Anthropology

211. Sources of Knowledge

The story of the growth and development of culture in the Western Hemisphere which has been sketched in reconstruction in the last chapter is built up from the incomplete information of excavations and the indirect evidence of culture trait distributions and analyses. Earlier than about ten thousand years ago, this hemisphere has no known human history. In the Old World, conditions are doubly different. There is a long primeval record, stretching perhaps a hundred thousand years beyond 8000 B.C., documented much like the subsequent culture history of America, but with a wealth of geological, faunal, and skeletal data to compensate for the loss of ancient cultural evidences in the lapse of time. Secondly, for the last ten thousand years, there is a fuller record than for America. This greater fullness is partly due to the earlier start toward its higher forms which civilization took in the Eastern Hemisphere. And this relatively early advancement brought it about that by 3000 B.C. adequate systems of writing had been achieved in Africa and Asia, so that contemporary inscriptions have been preserved to throw direct light on the thoughts and institutions of the people of that day, and to date the centuries of their rulers for us. These last five thousand years thus belong to history, rather than to prehistory, in some parts of the hemisphere; and they allow many a close inference as to what happened in the previous five thousand years when writing was as yet unknown or its first systems were being evolved.

These ten thousand years since the close of the Old Stone Age, half of them studied by the methods of anthropology, half also by those of history, and the whole forming the richest field in human culture history, are the subjects of the present chapter and the next.

First, however, it is necessary to refer back to the earliest known development of civilization in the Old Stone Age (Chapter VI), whose close is our present starting point.

212. Chronology of the Grand Divisions of Culture History

The period of human existence since the first tool was made is generally divided into four grand divisions (§ 66, 67): the Palæolithic or Old Stone Age; the Neolithic or New Stone Age; the Bronze Age; and the Iron Age. The duration of these four ages is diverse and notably diminishing from earliest to latest. The last three are comprised within the past ten thousand years: 8000 B.C. may be looked upon as a reasonably accurate date for the commencement of the Neolithic. For western Europe, at least, the probable error of this date is not over one or at most two thousand years. Back of this approximately fixed point stretches the immeasurably longer Palæolithic, for the determination of whose duration there is available not even any semi-historical evidence, and which can only be estimated in terms of geological alterations, continental glaciations, and faunal and floral changes—all unsatisfactory means for arriving at an absolute chronology expressible in years.

To a vague 100,000 B.C. as the tentative figure for the beginning of the Palæolithic, and an approximate 8000 B.C. for the commencement of the Neolithic, there can be added 3000 B.C. for the onset of the Bronze and 1000 B.C. of the Iron Age. The last two dates are averages only. The Greek islands, for instance, received bronze about this period, the Orient had it earlier, western Europe not until about 2500 B.C., northern Europe still later. In the same way, iron is well attested for western Asia in the thirteenth century before Christ, for Central Europe and France about 900 B.C., in Scandinavia some centuries later, in fact becoming abundant only shortly before the Roman period.

In the wide sense, the outstanding generalizations derivable from these figures are twofold. As regards the later periods, those of metal and probably the Neolithic, the west lagged behind the east, the north behind the south; Asia preceded and invented, Europe followed and imitated. As regards the entire duration, a tremendous disproportion is observable. The vast bulk of the total time of culture is covered by the Palæolithic: the three following Ages are all squeezed into a tenth of the whole. Within this fraction again the Neolithic takes up half, leaving the two metal Ages to divide the other half between them. There is a clear tendency toward acceleration of development.

213. The Lower and Upper Palæolithic

Within the Old Stone Age, a primary division is to be made between the Lower and Upper Palæolithic. The Lower Palæolithic comprises the Chellean, Acheulean, and Mousterian periods, when Europe was inhabited by Neandertal man, who was distinct from the modern human species, and possibly by a pre-Neandertal race not yet discovered. The Upper Palæolithic, or Reindeer Age, consists of the Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian, with the Azilian as epilogue. Through these Upper Palæolithic periods long-headed branches of Homo sapiens—ourselves—existed: the Cro-Magnon, Grimaldi, and Brünn types, some of them foreshadowing the existing Caucasian and Negroid races (§ 14, 16-18). The longest step forward in the development of European Palæolithic civilization comes in the passage from its Lower to its Upper phase. Before this transition, new achievements were rare and their total small. The use of fire, of flint cores and flakes, of fracturing and retouching, possibly the use of wooden handles, a minimal employment of bone, and a definite disposal of the dead, about sum up known human attainments to the end of the Lower Palæolithic (§ 81).

Compared with this stock of culture, that of the Upper Palæolithic is elaborate. Bone awls and weapon points; shell necklaces and armlets; clothing; painting of the dead; sculpture and engraving—a greater number of elements than the Lower Palæolithic had been able to accumulate in perhaps 75,000 years—appear in the Aurignacian. The foundations of the whole of the Upper Palæolithic civilization were laid in this period. That the Solutrean added needles and surface retouching of flint, the Magdalenian a more vigorous development of pictorial line and use of colors, lamps, harpoons, and spear throwers, represented in the main only an enriching of the general Upper Palæolithic culture, whose essentials were determined at the outset.[32]

214. Race Influence and Regional Differentiation in the Lower Palæolithic

This profound change raises a natural conjecture. The Lower Palæolithic culture, at least in its latest form, was carried by Neandertal man; Upper Palæolithic culture is in great part associated with Cro-Magnon man, whose anatomy was nearer our own. Did not this relatively modern structure involve also a relatively modern set of mental faculties, and these in turn, by their own sheer worth, produce the richer culture? The supposition is plausible enough, and has been made. But it is sounder procedure to withhold commitment of opinion. The inference involves the assumption that approach to our own bodily type is accompanied by higher native intelligence; and the further assumption that higher intelligence will automatically produce advance in civilization. Probable as both these assumptions may seem, they are still undemonstrated, in general and in particular. The application of the assumptions to the facts therefore gives an apparent explanation in terms of an ultimate but really unknown causality. By accepting this hypothetical causality, it turns attention away from the question of its validity. But the validity of the causal relation between the body and intelligence, and between intelligence and culture, is precisely a point that needs elucidation. It needs elucidation as much as does the change of civilization that occurred in Europe about 25,000 years ago; and is a much broader problem—indeed, part of the most fundamental problem that anthropology still faces as unsolved. Instead of a snapping interpretation of a dubious point in human history in terms of a couple of still more dubious principles, it will be wiser to lay these principles aside, for a time at least, and to reconsider more intensively the facts bearing on the particular point at issue.

There are two obvious lines of evidence that may help to throw light on the change from the Lower to the Upper Palæolithic, and in fact aid understanding of the whole Palæolithic. The first comprises the relations between western Europe and other areas during that period; the second, regional differences within Europe. In the previous chapter on the Palæolithic, such considerations have been disregarded in favor of a schematic presentation of what seemed the salient facts in a field made sufficiently difficult by the antiquity and incompleteness of data. The best of these data, and those which arrange themselves most systematically, are those from Europe, which have therefore been presented as if they constituted a self-sufficient unit. But it is unlikely that the culture should have developed in Europe in complete detachment for a hundred thousand years or that it should have remained identical over the whole of that continent. It is necessary, in short, to revise the simple outline of Chapter VI by giving heed to geographical and other disturbing considerations.

First of all, it is well to realize that what has heretofore been called the first tool, the Chellean pick or coup-de-poing, was not so much the only tool of its period as the most characteristic one. It seems to have been accompanied at all times and everywhere by smaller, less regularly made implements, some of which were even worked out of flakes instead of cores and subjected to crude blow-retouching. Further, these medium-sized pieces were probably “invented” before the coup-de-poing; which is after all what might be expected, the coup-de-poing being a comparatively effective, regularly shaped, symmetrical implement involving both an ideal of form and a tolerable, rough skill to produce. Several Pre-Chellean stations, containing such smaller implements but no coups-de-poing, are now recognized by many specialists in prehistory. The most notable are those of St. Acheul and Abbeville, in northern France; the remainder are in the same part of that country, in Belgium, or in southern England, which at that time formed part of the continent. The fauna of some of these sites is an early one and has been attributed to the second interglacial era (§ 69) as compared with the third interglacial in which the Chellean and Acheulean fall.

When the Chellean proper, with its typical, well-developed picks, is examined, it becomes clear that the distribution of this distinctive form is limited to a narrow strip of westernmost Europe from Belgium to Spain. The picks recur in north and east Africa and the districts of Asia bordering on the Mediterranean. They may not be of exactly the same age in these regions as in westerly Europe, but they are of the same type, and in view of the continuity of their distribution must be historically connected. In fact, the coup-de-poing Chellean might well be described as essentially an African (or Africo-Asian) development which underwent an extension across what was then the land-bridge of Gibraltar up the Atlantic face of Europe (Fig. 37).

The remainder of Europe was evidently also inhabited in this era; but by people of a variant culture. From Germany eastward into Russia, possibly Siberia, implements were worked which in part suggest the Pre-Chellean ones of northern France, in part developments of such Pre-Chellean pieces, and in part forms approaching Mousterian types. They do not include Chellean picks. The name Pre-Mousterian has been proposed for this central and east European culture. This name is appropriate, provided it is remembered that Pre-Mousterian denotes not a phase intermediate between the Acheulean and Mousterian of western Europe, but a culture developed, like the Chellean, yet more or less independently, out of the Pre-Chellean, and approximately coeval with the pure Chellean of western Europe and its Acheulean continuation. In other words, two culture-areas, an African-west-European and an east European, begin to be discernible from an extremely early time in the Lower Palæolithic (Fig. 37).

During the Acheulean, the western culture spread somewhat: into southern England, southeastern France, Italy, and began to overlap with the eastern culture along the Rhine. In the Mousterian, an assimilation seems to have taken place: culture, or at least flint industry, became more uniform over the whole of Europe, and in a measure the near parts of Asia and Africa also. This general Mousterian culture, with its small implements and emphasis on retouching, seems more likely to have evolved out of the pickless eastern Pre-Mousterian than out of the western Chellean-Acheulean with its large hewn coups-de-poing.

This would suggest an eastern origin for Mousterian man—the Neandertal race. But it is well not to proceed beyond some slight probability on this point because it is by no means certain that culture traveled only as races traveled. In their simple way, culture contacts without migrations may have been substantially as effective in shaping or altering civilization fifty thousand years ago as to-day. For all that can be demonstrated at present, the Mousterian Neandertal men of western Europe may have been the blood descendants of the undiscovered Chellean-Acheulean inhabitants of western Europe who had learned more effective retouching and smaller tools from the east Europeans.

215. Upper Palæolithic Culture Growths and Races

With the advent of the Upper Palæolithic, possibly some 25,000 years ago, the divergent culture-areas of the early Lower Palæolithic which had become largely effaced during the Mousterian, emerge again; but with shifted boundaries. The line of demarcation now is no longer formed by the Rhine and the Alps, but by the Pyrenees. Throughout the Upper Palæolithic, most of Spain formed an annex to the North African province, whose culture has been named the Capsian after the type station of Gafsa in Algiers. The Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian as they have been previously described (§ 72-81) ran their course in a middle European belt stretching from France to Poland (Figs. 38, 39). Northern Spain, southern England, at times Italy and southern Russia, were more or less in this mid-European province. The Balkans remain insufficiently explored; all northernmost Europe was still uninhabited. In general, it may be said that the mid-European Upper Palæolithic culture is characterized by the associated traits of work in bone and art; the contemporary Spanish-African Capsian by specialization along the line of increasingly smaller and finer flint implements, culminating in neat microliths measurable only in fractions of inches.

The southern equivalent of the mid-European Aurignacian was the Lower Capsian, of at least equal territorial extent even in its narrowest form (Fig. 38). The industry of Syria at this period was allied to the Capsian of Africa and may be regarded as related to it. The rather scant remains of the age in Italy are perhaps also to be allied with the Capsian culture rather than with the true Aurignacian. This makes it look as if at this time a great Lower Capsian culture-area embraced nearly all the shores of the Mediterranean. As against this, the mid-European true Aurignacian, so far as now known, covered only a narrow region.

During the Solutrean and Magdalenian, Africa and Spain were in the Upper Capsian. Evidence from the eastern Mediterranean begins to fail. Italy is wholly without discovered remains. There are indications (§ 240) that at least by the beginning of the Magdalenian in Europe, the favored land of Egypt had already entered into the Neolithic. If this is so, westernmost Asia, Greece, and even Italy may have begun to be affected by this higher phase of culture, and the paucity or absence of their late Palæolithic remains would be accounted for. This view seems reasonable, but is unproved.

The Solutrean seems to have been a brief period in western Europe, and its extent appears limited also (Fig. 39). It reveals two principal areas: one north of the Danube, the other in southern France. The former may have been the earlier, from which the culture, or certain phases of it, such as the art of even surface retouch on leaf-shaped blades, were carried westward into France. In this connection two facts may be significant.

First is the circumstance that the north Danubian Solutrean area possessed an art, apparently largely of Solutrean age, which is quite different from the Upper Palæolithic art of the west. Naturalism was scarcely attempted, figures were highly conventional, the style was one of concentric curves or stippling or hatching.

The second consideration is the Brünn race. This type, which as yet is known only from a few examples (§ 17), is generally considered Neandertaloid, but also shows leanings toward the Cro-Magnon race as well as differences from it. The less dubious Brünn remains, those from Brünn, Brüx, and perhaps Predmost, are all from Czecho-Slovakia, that is, the north Danubian region; and they seem to be of Solutrean age. These facts render it likely that there existed a connection between the east Solutrean culture, the geometric art, and the Brünn race, and they indicate at least some probability of the spread of Solutrean culture from eastern to western Europe. Brünn man may have been a modified Neandertal man who persisted in the east after Cro-Magnon man had become established in the west during the Aurignacian. Or he may have been a local eastern variant of a generic type whose better known western form we call Cro-Magnon man.

As to Grimaldi man, his Negroid affiliations also seem less startling once it is clear that the Aurignacian civilization was a mid-European phenomenon, and that contemporary Spain and probably Italy formed part of the essentially African development of the Lower Capsian. With southern Europe a cultural annex of north Africa at this period, the presence there of a Negroid type is reasonable enough. Further, both the strait of Gibraltar and that between Tunis and Sicily were land bridges during part of the Pleistocene; Gibraltar, for instance, probably during the Lower Capsian and, again, after a subsidence, in the Upper Capsian. The Mediterranean, in other words, must be conceived not as a great barring sea, but as a land-locked lake or pair of lakes, so that Europe and Africa were joined geographically as well as racially and culturally.

As to the Cro-Magnon race, its association with the Aurignacian-Magdalenian culture of mid-European type is clear enough, but its origin remains problematical. One naturally looks eastward: to the north lay ice, to the west the Atlantic, to the south a different even though related culture. But nothing is really known; no ancestral Asiatic form, no closely cognate later race, no eastern culture out of which the Aurignacian might have sprung nor to which it might have been specifically related. All or some of these may have existed, but in the absence of discovery, speculation is of little profit. There is the further difficulty about a theory that brings Cro-Magnon man out of the east into the west of Europe, that a little later, in the Solutrean, central Europe, through which he presumably passed, seems to have been in possession of the Brünn race. True, this might have been a later wave out of the east; but to derive both races out of Asia, and perhaps the preceding Neandertal type also, is a bit monotonous as a hypothesis, besides being one of those assumptions that seem to answer problems without really helping their understanding.

Much the same may be said as to the fate of Neandertal man—whether he was exterminated by the Cro-Magnons, or absorbed, or was driven away, or died out. A single discovery on this point will be worth more than the most elaborate conjecture.

Two points seem clear, whatever may have been the diffusions of race and culture at the time that the Lower Palæolithic was being replaced by the Upper. On the side of flint industry, there was no break: the Aurignacian is the continuation of the Mousterian. The experts occasionally have difficulty in agreeing whether a station or level is to be assigned to the late Mousterian or early Aurignacian. Whatever, therefore, was imported in the Upper Palæolithic was joined to something that remained over and continued in middle Europe from the Lower Palæolithic. Secondly, the center of known naturalistic art development was the west, southern France especially; perceptibly in the Aurignacian, notably in the Magdalenian. Yet this tract is peripheral to the Aurignacian-Magdalenian culture as a whole. It would thus be a forced explanation to look upon this art as the outright result of a diffusion or migration: the supposed recipients of the accomplishment would be carrying it farther than its originators. In other words, Upper Palæolithic art was in the main a growth on the soil of western Europe, so far as present evidence indicates. These findings diminish the probability of any large scale importation of Upper Palæolithic culture ready made as a by-product of the irruption of a new race. The change from Lower to Upper Palæolithic was indeed profoundly significant. But much of it may have been consummated by a gradual evolution within western and central Europe.

It is worth observing that the Lower Palæolithic of Europe with all its fundamental unity of culture stretched through different climates. The Chellean was at least in part sub-tropical, the Acheulean a time of cooling steppe climate, the Mousterian the period of maximum glaciation. The Upper Palæolithic again has its transition from the close of the Würm glaciation to the present temperature of Europe broken by three temporary advances of the ice, known as they occurred in the Alps as the Bühl, Gschnitz, and Daun phases. The following correlation of climatic and cultural periods has been suggested: Aurignacian, close of the last glacial and beginning of the post-glacial; Solutrean, first maximum of ice recession (Achenschwankung); Magdalenian, Bühl advance, second recession, and Gschnitz advance, corresponding respectively to the early, middle, and late stages of the period. To these might be added that the Azilian came at about the third recession and brief final Daun advance; the Neolithic, with the final recession of ice and appearance of modern conditions. It is clear that climatic circumstances were not the chief determining factor in the cultural development of early Europe. Had they been such, the Chellean would have differed culturally more from the Mousterian than this from the Aurignacian.

Southern Europe and North Africa were not glaciated in the Pleistocene. Heavier rainfall, perhaps accompanied by forestation, are likely to have taken the place of the ice, whereas a change from forest to steppe, or steppe to desert, corresponded to the recession of the ice in Alpine and northern Europe. For more distant regions, such as India and south Africa, the climatic correlations with Europe become dubious; which is one of the reasons why as yet no sure linking in time can be effected between their Palæolithic culture and that of Europe.

216. The Palæolithic Aftermath: Azilian

After the Magdalenian, there follows in western Europe the Azilian, or Azylian, named after Mas d’Azil in the French Pyrenees. It has also been called Tourassian. This was the period in which the reindeer died out, being replaced by the deer. Harpoons were accordingly made of deer horn instead of reindeer antler, the spongier texture of the interior of the material necessitating a coarser and broader form. Perforations to hold the harpoon line now began to be regularly provided. Bone implements were fewer, chiefly awls or simple dart heads. Stone implements became less important. The best made flint forms were minute points or blades of geometric form, often trapezoidal. These are the microliths, obviously intended, in the main, for insertion in wood, sometimes perhaps in sawlike rows. The great naturalistic Magdalenian art was dead in the Azilian. Its place was taken by simple conventional designs painted on pebbles, sometimes curiously suggestive of alphabetic symbols, although it is unthinkable that they could at this early time, and among so backward a people as these deer hunters, have served any purpose of writing. The puzzling designs are more likely to have been used in magic or religion.

The period of the Azilian was perhaps 10,000-8000 B.C. The climate was approaching that of to-day, though still cooler. The area of the Azilian proper was limited to the Pyrenean environs of southern France and northern Spain. Related and contemporary cultures can however be traced much farther; and the name Azilian in a larger sense may justifiably be applied to these also. The greater part of Spain and Portugal and north Africa were at this time in the Terminal Capsian. This was a local phase lacking the deer horn harpoons and painted pebbles of the Pyrenees, but with the microlithic flint industry especially conspicuous. In fact it is in Africa that the development of the extreme microlithic forms out of their antecedents, the reduced implements of the Upper Capsian, has been most clearly traced. In Europe the Azilian forms do not connect nearly so closely with the preceding Magdalenian. It looks therefore as if the culture of western Europe in this period were based to a considerable extent on traits evolved in Africa, to which various additions were made locally, like the pebble-painting in the Pyrenean area. This preponderance of African influences is corroborated by the occurrence in Syria and southern Italy of small flints allied to the Terminal Capsian ones. The same may be said of a culture phase of northern France, the Tardenoisian, which extended also to Belgium and England—which latter seems not to have become finally separated from the continent until about this era. The Tardenoisian is specifically characterized by microliths almost indistinguishable from the north African ones, but lacks the other traits of the south French Azilian. It may also have persisted longer, into the period which in the south was already early Neolithic. Approximately contemporary and related is also the south German culture represented at Ofnet, famous for its nests of skulls from decapitated bodies; and that in southern Scandinavia called Maglemose (§ 233). In Scotland and northern England, on the other hand, the harpoon head is once more to the fore, perhaps because here as in the Pyrenean area forested mountains and the sea were in juxtaposition and deer and salmon could both be taken abundantly. The food habits of sub-arid and arid north Africa must have been quite different; in fact it is evident that snails were seasonally consumed here in large quantities.

All these local phases interrelate and may be grouped together as Azilian as designative of the period and generic culture. The map (Fig. 40) shows the extent to which the manifestations of this culture stage have been traced. They may prove to extend farther.

Spain, at the close of the Palæolithic, possessed art of three types. In the north, Magdalenian realism flourished as vigorously as in neighboring southern France. The paintings of the cave of Altamira, for instance, are no less numerous and superb than those of Font-de-Gaume. Second, in the south, there prevailed a conventional style. Men and animals are still recognizable, but schematically drawn, and among them are pictographic symbols. Third, in eastern Spain, a cliff art was realistic in purpose, but crude in execution. One can see without difficulty what the figures are doing, but the proportions are distorted, and the fresh, vivid, sure spirit of Magdalenian painting is wholly lacking. The figures represent people more often than animals: gatherings, dances, long-gowned women, men with bows. This is the earliest direct or indirect record of the bow and arrow. It dates from the final phase of the Palæolithic, and the weapon may not have become employed throughout Europe until the Neolithic was definitely under way.

It is well to remember in this connection that no specific type of culture, no matter how old, is likely ever to have existed without variation over a whole hemisphere or continent. The later any type is, the greater is the probability that it has had sufficient time for specific characterization to enable it to be distinguished readily from the contemporary cultures of other areas. The local provinces or culture-areas of the Palæolithic foreshadow the deeper regional differentiations of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages.

There is some variation of usage as to whether the Azilian is assignable to the Palæolithic or Neolithic. Some include it with the earliest Neolithic phases to constitute a Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age. The era has also been designated Epi-Palæolithic and Proto-Neolithic. The concept of a separate Mesolithic period becomes important in the degree that the original definition of the Neolithic as limited to the age of polished stone remains rigorously adhered to. With the Neolithic conceived more broadly, as discussed in the following section, a separate Mesolithic becomes unnecessary, and the Azilian takes its place as a final Palæolithic episode of mixed African and local developments after the passing of the characteristic European Upper Palæolithic.

217. The Neolithic: Its Early Phase

The Neolithic is by original definition the age of polished stone as opposed to the fracturing of stone in the Palæolithic. In a sense, this definition is a true one, at any rate for Europe and the Near East. There is no stone grinding in the Palæolithic and there is in the Neolithic. But since the two stone ages were first discriminated fifty or more years ago, a vast body of knowledge has accumulated about them, with the result that the original criterion has become only an approximate one. The definition of the Neolithic as the age of ground stone is at the present time so over-elementary as to have become inaccurate. A long initial phase of this age did not yet grind stone, but continued to use tools made by the Palæolithic process of chipping. It was not until the latter part of the New Stone Age was reached, what we may call the Full Neolithic, that the grinding and polishing of stone were attempted.

What, then, it is natural to ask, makes the Early Neolithic Age really Neolithic—what in fact separates it from the Palæolithic? It is a cluster of traits; a cluster that grew as the Neolithic progressed; but every one of whose constituents was lacking from the Old Stone Age.

218. Pottery and the Bow

Outstanding in this cluster of cultural traits that mark the Neolithic is pottery. Wherever, in Europe and the Near East at least, there is universal agreement that a stage of development was Neolithic, pottery is present. And conversely, wherever pottery occurs, no one has yet doubted that a true Neolithic stage existed. The earliest potteryless phases, such as that of Maglemose, which have sometimes been designated as Proto-Neolithic, sometimes as Mesolithic, can advantageously be considered terminal Palæolithic.

Second in importance is the bow, which in general appeared contemporaneously with pottery. The evidence for its existence is sometimes less clear. Pottery is imperishable and unmistakable. The bow and arrow, on the other hand, are made of materials that decay in a few years, under ordinary conditions. Only the stone or bone point preserves, and this cannot always be distinguished with positiveness from the head of a light spear or even from a small knife blade. There was a time, for instance, when the smaller flint blades of the Solutrean were often regarded as arrow points, whereas now the tendency, based on more intensive comparisons, is to deny the bow and arrow to the Magdalenian as well as the Solutrean. Certainly the harpoon and its thrower are so numerous and indubitable in the Magdalenian that there would be reason to expect an important weapon like the bow to have left at least some sure traces: a definitive type of recognizable arrow head would have been worked out. But such is not the case.

These two culture elements, pottery and the bow, signalized an enormous advance over the past. Both required definite technical skill to manufacture. And both were of the greatest service. Whole lines of foods could now be utilized that had formerly been passed by: soups, stews, porridges. Plants whose seeds or parts before were inedible, or almost so, were added to the diet as soon as they could be boiled. The bow made possible long range fighting, the free pursuit of large game, and the capture of many small mammals and birds which previously it must have been difficult to take. The harpoon was developed chiefly for fishing. It would be of little help in killing birds, rabbits, and the like, or large and dangerous animals like wild cattle.

219. Bone Tools

Hand in hand with the invention or rather introduction of the bow and pottery—it seems doubtful whether they were devised in Europe—went an increased employment of bone and horn tools at the expense of stone. This drift had already begun in the Upper Palæolithic; in fact, is one of the signs that mark it off from the Lower Palæolithic. It became accentuated as the Upper Palæolithic wore on, still more prominent in its closing Azilian phase[33]—hence the increasing minuteness of flint blades—and continued into the early Neolithic. A good working chisel, wedge, awl, or needle, for instance, must be smooth. This finish is difficult in chipped stone, but easily attained in bone or horn by rubbing. It was not therefore until stone grinding came into use in the later Neolithic, that bone and horn began to fall in significance as materials. But they had performed their service. It is unlikely that stone polishing would have been attempted but for the experience and long habits of the polishing process as acquired in dealing with the softer materials.

220. The Dog

The first animal was also domesticated about the beginning of the Neolithic. Dog remains have been found in two very late post-Magdalenian Palæolithic sites, one in Scotland, the other in Denmark, both apparently Azilian in age. Then, the Danish kitchenmiddens, which began in the first stage of the Early Neolithic, contain innumerable bones that have been gnawed by dogs. The animals may still have been half wild at this period, since their own skeletons are rare in the middens. Evidently the species was not yet firmly attached to man; its members went off to die in solitude. This is what has generally been predicated on hypothetical grounds of the history of dog and man. Contrary to most domesticated animals, the dog is thought not to have been captured and tamed outright, but to have attached himself to human beings as a parasitic hanger-on, a shy, tolerated, uncared-for scavenger, living in a stage of symbiotic relationship with our ancestors before his real domestication. This view the prehistoric evidence seems to confirm.

221. The Hewn Ax

One more trait signalizes the Early Neolithic: the hewn stone ax. This was a chipped implement, straight or slightly convex along the cutting edge, tapering from that to the butt, about twice as long as broad, rather thick, unperforated and ungrooved; in fact perhaps often unhandled and driven by blows upon the butt: a sharp stone wedge as much as an ax, in short. The whole Palæolithic shows no such implement: even the Azilian has only bone or horn “axes.”

It is hardly necessary to repeat for the Neolithic what has already been said of the Palæolithic periods: the older types, such as chipped flint tools, continued very generally to be made. Such persistence is natural: a survival of a low type among higher ones does not mean much. It is the appearance of new and superior inventions that counts.

The Early Neolithic can be summed up, then, in these five traits: pottery; the bow and arrow; abundant use of bone and horn; the dog; and the hewn ax.

222. The Full Neolithic

It is the later or Full Neolithic, beginning probably between 6000 and 5000 B.C. in western Europe, that is marked by the grinding or polishing of stone. Even this criterion is less deep-going than might be thought from all the references that prehistorians have made to it, since the new process was put to limited service. Practically the only stone implements that were ground into shape in Europe were of the ax class: the ax head itself, the celt or chisel, hammer stones, and clubheads. The mill is the principal artifact that can be added to the list. The ax long remained what we to-day should scarcely dignify with the name of ax head: an unpierced, ungrooved blade. It is only toward the end of the Neolithic in Europe, after metal was already in use in the Orient and Mediterranean countries, that perforated and well ground stone axes appear; many of these make the impression of being stone imitations, among a remote, backward people, of forms cast in bronze by the richer and more advanced nations of the South and East.

Much more important than the ground stone ax in its influence on life was the commencement, during the Neolithic, of two of the great fundamentals of our own modern civilization: agriculture and domestic animals. These freed men from the buffetings of nature; made possible permanent habitation, the accumulation of food and wealth, and a heavier growth of population. Also, agriculture and animal breeding were evidently introduced only after numbers had reached a certain density. A sparse population, being able to subsist on wild products, tends to remain content with them. A fertile area with mild winters may support as high as one soul per square mile without improvement of the natural resources; in large forests, steppes, cold climates, and arid tracts, the territory needed for the subsistence of each head becomes larger in a hunting stage of existence.

The cultivated food plants of the European Neolithic were barley, wheat, and millet, pease, lentils, and somewhat later, beans and apples. All of these seem to derive from Mediterranean or west Asiatic sources. Of non-edible plants there was flax, which served textile purposes and involved loom weaving.

The species of domesticated animals numbered four, besides the dog: cattle, swine, sheep, and goats. The horse,[34] cat, hen, duck, came into Europe during the metal ages, in part during the historic period.

223. Origin of Domesticated Animals and Plants

The place of first domestication of the four oldest species is not known surely. Most of them had wild representatives in Europe long before and after the domesticated forms appear, but the same was true in western Asia and Egypt, and the general priority of these tracts in metal working and other cultural achievements makes it likely that their inhabitants were also the first to tame the animals in question. The subject is as intricate as it is interesting, because of difficulty which biologists experience in tracing the modified tame forms back to the wild species with certainty. The mere fact of continued domestication, even without conscious selection in breeding, often alters a species more from what may have been its old wild form than this differs from another wild species.

It is however clear from the unusually abundant and well preserved Lake-dwelling remains of Switzerland that the earliest known domestic animals of this region were considerably different from the nearest native species. The wild bull or urus of Europe, Bos primigenius, was large and long-horned. His bones in the oldest lake dwellings seem to come from wild individuals that had been hunted. Alongside are the remains of the domesticated Bos brachyceros, a short-horned form, small and delicately built. Later, though still in the Neolithic, long-horned tame cattle appear in the lake dwellings. Apparently the short-horns had first been imported from the south; then the native urus was tamed; finally, the two strains were crossed. These strains are thought to survive in our modern cattle, those of eastern and central Europe being prevailingly of the primigenius, of western Europe of the brachyceros type.

A similar story applies to the pig. The first domesticated swine of Switzerland were small, long-legged, and easily distinguishable from the wild boar of the region. It thus is likely that they were imported domesticated. In the Bronze Age, pigs grew larger, due perhaps to crossing with the wild species. Sheep were certainly brought into Europe, as there is no corresponding wild form; the goats, too, have their nearest relatives in Asia. They were perhaps tamed before sheep. At any rate, goats prevailed in the earlier lake dwellings, whereas later, sheep outnumbered them.

Similar arguments apply to the origin of the cultivated plants in Europe. For some of these, such as wheat, wild relatives—possible ancestors—are known from Asia, but not from Europe. Also there has been such a drift of later cultivated plants—legumes, greens, and fruits—from Asia and the Mediterranean into Europe during the Bronze and Iron Ages, as to render it probable that the earliest flow was in the same direction. The instances of diffusion from north to south are few: oats, rye, and hemp are perhaps the principal. These plants, however, were carried southward slowly and accepted reluctantly, whereas the northerners were in general avid of any southern or Oriental form which would bear their climate, as the progressive spread and increased use of new forms shows. Furthermore, even oats, rye, and hemp appear to be Asiatic in origin, and thus to have entered Europe merely from the east, instead of southeast.

224. Other Traits of the Full Neolithic

The earliest animals were kept for their flesh and hides. Two or three thousand years passed before cattle were used before the plow or to draw wagons. Both the plow and the wheel were unknown in Europe until well in the Bronze Age, after they had been established for some time in Asia. Still later was the use of milk. Here again Asia and Egypt have precedence.

Many other elements of culture appear in the Full Neolithic. Houses were dug into the ground and roofed over with timbers and earth. The dead were buried in enduring chambers of stone: “dolmens,” often put together out of enormous slabs; or excavations in soft bed rock. Upright pillars of undressed stone were erected—either singly as “menhirs” or in “alignments”—in connection with religious or funerary worship. Pottery was ornamented in a variety of geometric decorative styles, usually incised rather than painted; their sequences and contemporary distributions in several areas are gradually being determined.

225. The Bronze Age: Copper and Bronze Phases

There is no abrupt break between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. Metal was at first too rare, too difficult to mine and smelt and work, to be used extensively. It served for special weapons, tools, and ornaments of the wealthy. The life of the mass of the population went on in much the old channels for generations or centuries after the new material had become known. This was true especially of peoples in oreless regions, or too backward to have learned the art of metal working. To such nations, the first bronze came as an imported rarity, to be guarded as a treasure or heirloom.

Of even less immediate effect than the discovery of bronze, was that of the first metals known, copper and gold. The latter is of course too scarce and too soft to serve for anything but ornaments; and pure copper also, even when hardened by hammering, is of little use for many mechanical purposes. It makes a fairly efficient dagger, a rather mediocre ax, and a poor knife. The result was that a recognizable period of copper preceded the true Bronze Age, yet that it was essentially a last phase of the New Stone Age, with the metal creeping in as something subsidiary. In Italy and Spain it has therefore become customary among archæologists to speak of an “Eneolithic” period as a transition stage in which some copper, and occasionally bronze of low tin content, occur. In central and northern Europe, the equivalent stage falls somewhat later and is sometimes called the Stone-Bronze period.

Bronze is an alloy of tin with copper, harder than the latter, easier to melt, and casting better. In many properties it resembles brass, by which term it is referred to in the English Bible; but must not be confounded with it. Brass is an alloy of zinc with copper, of much later discovery, apparently in Asia, and until recent centuries little used in Europe. As regards bronze, even a two per cent addition of tin to copper results in a perceptible hardening; and five to ten per cent produce a greatly superior tool metal.

The origin of bronze is a problem of some difficulty, because the earliest known users of bronze, the peoples of the Near East, possessed little or no tin. There are said to have been tin supplies in the Khorasan district of Persia, which might have been drawn upon by the pre-Babylonians and thence carried to Egypt. The chief source of the tin of later antiquity was Spain and England. But at the outset of the Bronze Age, the Orientals did not even know of the existence of these countries, while their natives, still ignorant of copper, could not have mined tin for the purpose of hardening that basic metal.

Just how, then, bronze was discovered, is still unknown; but it must have been in Western Asia not later than the fourth millenium B.C. Before 3000 B.C., in the period of the first dynasties ruling over united Egypt, the art had been established in that country, since bronzes low in percentage of tin have been discovered from that era. While ancient Egypt mined its own copper in the adjacent Sinai peninsula, it is barren of tin resources, so that the latter metal must have been imported. Within a few centuries, bronze began to be used in Crete and Troy, and by 2500 B.C. in Italy and Spain, whereas it did not penetrate central and northern Europe until about 1900 B.C., according to the usual estimates. That the use of bronze over these widespread areas is a connected phenomenon, a case of single origin and diffusion, is clear from the manner in which the art spread from its center of invention like a wave which arrived later the farther it had to travel. The spread is confirmed by the fact that certain implement forms such as early triangular daggers and later swords traveled with the material. Had the western natives discovered bronze for themselves, they would have cast it into shapes peculiar to themselves, instead of adopting those long established among the Orientals.

226. Traits Associated with Bronze

About coincident with bronze there developed in Egypt and Babylonia a flood of new arts and inventions: writing; sunburned brick; stone masonry; sculpture and architecture; the arch; the plow and later the chariot; the potter’s wheel, which turns clay vessels with mechanical roundness; astronomical records and accurate calendars; an enhanced cult of the dead and greater monuments for them. Many of these elements were carried into westernmost Asia and the Ægean Islands; not so many to Italy; fewer still to Spain and France; and a minimum to central and northern Europe. But it would be an error to infer from the continued backwardness of the northern peoples that they were wholly passive and recipient. In their simpler, more barbaric way, they remodeled much of what they had carried to them, altered the form, decorated it in their own style, made much of some item which filled but an insignificant place in the more complex civilization of the southeast. The fibula or safety-pin, for instance, was seized upon with avidity by the central and north European nations, made ornate and tremendously enlarged, until it sometimes measured half a foot in length and more than half a pound in weight with spiral whorls, bosses, pin clasps, or attached rings as big as a palm. The Baltic nations, the farthest reached by this diffusion, in particular threw themselves into the development of the fibula with zest, success, and a large measure of decorative taste.

Even longer is the history of the sword. This has two lines of historic development. The one-edged sword or saber tends to curvature and is essentially a hewing weapon, not intended for thrusting, or only secondarily so adapted. This form is first known in western Asia, is apparently of Asiatic origin, and is the direct ancestor of the Saracen and Indian scimitar, the Malayan kris and barong, the Japanese samurai’s sword. The two-edged sword with point has at all times—until after the introduction of firearms—been the prevailing form in Europe. Its ancestor is the Egyptian bronze dagger, which in turn is probably derived from a copper and ultimately a flint blade of dagger length. The Egyptian dagger never grew to more than half-sword length, but the type was early carried to Crete and Italy and Spain. By 2500-2000 B.C. the latter countries were using triangular wide-bladed daggers of copper and bronze, with a basal breadth not much less than the length. The handle was a separate piece, riveted on. Gradually the length grew greater, the breadth less, the edges more nearly parallel, the point sharper; the half-sword and then the sword evolved out of the dagger. The handle, or its spike, came to be cast with the blade. These drawn-out forms traveling to central and northern Europe, were made there of greater and greater length, especially after iron was known. For three thousand years, and from the southern Mediterranean in its progress to the North Sea, the sword grew longer and longer, but always by gradual modification: the whole series of forms shows a transition in both time and geography. The Greek and Roman sword remained of thigh length, and was used mainly for thrusting; the Keltic and Germanic weapon was for hewing and almost unwieldy; blades so big as to require two-handed swinging finally came to be employed—a barbaric, ineffective exaggeration to which the long-cultured Mediterraneans never descended.