Anthropology

65. Fossils of the Body and of the Mind

The discovery of fossils has yielded some idea of the history of the human body during the past million years. The evidence is far from complete, but there is enough to prove a development much as might be expected under the hypothesis of evolution. To some extent fossils also afford an insight into the development of the human mind. The capacity of a skull gives the size of the brain. The interior surface of the skull corresponds to the outer surface of the brain. In this way some slight knowledge has been gained of the development in ancient types of man of the convolutions and centers of the brain surface with which mental activity is associated. Even limb bones yield indirect indications. A straight thigh means an erect posture of the body, with the arms no longer used for locomotion. Released from this service, they are freed for other purposes, such as grasping, handling, and various forms of what we call work. But a hand adapted for work would be useless without an intelligence to direct its operations. Thus the bones of our precursors provide suggestions as to the degree of development of their minds. The suggestions are sketchy and incomplete, but they are worth something.

A second line of evidence is fuller. When a human or pre-human hand has made any article, one can judge from that article what its purpose is likely to have been, how it was used, how much intelligence that use involved, what degree of skill was necessary to manufacture the article. All such artifacts—tools, weapons, or anything constructed—are a reflection of the degree of “culture” or civilization, elementary or advanced, possessed by the beings who made them.

On the whole the evidence to be got from artifacts as to the degree of advancement of their makers or users is greater than the information derivable from the structure of skeletons. A large brain does not always imply high intelligence. Even a much convoluted brain surface may accompany a mediocre mind. In other words, the correlation between body and mind has not been worked out with accuracy. On the other hand an advanced type of tool necessarily implies more skill in its use, and therefore a decided development of the use of intelligence. Similarly, if one finds nothing but simple tools occurring among any past or present people, we may be sure that their civilization and the training of their minds have remained backward.

It is true that one cannot always infer from a particular manufactured object the mentality of the particular person who owned and used it. An imbecile may come into possession of a good knife and even possess some ability in using it. But he can acquire the knife only if there are other individuals in his community or time who know how to smelt iron and forge steel. In short, even a single jackknife is proof that human ingenuity has progressed to the point of making important discoveries, and that arts of relatively high order are being practised. In this way a solitary implement, if its discovery is thoroughly authenticated, may suffice to establish a relatively high or low degree of civilization for a prehistoric period or a vanished race.

An implement manufactured by human hands of the past is of course different from an actual fossil of a former human being, and it is always necessary to distinguish between the two. The one is something made by a human being and in some measure reflecting the development of his intelligence; the other something left over or preserved from the human body itself. Nevertheless, in a metaphorical sense, the implements of the past may well be spoken of as the fossils of civilization. They are only its fragments, but they allow us to reconstruct the mode of life of prehistoric peoples and utterly forgotten nations, in much the same way as the geologist and the palæontologist reconstruct from true fossils the forms of life that existed on the earth or in the seas millions of years ago.

There is even a further parallel. Just as the geologist knows that one fossil is older or younger than another from its position in the earth’s crust or the stratum in which it was laid down, so the student of the beginnings of human civilization knows that the deposit at the bottom of a cave must be more ancient than the refuse at the top. He calls in the geologist to tell him the age of a glacial deposit or of a river terrace, and thus he may learn that, of two types of implements found at different places or levels, one is so many thousands of years or geological periods older than the other. In the long run, too, the older implements prove to be the simpler. Thus archæologists have succeeded in working out an evolution of civilization which parallels rather neatly the evolution of life forms. This evolution of human mental operations as it is reflected in the artifacts preserved from the lowest and earliest strata of civilization is the subject of the present chapter.

There is another way in which the evidence on the two lines of evolution is similar: its incompleteness. The geological record has been compared to a book from which whole chapters are missing; of others, but stray leaves remain; and only now and then have consecutive pages been preserved unmutilated. Humanity has always been so much less populous than the remainder of the animal kingdom, especially in its earlier stages, that the number of individuals whose bones have been preserved as fossils is infinitely smaller. The result is that we account ourselves fortunate in having been able to assemble six or seven not quite complete skeletons, and fragmentary portions of two or three dozen other individuals, of the Neandertal race which inhabited western Europe for thousands of years. For still earlier races or species of man the actual data are even scantier. Knowledge of so fundamental a form as Pithecanthropus, the earliest of the antecedents of man yet known, rests on two bones and two teeth, plus a third tooth discovered as the sole result of a subsequent expedition. Heidelberg man has to be reconstructed from a jaw.

The remains which illustrate the development of the human mind are not so scarce. A single man might easily manufacture hundreds or even thousands of implements in the course of a lifetime. When these are of stone they are practically imperishable; whereas it is only the exceptional skeleton, protected by favorable circumstances, of which the bones will endure for thousands of years. For every ancient true fossil trace of man that has been found, we have therefore thousands of the works of his hands.

The inadequateness of the cultural record is not in the insufficient number of the specimens, but in their onesidedness. Objects of stone, even those of horn and of metal, last; clothing, fabrics, skins, basketry, and wooden articles ordinarily decay so rapidly as to have no chance of being preserved for tens of thousands of years. Tools of the most ancient times have often been found in abundance; objects manufactured with tools from softer and less enduring materials are scarce even from moderately old periods. Now and then a piece of an earthenware pot may show the imprint of a textile. Textiles and foodstuffs are occasionally preserved by charring in fire or by penetration of metallic salts. Charcoal or ashes found in pockets or beds indicate that fire was maintained in one spot for considerable periods, and must therefore have been controlled and used, possibly even produced, by human agency. A bone needle with an eye proves that some one must have sewn, and one may therefore assume that garments were worn at the time. But for every point established in this way there are dozens about which knowledge remains blank.

Understanding of the social and religious life of the earliest men is naturally filled with the greatest gaps, and the farther back one goes in time, the greater is the enveloping darkness. The problem is as difficult as that of figuring accurately the degree of intelligence attained by the mailed fishes of the Devonian age some thirty or forty million years ago, or of estimating whether the complexion of Pithecanthropus was black, brown, or white. One can guess on these matters. One may by careful comparisons obtain some partial and indirect indication of an answer. But it is clearly wisest not to try to stretch too far the conclusions which can be drawn. Imagination has its value in science as in art and other aspects of life, yet when it becomes disproportionate to the facts, it is a danger instead of an aid.

Still, now and then something has been preserved from which one may draw inferences with a reasonable prospect of certainty even concerning the non-material side of life. If human bones are discovered charred and split open, there is good reason for believing these bones to be the remains of a cannibal feast. When prehistoric skeletons are found in the position in which death might have taken place, the presumption is that the people of that time abandoned their dead as animals would. If on the other hand a skeleton lies intact with its arms carefully folded, there is little room for doubt that the men of the time had progressed to the point where the survivors put away their dead; in other words, that human burial had been instituted, and that accordingly at least some rude form of society was in existence. When, perhaps from a still later period, a skeleton is found with red paint adhering to the bones, although these lie in their natural places, the only conclusion to be drawn is that the dead body was coated with pigment before being interred and that as the soft tissues wasted away the red ocher came to adhere to the bones. In this case the painting was evidently part of a rite performed over the dead.

66. Stone and Metals

The cultural record of man’s existence is divided into two great periods. In the latter of these, in which we are still living, metals were used; in the earlier, metals were unknown and tools made of stone. Hence the terms “Age of Stone” and “Age of Metals.” The duration of these two main periods is unequal. Metals were first used in Asia and Egypt about 4,000 B.C. and in Europe about 3,000 B.C.—say five to six thousand years ago. The most conservative authorities, however, would allow forty or fifty thousand years for the Stone Age; while others make it cover a quarter million. The assumption, which is here followed, of the intermediate figure of a hundred thousand years gives the Stone Age a duration twenty times as long as the Age of Metals. When one remembers that hand in hand with metals came the art of writing and an infinite variety of inventions, it is clear that larger additions have been made to human civilization in the comparatively brief period of metals than in the tremendously longer time that preceded it. Progress in the Stone Age was not only slow, but the farther back one peers into this age, the more lagging does the evolution of human culture seem to have been. One can definitely recognize a tendency toward the acceleration of evolution: the farther advancement has got the faster it moves.

The Age of Metals is subdivided into the Iron Age, which begins some three thousand years ago, say about 1,500-1,000 B.C.; and an earlier Bronze Age. In the Bronze Age one must distinguish first a period in which native copper was employed in some parts of the world; after which comes an era in which it had been learned that copper melted with a proportion of about one-tenth tin, thus producing bronze, was a superior material. Within the past five thousand years or so, accordingly, there are recognized successively the ages of copper, of bronze, and of iron.

Broadly speaking, these five thousand years are also the historic period. Not that there exist historic records going back so far as this for every people. But the earliest preserved documents that the historian uses, the written monuments of Egypt and Babylonia, are about five thousand years old. The Age of Metals thus corresponds approximately with the period of History; the Stone Age, with Prehistory.

67. The Old and the New Stone Ages

The Stone Age, apart from a rather doubtful introductory era to be mentioned presently, is customarily divided into two periods, the Old Stone Age and the New Stone Age,—the Palæolithic and the Neolithic. These words of Greek origin mean literally “old stone” and “new stone” periods. The criterion by which these two grand divisions were originally distinguished was that in the Palæolithic artifacts were made only by chipping, that is, some process of fracturing stone, whereas Neolithic stone objects were thought to have been pecked, ground, rubbed, and polished. Indeed the two periods have sometimes been designated as the epochs of rough stone and polished stone implements.

This distinction is now known to be inaccurate. It is true that the Old Stone Age did not yet employ frictional processes in shaping stone and confined itself to the older methods of fracturing by blows or pressure. But the converse is not true, that the Neolithic worked stone only by grinding, nor even that grinding was its characteristic process. Stone grinding was invented only toward the middle of the New Stone Age—in what is perhaps best designated the “Full Neolithic.” The Early Neolithic, which lasted half the total Neolithic duration, continued to work stone by fracture. What marked the beginning of the Neolithic was certain inventions having nothing to do with stone: notably pottery and the bow. With these available, human life took on a new color, and it was not until some thousands of years later that shaping of stone by grinding came into use. In other words, the prehistorians’ idea as to what constitutes the Neolithic have changed, and they no longer put stone processes in the first place in characterizing the period. They would do well, therefore, to change its name also to one having reference to its more specific traits. Such a change of designation will perhaps become established in time. But at present the term Neolithic is so intrenched in usage, that to replace it by “Pottery Age” or “Bow Age” would be misleading: all the literature on the subject employs “Neolithic.” The present chapter being concerned specifically with the Palæolithic, and this being an age in which stone implements did loom large and were consistently made by fracture only, the difficulties about the concept of the Neolithic, and its subdivision into an Early and a Full period, can be reserved for discussion later (Chapter XIV). But it is well to bear in mind as the Palæolithic is examined in the pages immediately following, that the Neolithic is neither its antithesis nor its logical complement, but rather a period signalized by the appearance of totally new directions of human culture.

Another point in connection with the two processes of working stone has reference to the mental activities involved by them. A tolerable ground ax or mortar can be made without much difficulty by any one willing to take the trouble. A civilized person entirely inexperienced in the working of stone would be likely to produce a fairly satisfactory implement by the rubbing technique. If however he attempted to manufacture a chipped stone tool, even of simple type, he would probably fail repeatedly before learning to control the method well enough to turn out an implement without first ruining a dozen. In short, the manual dexterity required to produce the best forms of chipped stone tools is greater than that needed for ground ones. Inasmuch as the chipping process is, however, the earlier, we are confronted here with a paradox.

Yet the paradox is only on the surface. It is true that so far as skill alone is concerned a good chipped tool is more difficult to make than a ground one. But it can be made in a shorter time. A rough stone tool can be manufactured in a few minutes. A good artifact may be preceded by a number of unsuccessful attempts or “rejects,” and yet be produced in an hour or less. The processes of pecking, grinding, and polishing, on the other hand, are laborious. They are slow even when pursued with steel tools, and when the shaping material is no better than another stone or sand, as was of course always the case in prehistoric times, the duration of the labor must have been discouraging. Weeks or at least days would be required to manufacture a single implement. If the work was done at odd times, one may imagine that many a stone ax was months in being produced. Patience and forethought of a rather high order are thus involved in the making of implements of the Neolithic type. Dexterity is replaced by higher qualities of what might be called the moral order. By comparison, the earliest men lacked these traits. They would not sit down to-day to commence something that would not be available for use until a month later. What they wanted they wanted quickly. To think ahead, to sacrifice present convenience to future advantage, must have been foreign to their way of life. Therefore they chipped; and although in the lapse of thousands of years they learned to do some chipping of high quality, they continued to operate with modifications of the same rough and rapid process. The uses to which their implements could be put were also correspondingly restricted. A first-class ax, a real chisel, or a mortar in which grinding can be done, can scarcely be made by chipping alone. It was not until men had learned to restrain their childish impulse to work only for the immediate purpose, and had acquired an increased self-control and discipline, that the grinding of stone came into use.

One principle must be clearly adhered to in the dating or proper arrangement of the periods of prehistoric time: the principle that it is always the highest types of implements which determine the age of a deposit. Lower forms often persist from the earlier periods into the later, alongside the newly invented higher types. The men of the Full Neolithic time did not wholly give up making chipped implements because they also ground stone. Just so we have not discarded the use of stone because we use metals, and we still employ copper for a great variety of purposes although we live in an age of which iron and steel are characteristic. To reckon a people as Palæolithic because they had chipped implements as well as ground ones, would be as misleading as to assert that we still belong to the Stone Age because we build houses of granite. In fact, stone masonry has had its principal development since metals have been in use.

This caution seems elementary enough. But it has sometimes been overlooked by scholars in the pursuit of a theory that made them try to stamp some prehistoric or savage race as particularly primitive. If in a stratum of ancient remains there are discovered a thousand chipped artifacts and only ten that are ground or polished but the latter unquestionably left there at the same time as the thousand chipped ones, one is justified in reckoning the whole deposit as Full Neolithic in period. For in such a case it is clear that the art of grinding must have been already known, even though it may as yet have been practised only occasionally.

It is found that all surviving peoples of primitive culture—American Indians, Australian black-fellows, Polynesians, Hottentots, and the like—except probably the Tasmanians, have attained the grinding stage of development. It is true enough that many American Indian tribes chipped arrow-points and knives more frequently than they would grind out axes. Yet without exception they also knew the process of grinding stone and applied it to some purpose. For this reason the endeavors that have been made by certain authors, who compare particular modern savage peoples to the races of prehistoric Europe on the basis of a similarity of their chipped implements, are misleading. It is true that tools like those produced in the Mousterian period of the Old Stone Age are made by the modern Australian tribes, and that certain Magdalenian implements from near the end of the Old Stone Age find parallels among those of the Eskimo. But both the Australians and the Eskimo practise the art of rubbing and polishing of stone, which was unknown in the Palæolithic. They therefore belong clearly to a later stage of civilization. Too great an insistence on such parallels would be likely to give rise to the implication that the Australians were a species of belated Mousterian Stone Age men, and the Eskimo only Magdalenians whom the Arctic regions had somehow perpetuated for ten thousand years; whereas their civilizations consist of Mousterian and Magdalenian ingredients plus many subsequent elements. The stage of development of the art of chipping in stone may be the same; the other arts and customs of modern Australian black-fellows and of Eskimos, and their bodily types, differ from those of the prehistoric Europeans.

With the distinction of the Palæolithic, Neolithic, and the Ages of Copper, Bronze, and Iron in mind, it is in order to examine what may have preceded them, and then to trace in outline the development which human culture underwent during the Palæolithic in the continent in which its records are best explored—Europe.

68. The Eolithic Age

The earliest of all periods of human handiwork, although a somewhat doubtful one, is the Eolithic, or age of the “dawn of stone” implements.

On purely theoretical grounds it appears likely, indeed almost inevitable, that the first definitely chipped implements did not develop full-fledged, but were preceded by still cruder tools, made perhaps without clear intent, and at any rate so rough and half-shaped that they would be difficult to recognize.

After the evolution of Palæolithic implements had become pretty well known, this conjecture began to be supported by evidence, or at least by alleged evidence. Investigators, especially Rutot in Belgium, found flints of which it was difficult to say whether or not they had been used by human hands. These pieces occurred in extremely ancient deposits. On the basis of these discoveries Rutot and his followers established the Eolithic period. Some have consistently assailed this Eolithic age as imaginary, asserting that the so-called eoliths were nothing but accidental products of nature. Others have accepted the eoliths and recognize the stage of embryonic or pre-human civilization which they imply. Still other students remain in doubt; and their attitude is perhaps still the safest to share.

The view now most prevalent is that the alleged Eolithic flints may have been used by early human hands, but that they were almost certainly not manufactured. This would make them tools only in the sense in which the limb of a tree is a tool when a man in distress seizes it to defend himself.

The eoliths are more or less irregular pieces of flint or similar stone, some of them so blunt that they must have been very inefficient if used for chopping or cutting or scraping. Small nocks or chips along the edge are believed not to have been flaked off with the conscious intent of producing an edge, but to have become chipped away through usage while the stone was being manipulated as a naturally formed tool. This would be much in line with our picking up a cobblestone in default of an ax or hammer, and continuing to maul away with it until the rough handling broke off several pieces and happened accidentally to produce an edge. That the eoliths were such unintentionally made tools is the most that can safely be claimed for them.

Even so some doubts remain. Stones similar to eoliths in every respect, except that their fractures show a fresher appearance, have been taken by dozens out of modern steel drums in which flint-bearing chalk was being broken for industrial purposes.

Then, too, the first believers in the authenticity of the eoliths reported them as occurring from the middle and earlier layers of the Pleistocene, in which periods we know that nearly human or half-human types like Heidelberg man and Pithecanthropus were already in existence. These two species being more similar to modern man than to the apes or other animals, we must imagine them to have been gifted with at least some human intelligence. It would therefore have been entirely possible for them to supplement the tools with which nature endowed them—their hands and teeth—with flints which they picked up and manipulated in one useful way or another without particularly troubling to shape the stones.

So far the argument is all in favor of the reality of the eolith. Before long, however, it was discovered that eoliths were not especially more abundant in the middle Pleistocene just previous to the opening of the Palæolithic, when we should expect them to have been most numerous, than they were in the early Pleistocene, when the human species must still have been most rudimentary. Then it was found that eoliths occur in lower strata than the earliest Pleistocene, namely, in the Pliocene, in the Miocene, and perhaps even earlier, in the Oligocene. Yet these periods are divisions of the Tertiary, or Age of Mammals—the age before man had been evolved! In short, the argument cuts too far. Once one begins to accept eoliths it is difficult to stop accepting them without carrying them back into a period of geological history when evolution could scarcely have produced a form sufficiently advanced in intelligence to use them.[8]

Perhaps on the whole the strongest argument in favor of the authenticity of the Pleistocene eoliths is the fact that the first implements known positively to belong to the Old Stone Age are just a little too well shaped and efficient to represent the products of the very beginnings of human manual dexterity. One cannot help but look for something antecedent that was simpler and ruder; and this need of the imagination the eoliths do go a long way to satisfy.

69. The Palæolithic Age: Duration, Climate, Animals

With the Eolithic period passed and the Palæolithic entered, our history of incipient human culture is on a solid foundation, especially so far as western Europe, the best explored region, is concerned. The general relation of this Old Stone Age in geological time may be defined as follows. The Quaternary, whose duration may be estimated to have been about a million years, is subdivided into the Pleistocene and the Recent. Of the two, the Recent is very much shorter than the Pleistocene. Broadly speaking, from ninety-eight to ninety-nine per cent of the total duration of the Quaternary was occupied by the Pleistocene. The small remainder which the geologist calls “Recent,” corresponds to those periods which the archæologist and the historian name the New Stone and Metal Ages; say the past ten thousand years. The Old Stone Age therefore falls in the Pleistocene. But it occupies only the later duration of the Pleistocene; the earlier part of the Pleistocene is barren of tools or other records of human culture, except so far as the eoliths may be so considered.

The proportion of the Pleistocene which is covered by the Old Stone Age is variously estimated. Some geologists will not allow the undisputed Palæolithic to have extended over more than the last tenth of the Pleistocene: the rivers have not changed their beds enough to permit the assumption of a longer period. This allowance would give the Palæolithic a duration of perhaps a hundred thousand years, which is the figure here followed. Those who place the beginning of the European Palæolithic in the second instead of the third interglacial period, would have to admit a considerably longer duration.

The geologist, because he deals with such enormous durations, has to operate on a broad-gauge scale, and usually disdains to commit himself to close estimates of years. To measure the lapse of time within the Pleistocene, he has found it most useful to avail himself of the evidences left by the great glaciers which repeatedly covered parts of several continents during the Pleistocene, and he has therefore given this period its popular name of “glacial epoch.” These glaciations must be imagined as having occurred on a much larger scale than one might at first infer from the shrunken remnants of the glaciers that persist in the Alps and other mountains. The Pleistocene glaciers were vast sheets, hundreds of feet in thickness, sliding uniformly over valleys, hills, and mountains except for an occasional high peak. Modern Greenland, which except at the edges is buried under a solid ice cap, evidently presents a pretty fair picture of what the northern parts of Europe and North America repeatedly looked like during the Pleistocene.

Four such glaciations, or periods of maximum extent of the continental ice, have been distinguished, and more or less correlated, in Europe and North America. In Europe they have been designated as the Günz, Mindel, Riss, and Würm glaciations respectively (Fig. 5). Each of these is the name of a locality in the Alps at which typical moraines or erosions produced by the ice of that period have been carefully observed.

Between these four successive advances of the ice sheets there fell more temperate eras, some of them rather arid, and others moist and almost tropical even in the latitude of Europe. These mild intervals are known as the interglacial periods. That Europe was free from ice during these interglacial periods is shown not only by facts of a purely geological nature but by the occurrence in these periods of fossils of a semi-tropical fauna which included elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, and the like.

Coming now to a consideration of the relation of man to these ice eras, we find that the first, second, and probably the third glaciations passed without leaving sure evidence of manufactured stone implements. In the last interglacial period, that which falls between the Riss and the Würm glaciations, the so-called “Chellean picks” appear; and from then on the record of artifacts is a continuous one. Considerable parts of Europe remained habitable all through the fourth and last glaciation, the Würm period, as the implements discovered prove. Gradually, although irregularly and with three minor advances and recessions, always diminishing in rigor, however, this last predominance of the ice died away; until, by the time its effects had wholly disappeared, and the geologically “Recent” era was inaugurated, human civilization had evolved to a point where it began to enter the New Stone Age.

The animals whose fossils are found in the same deposits with human skeletons and artifacts have been of the greatest assistance in the determination of the periods of such remains. The fossils are partly of extinct species until toward the very end of the Pleistocene, when exclusively living types of animals begin wholly to supersede the earlier ones. While the identification of the various species, and the fixation of the age of each, is the work of the specialist in palæontology, the results of such studies are all-important to the historian of man’s beginnings, because they help to determine chronology. If artifacts are found in association with fossil remains of an extinct animal such as the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, they are obviously older than artifacts that are accompanied only by the bones of the reindeer, the dog, or other living species. For this reason, although the history of mammalian life in the past is a science in itself, it also has close relations with human prehistory. Some of the most characteristic animals of the later Pleistocene, and the successive stages of human cultural development with which they were associated, are listed on the following page.

70. Subdivisions of the Palæolithic

The places at which the men of the Stone Age lived and where their debris accumulated are known as “stations.” The word was first employed in this sense in French, but has been taken over into other languages. A “station” then is simply a spot at which prehistoric remains of human occupation are found. At least a thousand of these have been discovered in western Europe. In general they divide into two classes. One kind is in the open, mostly in the gravels laid down by streams. These are therefore known as “River Drift” or simply “Drift” stations. The other kind is found in caves or under sheltering rocks. The majority of Drift stations have proved to be from the earlier or Lower Palæolithic, whereas the Cave stations date mostly from the later or Upper Palæolithic. The Drift and the Cave periods are therefore often distinguished within the Old Stone Age, especially by English archæologists. French, German, and American students generally use the terms “Lower Palæolithic” and “Upper Palæolithic,” whose reference is to periods of cultural development rather than type of locality inhabited, and which carry more significance. French archæologists also speak of the Upper Palæolithic as the Reindeer Age.

The Later Glacial Fauna of Western Europe

(Read upward)

• Postglacial and Recent:
• Bison, Bison priscus.
• Wild cattle, Bos primigenius.
• Red deer or stag, Cervus elaphus.
• Roe-deer, Capreolus.
• Reindeer, Rangifer tarandus.
• Wild boar, Sus scrofa.
• Fourth Glacial and Postglacial fauna: typically Mousterian to Magdalenian:
• Woolly mammoth, Elephas primigenius.
• Woolly or Siberian rhinoceros, Rhinoceros antiquitatis.
• Cave lion, Felis leo spelaea.
• Cave hyaena, Hyaena crocuta spelaea.
• Cave bear, Ursus spelaeus.
• Horse, Equus caballus.
• Ibex.
• Banded lemming, Myodes torquatus.
• Third Interglacial fauna: typically Chellean and Acheulean:
• Straight-tusked elephant, Elephas antiquus.
• Broad-nosed rhinoceros, Rhinoceros Merckii.
• Lion, Felis leo antiqua.
• Spotted hyaena, Hyaena crocuta.
• Brown bear, Ursus arctos.
• Horses, probably several varieties.
• Second Interglacial Fauna: typically Pre-Palæolithic, but in part surviving into the Chellean in favored localities:
• Southern mammoth, Elephas meridionalis.
• Etruscan rhinoceros, Rhinoceros etruscus.
• Hippopotamus major.
• Saber-tooth tigers, Machaerodus.
• Striped hyaena, Hyaena striata.
• Steno’s horse, Equus stenonis.
• Bison antiquus.
• Mastodon, tapir, anthropoids, and all primates but man and the macaque monkey already extinct in Western Europe.

The student who perhaps contributed most to the foundation of knowledge of the Palæolithic period was Gabriel de Mortillet. He first recognized four distinct sub-periods of the Palæolithic, each possessing its distinctive kinds of implements. These four periods, each named after one particular “station,” are the Chellean or earliest; the Mousterian; the Solutrean; and the Magdalenian or latest. These derived their designations from the four stations of Chelles in northern France, and of Le Moustier, Solutré, and La Madeleine in southern France (Fig. 16). De Mortillet did not endeavor to relate the culture of each of these four periods wholly to the particular locality for which he named it. He chose the stations as typical and included others as belonging to the same eras.

As more implements were found and studied, it was recognized, in part by de Mortillet himself, that while his original classification was sound, it was also incomplete. Two other periods had to be admitted. One of these, the Acheulean, falls before the Mousterian, and the second, the Aurignacian, after it. This makes six periods within the Old Stone Age; and these have been adopted by all students of the prehistory of man in Europe. The first three, the Chellean, Acheulean, and Mousterian, make up the Lower Palæolithic; the last three, the Aurignacian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian, constitute the Upper Palæolithic or Reindeer Age. These six divisions of the Old Stone Age are so essential to an understanding of the prehistory of man, that the serious student finds it necessary to know their names and sequence automatically.

71. Human Racial Types in the Palæolithic

When it comes to defining the types of fossil man in the Palæolithic, a curious situation develops. Long before there was even a true Stone Age, in the early and middle Pleistocene, there lived the half-human Pithecanthropus and the primitively human Heidelberg race (§ 11, 12). But for the whole first part of the Palæolithic, throughout the Chellean and Acheulean, no undisputed find of any skeletal remains has yet been made, although thousands of implements have been discovered which are undoubtedly human products.[9]

In the present state of knowledge the strongest case is that for the skull found at Piltdown in southern England. This is said to have been associated with “Pre-Chellean” tools, which would seem to establish the Piltdown type as the race that lived about the beginning of the Palæolithic (§ 13). But the deposit at Piltdown had been more or less rolled or shifted by natural agencies before its discovery, so that its age is not so certain as it might be; and there is no unanimity of opinion as to whether the highly developed skull and the excessively ape-like jaw that were found in the deposit really belong together. With this doubt about the fossil itself, it seems most reasonable not to press too strongly its identification as the type of man that lived in Europe at the commencement of the Old Stone Age.

For the end of the Lower Palæolithic, in the Mousterian, conditions change, and skeletal remains become authentic and comparatively numerous. From this period date the skeletons of the Neandertal species of man: a short, thickset race, powerful in bones and musculature, slightly stooping at the knee and at the shoulder, with a thick neck and a large head (§ 14). The brain was about as large as that of modern man, but the retreating aspect of the forehead was accentuated by heavy brow ridges.

In the Upper Palæolithic the Neandertal species has disappeared. The first precursors of Homo sapiens, or modern man, have come on the scene. A sort of transition from Neandertal man may be presented by the Brünn type, but the prevailing race in western Europe during the Upper Palæolithic period is that of Cro-Magnon, a tall, lithe, well-formed people, as agile and swift as Neandertal man was stocky and strong. The head and features were well proportioned, the skull and brain remarkably large, the general type not inferior to modern man, and probably already proto-Caucasian (§ 16).

Grimaldi man, so far known only from one spot on the Mediterranean shore of Europe, was proto-Negroid, Aurignacian in period, and therefore partly contemporaneous with the Cro-Magnon race (§ 18).

In summary, the types of man in Europe during the Old Stone Age have been as follows:

The interrelations of geology, glaciation, human types, periods of the Stone Age, and estimated time in years are brought together in the tables “Antiquity of Man” and “Prehistory” (Figs. 5 and 17.)[10]

72. Palæolithic Flint Implements

The most important line of evidence as to the gradual development of civilization through the six periods of the Old Stone Age is the series of flint tools. Hundreds of thousands of these tools have been discovered in western, central, and southern Europe—perhaps millions. At St. Acheul were found 20,000 Chellean coups-de-poing; at Solutré, below the Solutrean layer, 35,000 Mousterian-Aurignacian worked flints besides the remains of 100,000 horses; at Grimaldi in Italy, in the Grotte du Prince, 20,000 Mousterian pieces; at Schweizersbild in Switzerland, 14,000 late Magdalenian implements, and at Kesslerloch, near by, 30,000 from the late Solutrean and Magdalenian; at Hundsteig in Austria, 20,000 Aurignacian flints; at Predmost in Czecho-Slovakia, 25,000 probably of Solutrean age. Stations of such richness are not particularly rare, and the stations are numerous. In France alone 500 Magdalenian stations have been determined.

Clear stratigraphic relations have also been observed again and again. A few examples are: