Most often the subjects of these drawings are animals—reindeers, mammoths, horses, boars, bears, etc.; these, presumably, were dietetic luxuries, and therefore favorite objects of the chase. Sometimes the animals are transfixed with arrows; these, in the view of Frazer and Reinach, were intended as magic images that would bring the animal under the power, and into the stomach, of the artist or the hunter.20 Conceivably they were just plain art, drawn with the pure joy of esthetic creation; the crudest representation should have sufficed the purposes of magic, whereas these paintings are often of such delicacy, power and skill as to suggest the unhappy thought that art, in this field at least, has not advanced much in the long course of human history. Here is life, action, nobility, conveyed overwhelmingly with one brave line or two; here a single stroke (or is it that the others have faded?) creates a living, charging beast. Will Leonardo’s Last Supper, or El Greco’s Assumption, bear up as well as these Cro-Magnon paintings after twenty thousand years?
Painting is a sophisticated art, presuming many centuries of mental and technical development. If we may accept current theory (which it is always a perilous thing to do), painting developed from statuary, by a passage from carving in the round to bas-relief and thence to mere outline and coloring; painting is sculpture minus a dimension. The intermediate prehistoric art is well represented by an astonishingly vivid bas-relief of an archer (or a spearman) on the Aurignacian cliffs at Laussel in France.21 In a cave in Ariège, France, Louis Begouën discovered, among other Magdalenian relics, several ornamental handles carved out of reindeer antlers; one of these is of mature and excellent workmanship, as if the art had already generations of tradition and development behind it. Throughout the prehistoric Mediterranean—Egypt, Crete, Italy, France and Spain—countless figures of fat little women are found, which indicate either a worship of motherhood or an African conception of beauty. Stone statues of a wild horse, a reindeer and a mammoth have been unearthed in Czechoslovakia, among remains uncertainly ascribed to 30,000 B.C.22
The whole interpretation of history as progress falters when we consider that these statues, bas-reliefs and paintings, numerous though they are, may be but an infinitesimal fraction of the art that expressed or adorned the life of primeval man. What remains is found in caves, where the elements were in some measure kept at bay; it does not follow that prehistoric men were artists only when they were in caves. They may have carved as sedulously and ubiquitously as the Japanese, and may have fashioned statuary as abundantly as the Greeks; they may have painted not only the rocks in their caverns, but textiles, wood, everything—not excepting themselves. They may have created masterpieces far superior to the fragments that survive. In one grotto a tube was discovered, made from the bones of a reindeer, and filled with pigment;23 in another a stone palette was picked up still thick with red ochre paint despite the transit of two hundred centuries.24 Apparently the arts were highly developed and widely practised eighteen thousand years ago. Perhaps there was a class of professional artists among paleolithic men; perhaps there were Bohemians starving in the less respectable caves, denouncing the commercial bourgeoisie, plotting the death of academies, and forging antiques.
II. NEOLITHIC CULTURE
The Kitchen-Middens—The Lake-Dwellers—The coming of agriculture—The taming of animals—Technology—Neolithic weaving—pottery—building—transport—religion—science—Summary of the prehistoric preparation for civilization
At various times in the last one hundred years great heaps of seemingly prehistoric refuse have been found, in France, Sardinia, Portugal, Brazil, Japan and Manchuria, but above all in Denmark, where they received that queer name of Kitchen-Middens (Kjokken-möddinger) by which such ancient messes are now generally known. These rubbish heaps are composed of shells, especially of oysters, mussels and periwinkles; of the bones of various land and marine animals; of tools and weapons of horn, bone and unpolished stone; and of mineral remains like charcoal, ashes and broken pottery. These unprepossessing relics are apparently signs of a culture formed about the eighth millennium before Christ—later than the true paleolithic, and yet not properly neolithic, because not yet arrived at the use of polished stone. We know hardly anything of the men who left these remains, except that they had a certain catholic taste. Along with the slightly older culture of the Masd’Azil, in France, the Middens represent a “mesolithic” (middle-stone) or transition period between the paleolithic and the neolithic age.
In the year 1854, the winter being unusually dry, the level of the Swiss lakes sank, and revealed another epoch in prehistory. At some two hundred localities on these lakes piles were found which had stood in place under the water for from thirty to seventy centuries. The piles were so arranged as to indicate that small villages had been built upon them, perhaps for isolation or defense; each was connected with the land only by a narrow bridge, whose foundations, in some cases, were still in place; here and there even the framework of the houses had survived the patient play of the waters.* Amid these ruins were tools of bone and polished stone which became for archeologists the distinguishing mark of the New Stone Age that flourished some 10,000 B.C. in Asia, and some 5000 B.C. in Europe.28 Akin to these remains are the gigantic tumuli left in the valleys of the Mississippi and its tributaries by the strange race that we call the Mound-Builders, and of which we know nothing except that in these mounds, shaped in the form of altars, geometric figures, or totem animals, are found objects of stone, shell, bone and beaten metal which place these mysterious men at the end of the neolithic period.
If from such remains we attempt to patch together some picture of the New Stone Age, we find at once a startling innovation—agriculture. In one sense all human history hinges upon two revolutions: the neolithic passage from hunting to agriculture, and the modern passage from agriculture to industry; no other revolutions have been quite as real or basic as these. The remains show that the Lake-Dwellers ate wheat, millet, rye, barley and oats, besides one hundred and twenty kinds of fruit and many varieties of nut.29 No ploughs have been found in these ruins, probably because the first ploughshares were of wood—some strong tree-trunk and branch fitted with a flint edge; but a neolithic rock-carving unmistakably shows a peasant guiding a plough drawn by two oxen.30 This marks the appearance of one of the epochal inventions of history. Before agriculture the earth could have supported (in the rash estimate of Sir Arthur Keith) only some twenty million men, and the lives of these were shortened by the mortality of the chase and war;31 now began that multiplication of mankind which definitely confirmed man’s mastery of the planet.
Meanwhile the men of the New Stone Age were establishing another of the foundations of civilization: the domestication and breeding of animals. Doubtless this was a long process, probably antedating the neolithic period. A certain natural sociability may have contributed to the association of man and animal, as we may still see in the delight that primitive people take in taming wild beasts, and in filling their huts with monkeys, parrots and similar companions.32 The oldest bones in the neolithic remains (ca. 8000 B.C.) are those of the dog—the most ancient and honorable companion of the human race. A little later (ca. 6000 B.C.) came the goat, the sheep, the pig and the ox.33 Finally the horse, which to paleolithic man had been, if we may judge from the cave drawings, merely a beast of prey, was taken into camp, tamed, and turned into a beloved slave;34 in a hundred ways he was now put to work to increase the leisure, the wealth, and the power of man. The new lord of the earth began to replenish his food-supply by breeding as well as hunting; and perhaps he learned, in this same neolithic age, to use cow’s milk as food.
Neolithic inventors slowly improved and extended the tool-chest and armory of man. Here among the remains are pulleys, levers, grindstones, awls, pincers, axes, hoes, ladders, chisels, spindles, looms, sickles, saws, fish-hooks, skates, needles, brooches and pins.35 Here, above all, is the wheel, another fundamental invention of mankind, one of the modest essentials of industry and civilization; already in th
is New Stone Age it was developed into disc and spoked varieties. Stones of every sort—even obdurate diorite and obsidian—were ground, bored, and finished into a polished form. Flints were mined on a large scale. In the ruins of a neolithic mine at Brandon, England, eight worn picks of deerhorn were found, on whose dusty surfaces were the finger-prints of the workmen who had laid down those tools ten thousand years ago. In Belgium the skeleton of such a New Stone Age miner, who had been crushed by falling rock, was discovered with his deerhorn pick still clasped in his hands;36 across a hundred centuries we feel him as one of us, and share in weak imagination his terror and agony. Through how many bitter millenniums men have been tearing out of the bowels of the earth the mineral bases of civilization!
Having made needles and pins man began to weave; or, beginning to weave, he was moved to make needles and pins. No longer content to clothe himself with the furs and hides of beasts, he wove the wool of his sheep and the fibres found in the plants into garments from which came the robe of the Hindu, the toga of the Greek, the skirt of the Egyptian, and all the fascinating gamut of human dress. Dyes were mixed from the juices of plants or the minerals of the earth, and garments were stained with colors into luxuries for kings. At first men seem to have plaited textiles as they plaited straw, by interlacing one fibre with another; then they pierced holes into animal skins, and bound the skins with coarse fibres passing through the holes, as with the corsets of yesterday and the shoes of today; gradually the fibres were refined into thread, and sewing became one of the major arts of womankind. The stone distaffs and spindles among the neolithic ruins reveal one of the great origins of human industry. Even mirrors are found in these remains;37 everything was ready for civilization.
No pottery has been discovered in the earlier paleolithic graves; fragments of it appear in the remains of the Magdalenian culture in Belgium,38 but it is only in the mesolithic Age of the Kitchen-Middens that we find any developed use of earthenware. The origin of the art, of course, is unknown. Perhaps some observant primitive noticed that the trough made by his foot in clay held water with little seepage;39 perhaps some accidental baking of a piece of wet clay by an adjoining fire gave him the hint that fertilized invention, and revealed to him the possibilities of a material so abounding in quantity, so pliable to the hand, and so easy to harden with fire or the sun. Doubtless he had for thousands of years carried his food and drink in such natural containers as gourds and coconuts and the shells of the sea; then he had made himself cups and ladles of wood or stone, and baskets and hampers of rushes or straw; now he made lasting vessels of baked clay, and created another of the major industries of mankind. So far as the remains indicate, neolithic man did not know the potter’s wheel; but with his own hands he fashioned clay into forms of beauty as well as use, decorated it with simple designs,40 and made pottery, almost at the outset, not only an industry but an art.
Here, too, we find the first evidences of another major industry—building. Paleolithic man left no known trace of any other home than the cave. But in the neolithic remains we find such building devices as the ladder, the pulley, the lever, and the hinge.41 The Lake-Dwellers were skilful carpenters, fastening beam to pile with sturdy wooden pins, or mortising them head to head, or strengthening them with crossbeams notched into their sides. The floors were of clay, the walls of wattle-work coated with clay, the roofs of bark, straw, rushes or reeds. With the aid of the pulley and the wheel, building materials were carried from place to place, and great stone foundations were laid for villages. Transport, too, became an industry: canoes were built, and must have made the lakes live with traffic; trade was carried on over mountains and between distant continents.42 Amber, diorite, jadeite and obsidian were imported into Europe from afar.43 Similar words, letters, myths, pottery and designs betray the cultural contacts of diverse groups of prehistoric men.44
Outside of pottery the New Stone Age has left us no art, nothing to compare with the painting and statuary of paleolithic man. Here and there among the scenes of neolithic life from England to China we find circular heaps of stone called dolmens, upright monoliths called menhirs, and gigantic cromlechs—stone structures of unknown purpose—like those at Stonehenge or in Morbihan. Probably we shall never know the meaning or function of these megaliths; presumably they are the remains of altars and temples.45 For neolithic man doubtless had religions, myths with which to dramatize the daily tragedy and victory of the sun, the death and resurrection of the soil, and the strange earthly influences of the moon; we cannot understand the historic faiths unless we postulate such prehistoric origins.46 Perhaps the arrangement of the stones was determined by astronomic considerations, and suggests, as Schneider thinks, an acquaintance with the calendar.47 Some scientific knowledge was present, for certain neolithic skulls give evidence of trephining; and a few skeletons reveal limbs apparently broken and reset.48
We cannot properly estimate the achievements of prehistoric men, for we must guard against describing their life with imagination that transcends the evidence, while on the other hand we suspect that time has destroyed remains that would have narrowed the gap between primeval and modern man. Even so, the surviving record of Stone Age advances is impressive enough: paleolithic tools, fire, and art; neolithic agriculture, animal breeding, weaving, pottery, building, transport, and medicine, and the definite domination and wider peopling of the earth by the human race. All the bases had been laid; everything had been prepared for the historic civilizations except (perhaps) metals, writing and the state. Let men find a way to record their thoughts and achievements, and thereby transmit them more securely across the generations, and civilization would begin.
III. THE TRANSITION TO HISTORY
1. The Coming of Metals
Copper—Bronze—Iron
When did the use of metals come to man, and how? Again we do not know; we merely surmise that it came by accident, and we presume, from the absence of earlier remains, that it began towards the end of the Neolithic Age. Dating this end about 4000 B.C., we have a perspective in which the Age of Metals (and of writing and civilization) is a mere six thousand years appended to an Age of Stone lasting at least forty thousand years, and an Age of Man lasting* a million years. So young is the subject of our history.
The oldest known metal to be adapted to human use was copper. We find it in a Lake-Dwelling at Robenhausen, Switzerland, ca. 6000 B.C.;49 in prehistoric Mesopotamia ca. 4500 B.C.; in the Badarian graves of Egypt towards 4000 B.C.; in the ruins of Ur ca. 3100 B.C.; and in the relics of the North American Mound-Builders at an unknown age.50 The Age of Metals began not with their discovery, but with their transformation to human purpose by fire and working. Metallurgists believe that the first fusing of copper out of its stony ore came by haphazard when a primeval camp fire melted the copper lurking in the rocks that enclosed the flames; such an event has often been seen at primitive camp fires in our own day. Possibly this was the hint which, many times repeated, led early man, so long content with refractory stone, to seek in this malleable metal a substance more easily fashioned into durable weapons and tools.51 Presumably the metal was first used as it came from the profuse but careless hand of nature—sometimes nearly pure, most often grossly alloyed. Much later, doubtless—apparently about 3500 B.C. in the region around the Eastern Mediterranean—men discovered the art of smelting, of extracting metals from their ores. Then, towards 1500 B.C. (as we may judge from bas-reliefs on the tomb of Rekh-mara in Egypt), they proceeded to cast metal: dropping the molten copper into a clay or sand receptacle, they let it cool into Some desired form like a spear-head or an axe.52 That process, once discovered, was applied to a great variety of metals, and provided man with those doughty elements that were to build his greatest industries, and give him his conquest of the earth, the sea, and the air. Perhaps it was because the Eastern Mediterranean lands were rich in copper that vigorous new cultures arose, in the fourth millennium B.C., in Elam, Mesopotamia and Egypt, and spread thence in all directions to transform th
e world.53
But copper by itself was soft, admirably pliable for some purposes (what would our electrified age do without it?), but too weak for the heavier tasks of peace and war; an alloy was needed to harden it. Though nature suggested many, and often gave man copper already mixed and hardened with tin or zinc—forming, therefore, ready-made bronze or brass—he may have dallied for centuries before taking the next step: the deliberate fusing of metal with metal to make compounds more suited to his needs. The discovery is at least five thousand years old, for bronze is found in Cretan remains of 3000 B.C., in Egyptian remains of 2800 B.C., and in the second city of Troy 2000 B.C.54 We can no longer speak strictly of an “Age of Bronze,” for the metal came to different peoples at diverse epochs, and the term would therefore be without chronological meaning;55 furthermore, some cultures—like those of Finland, northern Russia, Polynesia, central Africa, southern India, North America, Australia and Japan—passed over the Bronze Age directly from stone to iron;56 and in those cultures where bronze appears it seems to have had a subordinate place as a luxury of priests, aristocrats and kings, while commoners had still to be content with stone.57 Even the terms “Old Stone Age” and “New Stone Age” are precariously relative, and describe conditions rather than times; to this day many primitive peoples (e.g., the Eskimos and the Polynesian Islanders) remain in the Age of Stone, knowing iron only as a delicacy brought to them by explorers. Captain Cook bought several pigs for a sixpenny nail when he landed in New Zealand in 1778; and another traveler described the inhabitants of Dog Island as “covetous chiefly of iron, so as to want to take the nails out of the ship.”58