B.C. to 7000 B.C. 
 If you ask me a date for the beginning of the food-producing 
 revolution in the Near East, I'd say 7000 B.C., plus or minus 
 a thousand years. For the earliest food-producing assemblages 
 or "village-culture materials" we've found so far, I'm going 
 to give the date of 5500 B.C. plus or minus 500 years. This 
 little table gives you all we know about early dates in the 
 Near East: 
 
 Earliest village-culture materials now 
 
 known 5500 B.C. 6000-5000 B.C. 
 
 ±500 yrs. 
 Probable birth of food-producing 
 
 revolution 7000 B.C. 8000-6000 B.C. 
 
 ±1000 yrs. 
 
 Natufian cave materials of Palestine 10,000 B.C. 13,000-7000 B.C. 
 
 ±3000 yrs. 
 
 • 89 • 
 
If you look at the figures closely, you will see that the lowest 
 date I gave for the Natufian (7000 B.C.) is separated by one 
 thousand years from the earliest date I give for the now known 
 village-culture materials (6000 B.C.). That thousand years 
 or so is the gap in our knowledge of these times — a gap we 
 still have to fill in (see p. 98). 
 
 THE EARLIEST FOOD-PRODUCING REMAINS 
 WE NOW HAVE 
 
 Four of the best-known and the earliest village-culture or food- 
 producing assemblages we've found so far in the Near East are 
 spotted along what Breasted used to call the "Fertile Crescent." 
 The map (p. 91) shows where they were found. According 
 to Breasted this crescent arched up from Palestine, over Syria, 
 and down into southern Mesopotamia. I have changed and 
 extended the area a bit. On my map it begins in the Egyptian 
 delta country, arches up through Palestine and Syria to 
 northern Iraq, and then bends off onto the Iranian plateau 
 in two branches. It is within this irregular "crescent" that 
 all of the very earliest village materials have been found so far. 
 
 There may be two or three other, equally early assem- 
 blages, 1 but these are not so fully known. Most of the details 
 of the four village assemblages we will talk about can be found 
 in the chart (p. 93). 
 
 SIALK IN NORTH-CENTRAL IRAN 
 
 Near the east end of the "crescent," up on the Iranian 
 plateau, lies the site called Sialk. Here, in the very bottom 
 layer of a great mound, was the remains of a very early village. 
 You can note in my chart all the different kinds of things the 
 French archaeologists found there. It was a true village with 
 built houses and two different kinds of pottery. Sialk is the 
 only one of the very early villages where metal tools have 
 been found. These are little pins or perhaps drills of hammered 
 copper. The early Sialk people buried their dead under the 
 
 1 At Jericho in Palestine, at Bakun B in southwestern Iran, and 
 possibly at Tasa in upper Egypt. These sites are also shown on the 
 map (p. 91). The position of the interesting, but slightly later, site of 
 Anau, on the northeastern branch of the "crescent" in Iran, is also shown. 
 
 • 90 • 
 
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 91 
 
floors of their houses and they covered the bodies of the dead 
 with red ochre*. 
 
 HASSUNA, IN UPPER MESOPOTAMIA-IRAQ 
 
 The next important early site is that called Hassuna, in the 
 upper valley of the Tigris River, in northern Iraq. This is 
 Mesopotamia, but the site of Hassuna lies much farther north 
 than the area of historic Babylonia. The bottom layers of the 
 mound contain the mud houses of a very early village. There 
 are several kinds of pottery, and some are painted. The chart 
 gives an idea of all the different things the Iraqi archaeologists 
 found in the houses. The Hassuna people made little clay 
 figurines of human females. These are usually called "mother- 
 goddess'' figurines and may be idols. The burials at Hassuna 
 were sometimes made in big pots. 
 
 JUDAIDAH, IN NORTHWESTERN SYRIA 
 
 Now we move westward to the shores of the Mediterranean, 
 in the area where Syria and Turkey join. Here there are 
 several different mounds whose earliest layers have yielded 
 one kind of early village material. The best known of these 
 is Judaidah, which was dug by archaeologists from the Oriental 
 Institute of the University of Chicago. Earliest Judaidah was 
 also a true village. The walls of its houses were built of mud, 
 but some of their foundations were stone. Again there are 
 several kinds of pottery, different again from the pottery of 
 Si, ilk and Hassuna. Stamp seals of stone appear in the early 
 Judaidah assemblage, but we don't know exactly what they 
 were used for. The Judaidah people buried their dead under 
 their house floors, and sometimes pottery and other things 
 were buried with them. 
 
 FA YUM AND MERIMDE, NEAR THE NILE 
 DELTA, EGYPT 
 
 Near the western end of the "crescent," in northern Egypt, 
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 assemblages. There are two sites here. One site, called 
 Merimde, is a true village. At the other, the Fayum site, only 
 grain bins or silos and many smaller objects were found ; the 
 
 • 92 • 
 
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 93 
 
village itself was gone. Both of these sites are outside of the 
 geographically typical Nile valley strip. Merimde is on the 
 west border of the delta and the desert. The Fayum site is 
 in a lake basin some twenty-five miles west of the Nile, south 
 of Cairo. Since objects last so well in the dry climate of 
 Egypt, you will see on our chart items like baskets and cloth 
 from these sites. Even more important, both the Austrian 
 reports of Merimde and those of the British at Fayum, mention 
 wheat. Barley and flax also appeared in the Fayum site. 
 The grain bins at both sites were holes in the ground lined 
 with mats. Simple burials were found at Merimde. 
 
 THE NATUFIAN AND THE EARLY VILLAGE 
 MATERIALS COMPARED 
 
 In the chart on page 93 you can compare these four early 
 village assemblages with the Natufian of the Palestinian caves. 
 You can see how in the villages much was going on which 
 didn't happen in the Natufian, and you'll realize why I think 
 there is a gap between the times of the Natufian of Palestine 
 and of the earliest known village materials generally. There 
 is no reason to think that Palestine was backward. The 
 earliest layer in the village mound of Jericho should be just 
 as early as our other four, but less is known of it, so I didn't 
 put it in the chart. I'm sure there's a gap in time between 
 the Natufian and the earliest Jericho village. 
 
 Also. I'm sure the Natufian is about the latest cave material 
 we have in the Near East. We haven't yet found any cave 
 material in Iran. The one cave found in north Iraq, at Zarzi, 
 probably was abandoned before Natufian times; the next thing 
 known is the Hassuna village. In northwestern Syria there has 
 been no cave material excavated: we have found only villages 
 like Juclaidah. In Egypt, there is evidently a long gap of 
 time between the Fayum and Merimde sites and the nearest 
 earlier period- that of the flint tools called Sebilian III. 
 
 HOW WF. STAND IN I HE PROBLEM Ol I 11 I 
 EARFII.SI NEAR EASTERN VILLAGES 
 
 Evidently, we have much to find out about a very interesting 
 period. Each of our four earliest village peoples probably 
 
 • 94 • 
 
did not think up these new ideas separately. Apparently 
 they all had the same domestic animals. So far, we have 
 found actual grain only in Egypt (where the preservation is 
 so excellent). But the other early assemblages must have had 
 grain, too, probably wheat and barley, which appear presently 
 in somewhat later levels. And surely there were not four 
 separate inventions of mud houses and of pottery, sickles, and 
 stone hoes in this one region. There must have been some 
 earlier, even more common level of interchange of ideas and 
 technological know-how. 
 
 We are sure that something big had already begun to 
 happen. Unluckily we have found few skeletons from our 
 earliest villages, and most of the burials we have found so 
 far are usually so badly crushed and broken that we can't 
 study or measure the bones. But Professor Coon believes 
 that the few skulls from Merimde are of Mediterranean type, 
 and without the Negroid trace he saw in the Natufians. Pro- 
 fessor H. V. Vallois says that the skulls of adults from Sialk I are 
 "Mediterraneans, or, more exactly, 'Proto-Mediterraneans.' 
 It looks as if the general type of Mediterranean man that we 
 see in the Near East today, was already there. We had him 
 in the Natufian, we find him in the earliest villages, and we 
 keep finding him. From what we know now, the honor of 
 discovering food-production for the first time belongs to this 
 Mediterranean type of man. 
 
 m 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FOOD-PRODUCTION 
 ELSEWHERE 
 
 We know even less about regions outside of the Near East. 
 The time gap between the upper cave layers and the first 
 known villages in China must be very long. We can't yet 
 watch the change from the food-collecting stage to the food- 
 producing stage in China, and so we can't yet answer the 
 question, "Was food-production in China simply an idea 
 borrowed from the Near East?" 
 
 I said (p. 88) that food-production may have begun by 
 itself in several other places; but we haven't yet found enough 
 in these places to tell how it got started. We do know that 
 the Mongoloid New World ancestors of the American Indians 
 
 • 95 • 
 
discovered it for themselves, some time after it had become 
 established among the Mediterranean whites of the Near East. 
 
 THE SPREAD OF FOOD-PRODUCTION 
 TO EUROPE 
 
 How about Europe? I won't give you any details on it at 
 all. 1 This much is clear. The general idea and much of the 
 know-how and the tools of food-production moved from the 
 Near East to Europe. So did the plants and animals which 
 had been domesticated. I don't mean there were traveling 
 salesmen. The process took a long time, and the ideas must 
 have moved from one group of people to the next. There 
 were just possibly some long distance movements of a few 
 people, but we don't yet know enough about these to be sure. 
 The ideas were carried to Europe in two main directions: 
 (1) through Turkey to Greece or to south Russia, and up 
 the Danube River valley; (2) along north Africa or by sea 
 to Italy, Spain, and France, then on to Britain and the north. 
 I say by sea because there are early village materials on Crete, 
 Malta, Sardinia, and the Balearic Islands. Within the time 
 range concerned, there is no question of land-bridges. People 
 had to get to these islands by boats. 
 
 Don't get the notion that the early village materials of 
 Europe were merely poor imitations of those in the Near East. 
 Some of the ideas which reached them were much improved 
 on by the people in Europe. There is one early village 
 assemblage in Germany which seems to have been purely food- 
 producing. No wild animal bones and no arrow points or 
 hunting weapons have turned up at all. This would be rare 
 until much later times in the Near East; in fact it may never 
 have been the case there. 
 
 THE SWISS LAKE-DWELLERS 
 
 One of the best-known early village assemblages anywhere is 
 the material from the Swiss lake-dwellings. This is spectacular 
 because much of it has been preserved. The people lived in 
 
 1 Several of the books I have listed on page 1 12 will give the details. 
 One of the best is Professor Childe's The Dawn of European Civilization. 
 
 ■ 96 • 
 
wooden houses set on piles out in the lakes; so whatever they 
 dropped became water-logged, and has thus been saved for 
 us. There are all kinds of stone tools set in their wooden or 
 antler hafts; there is cloth; there are the remains of grain, 
 vegetables, and fruit. There is so much more than we usually 
 find at such an early date that it makes the Swiss lake-dwellers 
 look pretty special. Actually, they probably weren't any 
 more rich or clever than the rest of the Europeans of their 
 times. We just happen to have more of the things they left. 
 
 DEVELOPMENT AND FURTHER SPREAD 
 OF FOOD PRODUCTION 
 
 In the areas where things got started first, new ideas appeared 
 and new ways of doing things were being invented. While 
 the earlier ideas were spreading out, the newer ideas kept 
 appearing in the center. Later the new ideas began spreading 
 too. The new ideas from the center might get taken up out- 
 side, or they might have to compete with things already de- 
 veloped in the outer areas. It was a complicated process as 
 to which ideas might win out; even simple caprice may often 
 have decided the point. Not everybody can have taken up 
 all of the ideas they heard about. 
 
 Things get very complicated in the Near East alone, in 
 the two thousand years following our four earliest known 
 village materials. We said our four earliest villages would 
 probably date about five hundred years either way from 5500 
 B.C. Soon after 3500 B.C., history begins, and that's the end 
 of my story. 
 
 In that two thousand years between 5500 and 3500 B.C., 
 many things happened in the Near East. Villages grew into 
 towns and some of the towns into still larger towns, trading 
 centers and ports. Houses began to show differences in size 
 and richness; some of the biggest houses may have been 
 inhabited by priests and kings, but others were probably those 
 of rich and successful men. Some buildings that have been 
 found can only have been shrines or little temples. Pottery 
 was often richly varied and decorated. Metal tools appeared. 
 They were made of copper and were simple, but their forms 
 were different from those of the old stone tools. On Judaidah, 
 
 . 97 . 
 
in northwestern Syria (about 3800 B.C.), we found a business- 
 like dagger and a perfectly modern-looking cold chisel, both 
 in copper. These things couldn't have been made by farmers; 
 they must have been the product of craftsmen, who spent their 
 time working in metal. Also, the copper didn't come from 
 that area. It had to be traded into the area, and something 
 must have been given in exchange for it. 
 
 I he coming oi metal tools must have been a thing ol greal 
 importance. Metal tools tell us a story of ever-growing techni- 
 cal skills and of ever broader horizons of trade and economic 
 interchange. Professor Childe has outlined the steps by which 
 different metal tools began to appear in the ancient Near 
 East and Europe. The first step was the simple hammering 
 of "cold" copper into copies of stone tools, or into small 
 ornaments. Next came weapons and larger ornaments of 
 copper and the first bronze, but few tools of "industrial" type. 
 In the third step, smaller copper and bronze tools for crafts- 
 men were added. Heavy bronze tools for agriculture or rough 
 work came last of all. 
 
 Iron tools followed some of the same steps, although that 
 metal did not come into general use until after 1500 B.C. 
 The first iron tools were only copies of contemporary bronze 
 or stone ones. Not until this first step was past did tools of 
 iron begin to take advantage of the strength of the new metal, 
 and appear in new and heavy forms. 
 
 There are more details like this which we could use to 
 build up the story, but I simply want you to get the idea: 
 In the 2,000 years after 5500 B.C., more advances were made 
 than in all the half million years just before. Don't you agree 
 with us in thinking that this whole development was revolu- 
 tionary? 
 
 Alter this publication went to press, my wife and I and 
 our graduate assistant. Miss Charlotte Otten, returned from a 
 spring field season in Iraq. Our "Iraq Project" for the 
 Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago worked on a 
 site called Jarmo in the foothills of southern Kurdistan. Jarmo 
 yielded materials of a technological stage intermediate be- 
 
 • 98 • 
 
tween that of the Sialk, Hassuna, and similar villages (see pp. 
 90-93) and that of the Natufian. Thus Jarmo fills, at least in 
 part, the gap in knowledge that I have stressed on pages 82, 
 89, 90, 94, and 95. 
 
 Jarmo is a village site with simple mud-walled houses that 
 have several rectangular rooms. The Jarmo people had made 
 animal and human figurines of clay, but portable pottery 
 vessels were not yet known. A flourishing ground-stone in- 
 dustry included stone vessels. One link backwards to the 
 Natufian stage was the persistence of microliths. Quantities 
 of animal bones and a few kernels of grain were recovered. 
 
 The full implication of the Jarmo materials will only be 
 known after a complete study has been made. When the 
 materials can be placed in a chart like that on page 93, I 
 should judge that the assemblage will be nearer to the Sialk- 
 Hassuna stage than to that of the Natufian. The gap in 
 knowledge is not yet completely filled, but the discovery of 
 Jarmo qualifies what I say of the gap on the pages indicated 
 above. 
 
 99 
 
THE Conquest of Civilization 
 
 We are now coming to the point where history is about to 
 begin. I am going to stick pretty close to the Near East in 
 this chapter. It is perhaps most interesting to most of us, for 
 the foundations of Western Civilization were laid in the Near 
 East. 
 
 There is another interesting thing, too. We have seen 
 that the first experiment in food-production took place in 
 the Near East. So did the first experiment in civilization. 
 Both experiments "took." The traditions we live by today 
 are based, ultimately, on those ancient beginnings in food- 
 production and civilization in the Near East. 
 
 WII.VI "CIVILIZATION" MEANS 
 
 I shall not try to define "civilization'' for you; rather, I shall 
 tell you what the word brings to my mind. To me civilization 
 means urbanization: the fact that there are cities. It means, 
 a formal political set-up: that there are kings or governing 
 bodies that the people have set up. It means formal laws, 
 rules of conduct, which the government (if not the people) 
 believes are necessary. It probably means that there are 
 formalized projects — roads, harbors, irrigation canals, and the 
 like — and also some sort of army or police force to protect 
 
 • 100 • 
 
them. It also usually means there is writing. (The people 
 of the Andes — the Incas — had everything which goes to make 
 up a civilization but formal writing. I can see no reason to 
 say they were not civilized.) 
 
 In different civilizations, there may be important dif- 
 ferences in the way such things as the above are managed. 
 In early civilizations, it is usual to find religion very closely 
 tied in with government, law, and so forth. The king may 
 also be a high-priest, or he may even be thought of as a god. 
 The laws are usually thought to have been given to the people 
 by the gods. The temples are protected just as carefully as 
 the other projects. 
 
 CIVILIZATION IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT 
 FOOD-PRODUCTION 
 
 Civilizations have to be made up of many people. Some of 
 the people live in the country; some live in very large towns 
 or cities. Classes of society have begun. There are officials 
 and government people ; there are priests or religious officials ; 
 there are merchants and traders; there are craftsmen, metal- 
 workers, potters, builders, and so on; there are also farmers, 
 and these are the people who produce the food for the whole 
 population. Civilization cannot exist without food-production. 
 Food-production has to be pretty efficient before civilization 
 can even begin. 
 
 But people can be food-producing without being civilized. 
 In many parts of the world this is still the case. When the 
 white men first came to America, the Indians in most parts 
 of this country were food-producers. They grew corn, pota- 
 toes, tomatoes, squash, and many other things the white men 
 had never eaten before. But only the Aztecs of Mexico, the 
 Mayas of Yucatan and Guatemala, and the Incas of the Andes 
 were civilized. 
 
 WHY DIDN'T CIVILIZATION COME TO 
 ALL FOOD-PRODUCERS? 
 
 Once you have food-production, what else has to happen be- 
 fore you get civilization? Many men have asked this question 
 and have failed to give a full and satisfactory answer. There 
 
 • 101 • 
 
is probably no one answer. I am going to give you my own 
 idea about how civilization may have come about in the Near 
 Easl alone. But remember, it is only a guess. It does not 
 apply to the beginnings of the civilizations of the American 
 Indians, and probably not to those of China, India, or the 
 other places where civilizations sprang up by themselves. 
 
 whirl; civilization first appeared in 
 the near east 
 
 You remember that our earliest villages in the Near East lay 
 along a great "crescent. " (See map on p. 91.) The crescent 
 arches up from Egypt through Palestine and Syria and then 
 into northern Iraq and off into Iran. Food-production, as 
 early as we know it, already existed over this crescent-shaped 
 area (say at 5500 B.C. i500 years). 
 
 Now notice that this area does not include southern 
 Mesopotamia, that is, Babylonia proper. 1 The earliest known 
 villages there are at least a thousand years later. Also it does 
 not seem (so far as we've yet discovered) to run up into the 
 Nile valley proper at the very beginning, for the Merimde 
 and Fayum sites are north and west of the typical strip of 
 river land. 
 
 We know that by about 3200 B.C. the Early Dynastic 
 period had begun in southern Mesopotamia. The beginnings 
 of writing may go back several hundred years earlier, but we 
 can safely say that civilization had begun in Mesopotamia by 
 3200 B.C. In Egypt, the beginning of the First Dynasty is 
 at about 3100 B.C., and writing probably did not appear 
 much earlier. There is no question but that history and civili- 
 zation wen- well under way in both Mesopotamia and Egypt 
 by 3000 B.C.— about five thousand years ago. 
 
 I 111. "CRESCENT" VERSUS THE RIVER LANDS 
 
 Why did these two civilizations spring up in these two river 
 lands which apparently were not even part of the area where 
 food-production began? Why didn't we have the first civiliza- 
 
 1 Professor Breasted's original "Fertile Crescent" did include southern 
 Mesopotamia. On page 90, I explained how my "crescent" is different. 
 
 • 102 • 
 
tions in Palestine, Syria, north Iraq, or Iran, where wVre sure 
 food-production had had a long time to develop? I think the 
 probable answer gives a clue to the ways in which civilization 
 began in Egypt and Mesopotamia. 
 
 The land in the "crescent" is of a sort which people can 
 farm without too much trouble. It is made up of a fairly 
 fertile coastal strip in Palestine and Syria. There are pleasant 
 mountain slopes, streams running out to the sea, and rain, at 
 least in the winter months. The rain belt and the foothills 
 of the Turkish mountains also extend to northern Iraq, and 
 on to the Iranian plateau. The Iranian plateau has its moun- 
 tain valleys, streams, and some rain. The whole strip of the 
 crescent is almost made-to-order for beginning farmers. The 
 grassy slopes of the higher hills would be pasture for their 
 herds and flocks. As soon as the earliest experiments with 
 agriculture and domestic animals had been successful, a 
 pleasant living could be made in the "crescent"-— and without 
 too much trouble. 
 
 THE RIVER LANDS 
 
 Now look at Egypt and southern Mesopotamia. Both are 
 lands without rain, for all intents and purposes. Both are 
 lands with rivers that have laid down very fertile soil — soil 
 far superior to that in the "crescent." But in both lands, the 
 rivers are of no great aid without some control. 
 
 The Nile floods its banks once a year, in late September 
 or early October. It not only soaks the narrow fertile strip 
 of land on either side ; it lays down a fresh layer of new soil 
 each year. Beyond the fertile strip on either side rise great 
 cliffs, and behind them is the desert. In its natural, uncon- 
 trolled state, the yearly flood of the Nile must have caused 
 short-lived swamps that were full of crocodiles. After a short 
 time, the flood level would have dropped, the water and the 
 crocodiles would have run back into the river, and the swamp 
 plants would have become parched and dry. 
 
 The Tigris and the Euphrates of Mesopotamia are less 
 likely to flood regularly than the Nile. The Tigris has a shorter 
 and straighter course than the Euphrates; it is also the more 
 
 • 103 • 
 
violent river. Its banks are high, and when the snows melt 
 and flow into all of its tributary rivers, ii is swifl and dangerous. 
 The Euphrates has a much longer and curving course. Its 
 
 hanks are lower and il is less likely to flood dangerously. The 
 land on either side and between the two rivers is very fertile. 
 Unlike the Nile Valley, neither the Tigris nor the Euphrates 
 is flanked by cliffs. The land on either side of the rivers 
 stretches out for miles and is not much rougher than a poor 
 tennis court. 
 
 THE RIVERS MUST BE CONTROLLED 
 
 The real trick in both Egypt and Mesopotamia is to make the 
 rivers work for you. In Egypt, this is a matter of building 
 dikes and reservoirs that will catch and hold the Nile flood. 
 In this way, the water is held and allowed to run off over 
 the fields as it is needed. In Mesopotamia, it is a matter of 
 digging canals, branch canals, and ditches to irrigate from the 
 rivers. 
 
 Obviously, we can no longer find the first dikes or reservoirs 
 of the Nile valley, or the first canals or ditches of Mesopotamia. 
 The same land has been lived on far too long for any traces 
 of the first attempts to be left; or, especially in Egypt, it has 
 been covered by the yearly deposits of silt, dropped by the 
 river floods. But we're pretty sure the first food-producers 
 of Egypt and southern Mesopotamia must have made such 
 dikes, canals, and ditches. In the first place, there can't have 
 been enough rain for them to grow things otherwise. In the 
 second place, the patterns for such projects seem to have been 
 pretty well set by historic times. 
 
 CONTROL OE THE RIVERS THE BUSINESS 
 OE EVERYONE 
 
 Here, then, is the probable reason why civilization grew in 
 Egypt and Mesopotamia first — not in Palestine, Syria, or Iran. 
 In the latter areas, in the "crescent," people could manage 
 to produce their food as individuals. It wasn't too hard; 
 there were rain and some streams, and good pasturage for 
 the animals even if a crop or two went wrong. In Egypt 
 
 • 104 • 
 
and Mesopotamia, people had to put in a much greater amount 
 of work, and this work couldn't be individual work. Whole 
 villages or groups of people had to turn out to fix dikes or dig 
 ditches. The dikes had to be repaired, the ditches cleared 
 of silt. 
 
 There also had to be hard and fast rules. The person 
 who lived nearest the ditch or the reservoir must not be allowed 
 to take all the water and leave none for his neighbors. It was 
 not only a business of learning to control the rivers and of 
 making their waters do the farmer's work. It also meant 
 controlling men. But once these men had managed both kinds 
 of controls, what a wonderful yield they had! The soil was 
 already fertile, and the silt which came in the floods and 
 ditches kept adding fertile soil. 
 
 THE GERM OF CIVILIZATION IN EGYPT 
 AND MESOPOTAMIA 
 
 This learning to work together for the common good was the 
 germ of the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations. 
 The bare elements of civilization were already there : the need 
 for a governing hand and for laws to see that the communities' 
 work was done, and that the water was justly shared. You 
 may object that there is a sort of chicken and egg paradox in 
 this idea. How could the people have set up the rules until 
 they'd managed to get a way to live, and how could they 
 manage to get a way to live until they set up the rules? I 
 think that small groups must have moved down along the 
 rivers quite early, making use of naturally favorable spots, 
 and that the rules grew out of such cases. It would have been 
 like the hand-in-hand growth of automobiles and paved 
 highways in the United States. 
 
 Once the rules and the know-how did get going, there 
 must have been a constant interplay of the two. Thus, the 
 more the crops yielded, the richer and better-fed the people 
 would have been, and the more the population would have 
 grown. The more the population grew, the more land would 
 have needed to be flooded or irrigated, and the more complex 
 the system of dikes, reservoirs, canals, and ditches would have 
 needed to be. The more complex the system, the more neces- 
 
 • 105 • 
 
sity for work on new projects and for the control of their use. . 
 And so on. . . . 
 
 What I havejusl put down for you is a guess at the manner 
 of growth of some of the formalized systems that go to make 
 up a civilized society. My explanation has been pointed 
 particularly at Egypt and Mesopotamia. I have already told 
 you that the irrigation and water-control part of it does not 
 apply to the development of the Aztecs or the Mayas, or 
 perhaps anybody else. But I think that a fair part of the 
 story of Egypt and Mesopotamia must be as I've just told you. 
 
 WHAT WE KNOW OF THE EGYPTIAN AM) 
 MESOPOTAMIAN PEOPLES 
 
 Who were the people who brought about civilization in south- 
 ern Mesopotamia and Egypt? For Mesopotamia we do not 
 know. No studies have yet been made. Few human skulls 
 or bones have been preserved except from later times. But 
 we know there were already Mediterranean types in Iran as 
 early as the Sialk village. There were certainly Mediterran- 
 eans in Syria, soon after this. Most of the historical peoples 
 of Mesopotamia belonged to one of the Mediterranean sub- 
 groups. For the range of our present interest (about 4500 to 
 3500 B.C.), we can hardly doubt that most of the peoples of 
 southern Mesopotamia were also Mediterranean-like, even if 
 we haven't yet found their skulls. 
 
 In Egypt, we have found skulls and whole skeletons for 
 the range of about 4500 to 3500 B.C. Professor Coon believes 
 these all belong to one or another of his sub-groups of the 
 Mediterranean type. This is the type of skeleton that cer- 
 tainly continues to appear in Egyptian graves in historic times. 
 
 In both lands civilization seems thus to have been the 
 product of Mediterranean peoples. This is the type of man 
 whom we saw first in the Natufian caves of Palestine, and he 
 is still the most usual physical type in the Near East. This 
 business of "sub-groups" means that there was nothing "pure" 
 about the Mediterraneans of those early days, just as there is 
 nothing "pure" about them today. In the descriptions the 
 
 • 106 • 
 
physical anthropologists give of the Mediterraneans, phrases 
 such as "a slight Negroid tendency" keep cropping up. We've 
 already met the phrase in the description of the Natufians 
 (p. 84). Recently, Professor Krogman has published evidence 
 for another physical type in the early Near East. This is the 
 "proto-Nordic" type of skull (although neither light skin nor 
 blond hair can possibly be assessed here). The "proto-Nordic" 
 is present in Iran by 4000 B.C., early enough to have played 
 its part in the general mixing of peoples. 
 
 For the beginnings of writing, for the names of the first 
 kings and of the gods, you must go to the history books. The 
 prehistorian's job has been finished when he gets you this far. 
 
 107 
 
A 
 
 Summary ohuo,o 1=0 
 
 U0 2 -0-I=Ml-O0H 
 
 In the pages you have read so far, you have been brought 
 through the earliest 99 per cent of the story of man's life on 
 this planet. I have left only 1 per cent of the story for the 
 historians to tell. 
 
 I HE DRAMA OF THE PAST 
 
 Men first became men when evolution had carried them to a 
 certain point. This was the point where the eye-hand-brain 
 co-ordination was good enough so that tools could be made. 
 When tools began to be made according to sets of lasting 
 habits, we know that men had appeared. This happened 
 over a half million years ago. The stage for the play may 
 have been as broad as all of Europe, Africa, and Asia. At 
 
 '.it seems unlikely that it was only one little region that 
 the beginning of the drama. 
 
 (.laciers and different climates came and went, to change 
 the settings. But the play went on in the same first act for 
 ,i very long time. The men who were the players had simple 
 roles. They had to feed themselves and protect themselves 
 as best they could. They did this by hunting, catching, and 
 finding food wherever they could, and by taking such protec- 
 tion as caves, fire, and their simple tools would give them. 
 Before the first act was over, the last of the glaciers was melting 
 away, and the players had added the New World to their 
 
 • 108 • 
 
stage. If we want a special name for the first act, we could 
 call it The Food-Collectors. 
 
 There were few climaxes in the first act, so far as we can 
 see. But I think there may have been a few. The great cave 
 art of France and Spain was probably an expression of one. 
 Even the ideas of burying the dead and of the "Venus" 
 figurines must also point to levels of human thought and 
 activity that were over and above pure food-getting. 
 
 THE SECOND ACT 
 
 The second act began only about ten thousand years ago. A 
 few of the players started it by themselves near the center of 
 the Old World part of the stage, in the Near East. It began 
 as a plant and animal act, but it soon became much more 
 complicated. 
 
 But the players in this one part of the stage — in the Near 
 East — were not the only ones to start off on the second act 
 by themselves. Other players, possibly in several places in 
 the Far East, and certainly in the New World, also started 
 second acts that began as plant and animal acts, and then 
 became complicated. We can call the whole second act The 
 Food-Producers. 
 
 THE FIRST GREAT CLIMAX OF THE 
 SECOND ACT 
 
 In the Near East, the first marked climax of the second act 
 happened in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The play and the 
 players reached that great climax that we call civilization. 
 This seems to have come less than five thousand years after 
 the second act began. But it could never have happened in 
 the first act at all. 
 
 There is another curious thing about the first act. Many 
 of the players didn't know it was over and they kept on with 
 their roles long after the second act had begun. On the edges 
 of the stage there are today some players who are still going 
 on with the first act. The Eskimos, and the native Australians, 
 and certain tribes in the Amazon jungle are some of these 
 players. They seem perfectly happy to keep on with the first 
 act. 
 
 • 109 • 
 
The second act moved from climax to climax. The civili- 
 zations of Egypt and Mesopotamia were only the earliest of 
 these climaxes. The players to the west caught the spirit 
 of the thing, and climaxes followed there. So also did climaxes 
 come in the far Eastern and New World portions of the stage. 
 
 The greater part of the second act should really be described 
 to you by ;i historian. Although it was a very short act when 
 compared to the first one, the climaxes complicate it a great 
 deal. As a prehistorian what I have told you about is only 
 the first act, and the very beginning of the second. 
 
 THE I HIRI) ACT 
 
 Also, as a prehistorian, I probably should not even mention 
 the third act — it began so recently. The third act is The 
 Industrialization. It is the one in which we ourselves are 
 players. If the pace of the second act was so much faster than 
 that of the first, the pace of the third act is terrific. The 
 danger is that it may wear down the players completely. 
 
 What sort of climaxes will the third act have, and are we 
 already in one? You have seen by now that the acts of my 
 play are given in terms of modes or basic patterns of human 
 economy— ways in which people get food and protection and 
 safety. The climaxes involve more than human economy. 
 Economic and technological factors may be part of the 
 climaxes, but they are not all. The climaxes may be revolu- 
 tions in their own way, intellectual and social revolutions if 
 you like. 
 
 If the third act follows the pattern of the second act, a 
 climax should come soon after the act begins. We may be 
 due for one soon if we are not already in it. Remember the 
 terrific pace of this third act. 
 
 WHY BOTHER WITH PREHISTORY? 
 
 Why do we bother about prehistory? The main reason is 
 that I think it may point to useful ideas for the present. We 
 are in the troublesome beginnings of the third act of the play. 
 I he beginnings of the second act may have lessons for us. 
 I know there are at least some lessons, even in the present 
 
 • 110 ■ 
 
incomplete state of our knowledge. The players who began 
 the second act, separately, in different parts of the world, 
 were not all of one "pure race." Some apparently quite 
 mixed Mediterraneans got off to the first start on the second 
 act and brought it to its first two climaxes as well. "Pure 
 race" had nothing to do with it. Mongoloids of different 
 kinds achieved the first climaxes in China and in the New 
 World. 
 
 By the time the written records of Egypt and Mesopotamia 
 begin to turn up in number, the climaxes there are well under 
 way. To understand the beginnings of the climaxes, and the 
 real beginnings of the second act itself, we are thrown back 
 on prehistoric archaeology. And this is as true for China, 
 India, Middle America, and the Andes, as it is for the Near 
 East. 
 
 There are lessons to be learned from all of man's past, 
 not simply lessons of how to fight battles or win peace con- 
 ferences, but of how human society evolves from one stage 
 to another. Many of these lessons can only be looked for in 
 the prehistoric past. So far, we have only made a beginning. 
 There is much still to do, and many gaps in the story are yet 
 to be filled. The prehistorian's job is to find the evidence, to 
 fill the gaps, and to discover the lessons men have learned in 
 the past. As I see it, this is not only an exciting but a very 
 practical goal for which to strive. 
 
 Ill 
 
List of Books 
 
 B< >OKS OF GENERAL INTERES I 
 
 (In the thirty-five cent Pelican S< 
 
 Childe, V. Gordon 
 
 What II ,: I .</ . 1946 (1942). 
 
 Benedict, Ruth 
 
 l dturc. 1946 (1934). 
 
 Dunn. L. C. and Dobzhansky, I'll. 
 II " iity, Rai ■ . at i Society. 1946. 
 
 GEOCHRONOLOGY AND THE ICE AGE 
 
 Zeuner, F. E. 
 
 Dating th Past. 1946. 
 
 FOSSIL MEN AND RACE 
 
 1 [owells, \Vm. 
 
 Mankind w Far. 1945. 
 
 Hooton, E. A. 
 
 Up from the Apr. 1946. 
 
 Coon, C. S. 
 
 trope. 1939. 
 
 GENERAL ARCH \l < >LOGY 
 
 ( Hark, ( Jral iame 
 
 Ai 1939. 
 
 PREHISTORY 
 
 ( Ihilde, V. Gordon 
 
 Dawn of Em ■ ition. 1948. 
 
 . 11? . 
 
Curwen, E. Cecil 
 
 Plough and Pas tun' . 1946. 
 
 Garrod, D. A. E. 
 
 Environment, 7 ools and Man. 1946. 
 
 EARLY HISTORY 
 
 Breasted, J. H. 
 
 The Conquest of Civilization. 1938. 
 
 Frankfort, H. and others 
 
 The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man. 1947. 
 
 Human Origins, An Introductory General Course in Anthropology, "Selected 
 Readings, II," is a series of papers on various subjects, by members 
 of the staff of the Department of Anthropology, the Oriental Institute, 
 etc., of the University of Chicago, and other institutions. 2nd ed., 
 University of Chicago Bookstore, 1946. Many of the papers are 
 pertinent to the headings listed above. Another recent work of general 
 interest is Anthropology, by A. L. Kroeber, 1948. 
 
 113 
 
Ind 
 
 ex 
 
 Abbevillian, 41 ; biface, 37 
 
 Acheulean, 41, 50, 52, 53. 56, 60 
 
 Acheuleo-Levalloisian, 53 
 
 Acheuleo-Mousterian, 53 
 
 Africa, 19, 20, 29, 44, 49, 59; north, 
 58, 74, 81, 82, 96; South, 27, 42, 
 58, 75 
 
 Alpine (physical type), 29 
 
 American Indians, 72, 76, 79, 95, 
 100, ldl 
 
 Animals, 45, 52, 55, 77, 87, 93 
 
 Antevs, Ernst, 17 
 
 Anvils, 55 
 
 Anyathian, 41 
 
 Arabs, Mediterranean group, 29 
 
 Archaeological interpretation, 8 
 
 Archaeology, defined, 8 
 
 Army, 99 
 
 Arrow, points, 63, 78, 83; shaft, 63, 
 74 
 
 Art, 70, 73; East Spanish, 72; 
 figurines, 70, 92, 93, 109; Franco- 
 Cantabrian, 71, 72; painting, 70, 
 "1 ; movable (engravings, model- 
 ing, scratching), 70; sculpture, 
 70 
 
 Asia, 20, 62, 76, 80, 107; central, 
 1'); south and east, 46; western, 
 39, 44 
 
 Assemblage, defined, 78; Magle- 
 mosian, 78; Natufian, 82 
 
 Aterian, 73 
 
 Atlantic rain belt south of glaciers, 
 81 
 
 Awls, 64, 83 
 
 Axes, 78 
 
 A/.ilian, 79 
 
 Bakun, 90 
 Balearic Islands, 96 
 Barley, 94, 95 
 Baskets, 94 
 
 Beads, 69, 73, 83; bone, 69 
 Bear, 45, 84 
 
 of archaeological 
 
 Belgium, 77 
 
 Benches, 82 
 
 Bering Strait, 76, 80 
 
 Berries, 55 
 
 Blade, "backed," 62; "blade-core," 
 60; stone, defined, 60; strangu- 
 lated (notched), 63; tool indus- 
 tries, 73; tools, 75, 78; tool tradi- 
 tion, 59 
 
 Boar, wild, 84 
 
 Boats, 96 
 
 Bogs, sources 
 material, 78 
 
 Bolas, 53, 56 
 
 Borer, 64 
 
 Boskop skull, 27 
 
 Brain, development of, 20 
 
 Breasted, J. H., 90 
 
 Breuil, Abbe, 35, 49 
 
 Britain, 77, 96 
 
 Buffalo, in China, 45; killed by 
 stampede, 72 
 
 Burials, 55, 57, 73, 83, 90, 92, 94, 
 95, 109 
 
 Burins, 63, 75, 78 
 
 Burma, 40, 58, 76 
 
 Bushmen, 27 
 
 Camel, 45 
 
 Camps, summer habitation, 78 
 
 ( Cannibalism, 45 
 
 Canoes in Maglemosian assem- 
 blage, 78 
 
 Caucasoids, 27, 28, 29, 32, 73 
 
 Cave men, 25 
 
 Caves, 47, 48, 52, 55, 72, 94, 95, 106 
 
 Chancelade skull, 27, 32 
 
 Chcllean, 41 
 
 Childe, V. Gordon, 8, 73, 74, 78, 
 80, 84, 88, 96, 98 
 
 China, 19, 21, 40, 58, 76, 88, 95, 
 102, 111 
 
 Chisel, 63, 98 
 
 Chopping blocks, 55 
 
 114 
 
Chokoutien, 27 
 
 Choukoutienian, 41 
 
 Cities, 100, 101 
 
 Civilization, beginnings, 100-106, 
 109; western, 100 
 
 Clactonian, 38, 41, 50 
 
 Classes, social, 101 
 
 Cleavers, 40 
 
 Cloth, 87, 94, 97 
 
 Clothing, 45, 72, 93 
 
 Club-heads, 78 
 
 Clubs, 78 
 
 Coloring matter, mineral, 55 
 
 Combe Capelle, 32, 73 
 
 Combe Capelle-Brunn group, 26, 
 73 
 
 Cooking, 45 
 
 Coon, C. S., 26, 79, 84, 95, 106 
 
 Copper, 90, 97, 98 
 
 "Cradle of mankind," 19 
 
 Craftsmen, 87, 98 
 
 Crete, 96 
 
 Cro-Magnon, 23, 26, 32, 73 
 
 Culture, characteristics, 34; de- 
 fined, 33 
 
 Daggers, 65, 98 
 
 Danube Valley, 96 
 
 Decoration, engraved, 70 
 
 Deer, 45, 52, 79, 84 
 
 Denmark, 78 
 
 Diet in food-producing economy, 
 
 87 
 Dikes used in irrigation, 104, 105 
 Dinarics, 29 
 Domestication, of animals, 17, 79, 
 
 80, 84; of plants, 17, 80, 84; 
 
 theory of, 81 
 "Dragon teeth" fossils in China, 22 
 Draw-knife, 64 
 Drill, 64, 90 
 
 Early Dynastic Period, Mesopo- 
 tamia, 102 
 
 East Baltics, 29 
 
 East Spanish art, 72 
 
 Egypt, 59, 82, 90, 92, 95, 102, 103 
 
 Elephant, 45 
 
 England, 36, 49 
 
 Eoanthropus dawsoni, 24, 25 
 
 Eoliths, 36 
 
 Euphrates River, 103, 104 
 
 Europe, cave dwellings, 47, 48, 49 
 duration of food-collecting, 80 
 fossil types of man, 25, 26 
 glaciers, 35, 77; mixture of races, 
 29; spread of food-production 
 to, 96; tool traditions, 39, 44, 
 56, 60, 62, 73, 74, 76, 78 
 
 Far East, 19, 44, 58, 76 
 
 Farmers, 101, 103 
 
 Fayum, 92, 94, 102 
 
 "Fertile Crescent," 90, 102 
 
 Figurines, 70, 92, 109 
 
 Fire, 45, 52, 55, 72 
 
 Fireplace, 82 
 
 First Dynasty, Egypt, 102 
 
 Fish-hooks, 68, 78 
 
 Fishing, 79, 80, 86 
 
 Fish-nets, 78 
 
 Fish spears, 78 
 
 Flake scrapers, 75 
 
 Flax, 94 
 
 Flint, 40, 60 
 
 Floats, bark, 78 
 
 Fontechevade, 35, 44, 46 
 
 Food, 45, 72, 79, 80, 84, 87, 88, 
 
 93-95, 97, 100 
 Food-collecting, 57, 88, 95 
 Food-collectors, 44, 80, 86, 109 
 Food-producers, 86, 109 
 Food-producing economy, 87, 95, 
 
 96 
 Food-producing revolution, 18, 80, 
 
 84 
 France, 36, 42, 47, 49, 50, 60, 72, 
 
 74, 77, 79, 96, 109 
 Fruit, 97 
 
 Galley Hill (fossil type), 25, 26, 31, 
 
 54 
 Garrod, D. A., 62 
 Gazelle, 52, 84 
 
 German nation, composition, 29 
 Germany, 72, 77, 78, 96 
 Gibraltar, Strait of, 74 
 "Gigantism," 23 
 Glaciers, 16, 35, 55 
 Goats, 93 
 Gods, 87, 88, 101 
 Government, 100, 101 
 Grain, 84, 87, 88, 93, 94, 95; silos, 
 
 87, 92, 93, 94 
 Greece, 96 
 Grimaldi, 27, 28, 32, 73 
 
 Hackberry seeds used as food, 45 
 
 Hafts, 78; antler, 97; sickle, 83 
 
 Haifa, 10 
 
 Hand, development, 20 
 
 Hand axes, 38, 40, 53 
 
 Handles, 63, 78; bone, 69; sickle, 
 
 83 
 Harbors, 99 
 Harpoons, 70, 74, 78, 83, 93; 
 
 antler, 70; bone, 69 
 Hassuna, 92, 93, 94 
 Head-dresses, 83 
 
 115 
 
Heidelberg (fossil tvpel, 25, 31 
 
 Hides, 65, ~2 
 
 I listoi \ . beginning of. , 1 8 
 
 Hoes. 93 
 
 Holland, 77 
 
 Homo, erectus, 21 ; sapiens, 25, 28 
 
 I [orse, 45 
 
 Houses, 87, 90, ' ' 9 ■ 97 
 
 Hunting, 'A so. 86, 87 
 
 Hyena, 84 
 
 lee Age, 16, 36; beginning, 20; 
 
 las! glaciation, 76; survivors in 
 
 Europe, 9 
 India, 2'), 40, 44, 58, 75, 88 
 Industrialization, 109 
 Industrial revolution, 80 
 Industry, defined, 4') 
 Iran. 80, 90, 102 104 
 Iraq, 90, 92, 94, 102, 103 
 Irrigation, ''9, 104 
 Italy, 49, 96 
 
 Java. 19, 21, 4(1, 58 
 
 ].i\ a man, 21, 23, 31 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 10 
 Jericho, 90, 94 
 Judaidah, 92, 93, 94, 97 
 
 Keith. Sir Arthur, 24, 26 
 Kelley, Harper, 42 
 Kenya, 56 
 Kinus, 97, 100, 101 
 Knives, 60, 62. 65, 68, 70 
 Krogman, W. M., 20, 28, 29, 30, 
 32. 42. 107 
 
 1 ..i Micoque, 35, 49, 50 
 
 Lamps, 7 1 
 
 Land bridges in Mediterranean, 16 
 
 Laurel leaf point, 65, 73 
 
 Law, 100, 101 
 
 Leakey, L. S. B., 56 
 
 I.e Moustier, 48 
 
 I ,eopard, 84 
 
 Levalloisian, 41. 52, 53, 56, 57. 
 
 60 
 Levalloiso-Mousterian, 41, 53, 54 
 
 Magic, "1, 73, 88 
 Maglemosian assemblage, 78, 79 
 Malaysia, i ice Inst cultivated in, 88 
 Mammoth, 55, 77 
 
 Mankind, stoc ks, 27, 28 
 Marston, A. I ., 10 
 Mats, 94 
 \h ( own. I . I ).. 
 
 Mediterranean basin, 59, 78, 80, 92 
 Mediterranean man, 29, 84, 95, 96, 
 106, 107 
 
 Men, defined, 21 
 
 Merchants, 101 
 Merimde, 92-94, 95 
 Mesopotamia, 90, 92, 102-106 
 Metal-workers, lol 
 Micoquian, 41, 51 
 Mierohths, 74, 75, 78, 79, 83 
 Middle Last, 73, 74, 76, 80, 81 
 Mongoloid, 24, 28, 29, 32, 73, 
 
 '6, 95, 111 
 Morocco, 42 
 Mortars, 83, 84, 93 
 Mounds, how formed, 10 
 Mounl ( larmel, 1". 26, 31, 44, 50, 
 
 54, 58, 60, 62, 82 
 "Mi lustei ian man." 54 
 "Mousterian" tools, 41, 52-54; of 
 
 Acheulean tradition, 52, 53 
 Movius, II. L., 40, 76 
 
 Natufian, assemblage, 82-85, 93, 
 94; burials. 83; date of, 89 
 
 Neanderthal man, 24, 25, 31, 32, 
 34, 44, 47, 54 
 
 Neanthropic man. 42 
 
 Near Last, beginnings of civiliza- 
 tion, 100; cave sites. 49, 94; 
 climate in Ice Age, 81 ; "Fertile 
 Crescent," ''0; food-production, 
 17, 88, 8'». 96, 97, 109; Natufian 
 assemblage, 82, 85: stone tools, 
 57, "6; types of man, 95, 106, 107 
 
 Needles, 68, 72, 83 
 
 Negroid, 2"^ -29, 32, 73, 84 
 
 New World. 27, 76, 80, 88, 95, 1 1 1 
 
 Nile River Valley, 92, 102 104 
 
 Nordics, 29 
 
 Norway, 78 
 
 Nuts, 55 
 
 Ochre, red. 83; with burials, 73, 92 
 Old World, 59, 76 
 Ornaments. 69, 73, 83, 98 
 Ostrich, 45 
 
 Paddle, 78 
 
 Paintings in caves, o. 1 
 
 Paleanthropic man. 32, 42 
 
 Palestine, bui ials, 57, s 3 : cave sites, 
 10, 55, 82: in "Fertile Crescent," 
 90, 102, 103; tools, 44, 50-51, 
 54, 59, 60, 62; types ol man, 26, 
 31, 58, 106 
 
 Patjitanian, 41 
 
 Paving, 82 
 
 Peking cave, 49 
 
 Peking man, 21-24, 34, 42, 44, 45, 
 48 
 
 Pendant, 69 
 
 116 
 
Pestle, 83, 84 
 
 "Piltdown man," 24, 25 
 
 Pins, 68, 83, 90, 93 
 
 Pithecanthropus erectus, 21, 23, 31 
 
 Pleistocene, 16 
 
 Points, 63, 69, 83, 93; arrow, 78, 
 
 83; laurel leaf, 65, 66, 73; 
 
 shouldered, 63; split-based bone, 
 
 69; willow leaf, 65, 66 
 Portugal, 42 
 Potters, 100 
 Pottery, 87, 90, 92, 95; decorated, 
 
 97; painted, 92 
 Prehistory, defined, 7 
 Priests, 97, 101 
 Proto-Australoid, 27 
 "Proto-Mediterranean," 95 
 Proto-Nordic, 107 
 
 Race, 28, 29; biological, 30, 32; 
 
 "pure," 32; sociological, 30, 32 
 Redfield, Robert, 33 
 Reindeer, 55, 77 
 Religion, 101 
 Rhinoceros, 77 
 Rhodesia (fossil type), 25 
 Rice first cultivated, 98 
 Riss glaciation, 49 
 Roads, 100 
 Rock shelters, 49, 72 
 Russia, 72; Asiatic, 57; central, 79; 
 
 south, 79, 96; Transcaspian, 58 
 
 Sahara Desert, 20, 81 
 
 Sardinia, 96 
 
 Sbaikian, 74 
 
 Schliemann, H., 10, 11, 12 
 
 Scotland, 72, 75 
 
 Scraper, flake, 75; end scraper on 
 
 blade, 65; keel-shaped, 66, 68; 
 
 side, 53 
 Sculpture in caves, 70 
 Seals, stamp, 92 
 Sebilian, 94 
 Sheep, 45, 93 
 Shrines, 97 
 Sialk, 90, 93, 95, 106 
 Siberia, 27, 73, 76, 80 
 Sickle, 83, 84, 95; blade, 83; haft, 
 
 83 
 Sinanthropus pekinensis, 21 
 Sled runners, 78 
 Soan, 41 
 
 Solo (fossil type), 25, 31 
 Solo River Valley, 25 
 Solutrean, 65, 74 
 Spain, 49, 74, 77, 96, 109 
 Spear, 63, 68; shaft, 64; thrower, 
 
 69, 70 
 
 Speech, development of organs of, 
 
 21 
 Steinheim fossil skull, 26 
 Stratification in caves, 11, 48 
 Stropper, 69, 70 
 Swamps, sources of archaeological 
 
 material, 78 
 Swanscombe (fossil type), 10, 26, 
 
 31, 54 
 Swiss lake-dwellings, 96 
 Syria, 90, 92, 94, 98, 102, 103, 106 
 
 Tabun, 51, 60 
 
 Tardenoisian, 79 
 
 Tasa, 90 
 
 Tayacian, 41, 50 
 
 Teeth, pierced, 69 
 
 Temples, 97, 101 
 
 Teshik Tash, 58 
 
 Textiles, 87 
 
 Thong-stropper, 69 
 
 Thumb, opposable, 20 
 
 Thunderbolt, 10 
 
 Tiger, 45 
 
 Tigris River, 90, 103, 104 
 
 Toggle, 69 
 
 Tools, 53, 55, 63-70, 78, 83; antler, 
 69, 78; blade, 60, 62; bone, 42, 
 51, 55, 68, 78; chopper, 40; 
 flake, 38, 53 ; flint, 60, 65 ; ground 
 stone, 78, 83, 93; groups, 41; 
 metal, 90, 97, 98; microliths, 
 74, 75, 79; shell, 42; use of, 20; 
 wood, 42 
 
 Towns, 97, 101 
 
 Trade, 98 
 
 Traders, 101 
 
 Trading centers, 97 
 Traditions, tool-making, 36, 37, 40 
 42, 60; chopper, 40, 42, 58, 76 
 core or biface, 37-42, 51, 56, 58 
 flake, 38-42, 58 
 Turkey, 74, 92, 96, 103 
 
 Vallois, H. V., 95 
 Vegetables, 55, 97 
 Village-culture materials, 89, 90 
 Villages, 86, 87, 94, 95, 97 
 Von Koenigswald, G. H. R., 22 
 
 Wad F, 62 
 
 Weapons, 53, 56, 63, 65, 68-70, 98 
 
 Weidenreich, F., 20, 22, 23, 24, 76 
 
 White, L. A., 30 
 
 Willow leaf point, 65, 66 
 
 Wolf, 45 
 
 Writing, 101, 102 
 
 Zeuncr, F. E., 60 
 
 117