Chapter VI: The Beginnings of Human Civilization (2)

Stone implements must perhaps always remain in the foreground of our understanding of the Old Stone Age because they were made so much more numerously than other objects, or at any rate have been preserved so much more abundantly, that they will supply us with the bulk of our evidence. At the same time it would be an error to believe that the life of these men of long ago was filled with the making and using of stone tools to the exclusion of everything else. Gradually during the last fifty years, through unremittingly patient explorations and the piecing of one small discovery to another, there has accumulated a fair body of knowledge of other sides of the life of Palæolithic men. There is every reason to believe that as time goes on we shall learn more and more about them, and thus be able to reconstruct a reasonably complete and vivid picture of their behavior.

Implements of bone and horn are next most abundant after those of stone, but it is significant that the Lower Palæolithic still dispensed with these materials. In the Chellean and Acheulean stations, although broken bones of devoured animals occur, bone was not shaped. In the Mousterian this material first came into use, but as yet only as so-called “anvils” on which to chip flint or cut, and not as true tools.

One of the changes that most prominently mark the passage from the Lower to the Upper Palæolithic is the sudden development in the use of bone at the beginning of the Aurignacian, and then of reindeer horn. These materials came more and more into favor as time went on. The Aurignacians had bone awls or pins, polishers, paint tubes of hollowed reindeer leg bone, and points with a grooved base for hafting, generally construed as javelin heads. In the Solutrean, eyed needles were added. The greatest development was attained in the Magdalenian. Bone javelin and spear heads were now made in a variety of forms, with bases pointed, beveled, or grooved. Hammers, chisels or wedges, and perforators were added to the list of bone tools. Whistles and perhaps flutes were blown. Reindeer antler was employed for carved and perforated lengths of horn, “rods of command” or magic, they are usually called; as well as for harpoons and throwers, to be discussed below.

By the close of the Palæolithic, objects of organic substances began to approach in frequency those of flint. This may well have been a sort of preparation for the grinding and polishing of stone which is the distinctive technique of the New Stone Age. Bone cannot well be chipped or retouched. It must be cut, ground, or rubbed into shape. The Neolithic people therefore may be said to have extended to stone a process which their predecessors of the Upper Palæolithic were familiar with but had failed to apply to the harder substance.

74. DRESS

The slender bone needle provided with an eye which the Solutrean and Magdalenian added to the primitive awl implies thread and sewing. It may be concluded therefore that, at least from the middle of the Upper Palæolithic on, the people of Europe went clothed in some sort of fitted garments. It would be going too far to assert that the Neandertal men ran about naked as the lower animals. Several inventions which they had made compel us to attribute to them enough intelligence to lead them to cover themselves with skins when they felt cold. But they may have been too improvident, or habituated to discomfort, to trouble even to dress hides. At any rate there is no positive indication that they regularly clothed themselves. By contrast, the sewing of the Upper Palæolithic Cro-Magnons marked a considerable advance.

Ornament may have been earlier than clothing. The paint of the Aurignacians decorated their own bodies and those of their dead. About their necks and waists they hung rows of perforated shells and teeth. More of these have been found on the skeletons of males than of females. By the Magdalenian, there was sophistication enough to lead to the carving of artificial shells and teeth out of ivory; and amber was beginning to be transported from the German coast to Southern France.

75. HARPOONS AND WEAPONS

Towards the end of the Upper Palæolithic, in the Magdalenian, the harpoon came into extensive use. The shafts have of course long since decayed, but many of the reindeer antler heads have remained intact. At first these were notched with barbs along one edge only. In the later Magdalenian the barbs were cut on both sides. The harpoon differs from the simple spear or javelin in having its head detachable from the shaft. The two are fitted together by a socket. If the prey, be it fish or mammal, is not killed by the first throw, its struggles to escape shake the shaft loose, while the barbs hold the head firmly imbedded in its body. A line is attached to the head and tied to the shaft or held in the hand of the hunter. The animal is thus kept from escaping. During the Magdalenian the line was kept from slipping off the head by one or two knobs near the butt. In the subsequent Azilian period the head was perforated, as is the modern Eskimo practice. The harpoon is really a rather complicated instrument: it consists of at least three pieces—head, shaft, and line.

Another device which the Magdalenians shared with the Aztecs, the Eskimo, and some other modern peoples, is the spear thrower or atlatl. This is a sort of rod or handle, one end of which is grasped by the fingers while the other engages the butt end of the harpoon or dart. The hand only steers the shaft at the beginning of its flight: the propulsion comes from the thrower. The instrument may therefore be described as a device for artificially lengthening the human arm and thus imparting greater velocity and length of flight to the weapon. There is without doubt considerable ingenuity involved in this apparatus, both in its invention and in its successful use. A person unskilled in bodily movements would never hit upon the invention; nor could a race of high native dexterity acquire proficiency in the art of hunting with the thrower until each individual was willing to practise for a considerable period. It may once more be concluded, accordingly, that by the end of the Palæolithic, civilization had developed to a point where men were much readier to undergo protracted training and forbearance than they had been at the beginning of the period.

One instrument that we are wont to associate with the beginnings of civilization, because of its almost universal employment by savages of to-day, is the bow and arrow. So strong has the preconception been that the Palæolithic peoples must have been like modern savages, that time and time again it has been assumed that they possessed the bow. There is no convincing evidence to show that this was so, and a good deal of negative evidence to establish that they were unacquainted with the weapon. All the Palæolithic remains of flint, bone, or horn, which at times have been interpreted as arrow points, are more conservatively explained as knives or heads of darts. The prevailing opinion is that the bow was not invented until the Neolithic. This would make the weapon only about ten thousand years old—a hoary antiquity, indeed, but recent as compared with the knife, the spear, and even the harpoon. The reason for this lateness in the invention of the bow and arrow is probably to be sought in the delicacy of the instrument. It is not essentially more complex than the harpoon, certainly not more complex than the harpoon impelled by the spear thrower. But it involves much finer adjustments. A poorly made harpoon is of course inferior to a well-made one, but may be measurably effective. It may retrieve game half the time. But a bow which falls below a certain standard will not shoot at all, or will shoot so feebly as to have a zero efficiency. In fact, one of the things that students of the beginnings of culture have long been puzzled about is how the bow and arrow could have been invented. Most other inventions can be traced through a series of steps, each of which, although incomplete, achieved a certain utility of its own. But, other than toys or musical instruments, no implement has yet been found, or even satisfactorily imagined, which was not yet a bow, which would still serve a purpose, and which, by addition or improvement, could give rise to the bow.

76. WOODEN IMPLEMENTS

Wood is likely to have been used by primitive men for one purpose or another from the very earliest times. Even “half men” of the “missing link” type, it may be believed, would in case of need pick up a stick or wrench a limb from a tree to serve them as a club. But we do not know when human beings first began to fashion wood into definite implements by working it with their stone tools. Wood is too perishable a substance to have stood any chance of being preserved from so long distant a past.

Our knowledge of the first employment of wood is indirect. Many of the Mousterian chipped flakes are of such size and shape that they could have been operated much more effectively had they been mounted on a handle. Possibly therefore the process of hafting or handling had come to be practised in the Mousterian, although there is no specific evidence to this effect. In the Upper Palæolithic, wood was certainly used to a considerable extent. The harpoon and dart heads, for instance, must have had wooden shafts.

A true ax is not known from the Old Stone Age and seems to have been invented in the Neolithic. The distinctive factor of the instrument, upon which its utility largely depends, is the straightness and smoothness of the edge; and such an edge is best attained by the grinding process. Even the unground axes of the earliest Neolithic depended on a single stroke to provide them with the required straight cutting edge. We may believe, therefore, that the Palæolithic peoples worked wood in the manner familiar to us from the practices of many modern savage races. They split it, rubbed it, and burned it into shape, rather than trying to chop it.

77. FIRE

One of the most fundamental of human arts is the use of fire. It is also one of the most ancient. Its occurrence is easily traced, at any rate in deposits that have not been disturbed by nature, through the presence of charred bones, lumps of charcoal, and layers of ash. Charcoal crumbles easily, but its fragments are practically imperishable. Its presence in considerable quantities in any station, particularly if the coal is accumulated in pockets, is therefore sure proof that the people who occupied the site burned fires for warmth, or cooking, or both purposes. The use of fire has been established throughout the part of the Palæolithic when men lived in caves and under rock shelters; that is, during the Mousterian and Upper Palæolithic.

The Chellean and Acheulean deposits are so much older and more open, and in many cases have been washed over so much by rainfall and by streams, that, if the men of these periods did use fire, as they may well have done, its evidences might have been pretty generally obliterated.

Whether early Palæolithic men knew how to make fire, or whether they only found it and kept it alive, is more difficult to say. They could easily have acquired it in the first place from trees struck by lightning or from other occasional natural agencies. Then, recognizing its value, they may well have nursed it along, lighting one hearth from another. Yet at some time in the Palæolithic the art of producing fire at will, by friction between two pieces of wood, is almost certain to have been invented. One may infer this from the general similarity of level of Magdalenian civilization to that of modern savages, all of whom practise the art of ignition. But in the nature of things it would be difficult to find evidence bearing on this point from more than ten thousand years ago. It can be assumed that man is likely to have lived first for a long period in a condition in which he knew and used and preserved fire, yet was not able to produce it.

78. HOUSES

Although Palæolithic man worked so much in stone, he did not build in it. Hence our knowledge of the kinds of shelters he made for himself is almost _nil_. There are Upper Palæolithic “tectiform” paintings which look as if they might be attempts to depict houses. It is clear, moreover, that in this period the general development of the mechanical arts was sufficiently advanced to allow of the construction of some sort of rude edifices.

It is conceivable that as far back as the Lower Palæolithic simple shelters of branches were constructed, or that skins may have been hung over a few poles to keep off wind and rain. On account of the perishable nature of the materials involved, it happens that there is no proof either for or against such a supposition. It is possible that in time, when patient excavations shall have revealed some particularly well preserved site, the holes may yet be found in which the posts of a Palæolithic hut were once set. In case of a fire, the carbonized stumps might prove to have been preserved in place; or the butts of the posts might have gradually rotted away and the space once occupied by them have become filled with an earthy material of different color and consistency from the surrounding soil. In this lucky event, even the size and shape of the house might be reconstructed from the relative positions of the post holes. From evidence of just this sort some interesting ideas have actually been obtained as to the houses and village plan of Neolithic European peoples. Of course, the chances are much less that remains of this sort would be preserved from the Palæolithic. But the method would be equally applicable if favorable conditions offered; and it is in some such way that we may hope in the future to learn a little about the earliest habitations that mankind constructed. In any event the example serves to illustrate the indirect and delicate means of which the student of prehistory must consistently avail himself in his reconstructions of the past; and gives reason to believe that all that has been learned about early man in the last fifty years is very little in comparison with what the ensuing generation and century will bring to light.

79. RELIGION

It has already been said that knowledge of religion, a non-material thing, can be preserved from the remote past only by the most roundabout means. It is conceivable that the people of the Upper Palæolithic spent at least as much time in ceremonial observances as in working flint. Analogy with modern uncivilized tribes would make us think that this is quite likely. But the stone tools have remained lying in the earth, while the religious customs went out of use thousands of years ago and the beliefs were forgotten. Yet this is known: As far back as the Mousterian, thirty thousand years ago, certain practices were being observed by the Neandertal race of western Europe which modern savages observe in obedience to the dictates of their religion. When these people of the Mousterian laid away their dead, they put some of their belongings with them. When existing nations do this, it is invariably in connection with a belief in the continued existence of the soul after death. We may reasonably conclude therefore that even in this long distant period human beings had arrived at a crude recognition of the difference between flesh and spirit; in short, religion had come into being. Even to say that Neandertal man did not know whether his dead were dead, implies his recognition of something different from life in the body, for he recognized of course that the body had become different. Whether the Neandertal race already held to the existence of spirits distinct from man or superior to him, it is impossible to say.

The Upper Palæolithic Cro-Magnon peoples laid out the bodies of their dead and sometimes folded them. They also sometimes painted the bodies, and buried flint implements and food in the graves. That is, funerary practices were becoming established. We may assume that hand in hand with this development of observances there went a growth of ritual and belief.

80. PALÆOLITHIC ART

The highest achievement of the men of the Old Stone Age is their art. The perfection to which they carried this art is simply astounding in view of the comparative meagerness of their civilization otherwise. It is also remarkable how full-fledged this achievement sprang into existence. The Lower Palæolithic seems to have been without a trace of art. With the Aurignacian, simple carving and painting appear; and while the acme of accomplishment was not reached until the Magdalenian, the essential foundations of a graphic art of high order were laid in the late Aurignacian.

The Upper Palæolithic people carved in ivory, bone, and horn; they incised or engraved on flattened and rounded surfaces of the same material; and they carved and painted the walls of caves. They modeled at times in clay and perhaps in other soft materials, and may have drawn or painted pictures on skins and on exposed rock surfaces, for all we know; we can judge only by the remains that have actually come down to us. This art is not a child-like, struggling attempt to represent objects in the rough, nor is it a mere decorative playing with geometric figures. These first human artists set boldly to work to depict; and while their technique was simple, it was carried to a remarkably high degree of perfection. A few bold strokes gave the outlines of an animal, but they gave it with such fidelity that the species can often be recognized at a glance. The Cro-Magnon people must have developed a high power of mental concentration to be able to observe and reproduce so closely. The most gifted individuals perhaps practised assiduously to attain their facility.

Palæolithic art is very different from that of most modern savages. The latter often work out decorative patterns of some complexity, richness, and æsthetic value, but when they attempt to depict nature, they usually fail conspicuously. The lines are crude and wavering. Any head, body, and tail with four legs stands for almost any animal. It is a reasonable representation of an abstraction that they accomplish, not the delineation of what is characteristic in the visible form. Both observer and painter, among most living savages, are supposed to know beforehand that the drawing represents a fox and not a bear. At most, some symbols are added, such as a bushy tail for a fox or a fin for a whale. It is only in rare cases that any but advanced nations break away from these primitive tendencies and learn to draw things as they really appear. The ancient Egyptians developed such a faculty, and among savages the Bushmen are remarkably gifted, but, on the whole, successful realistic art is an accomplishment of high civilization. It is therefore something of a mystery how the Cro-Magnon men of the Aurignacian brought themselves to do so well.

In sculpture their first efforts were directed upon figurines. These mostly represent the human female. The head, hands, and feet are either absent or much abbreviated. In the body, those parts having to do with reproduction and fecundity are usually heavily exaggerated, but at the same time given with considerable skill (Fig. 20). It is likely that these statuettes served some religious cult. At any rate, the carvings in three dimensions often represent the human figure, whereas two-dimensional drawings, etchings, and paintings mostly represent animals and are much more successful than the human outlines. In the Magdalenian, miniature sculpture of animals was added to that of the human figure (Fig. 21).

Success in seizing the salient outline was the earliest characteristic of the paintings and drawings. The first Aurignacian engravings are invariably in profile and usually show only the two legs on the immediately visible side. In time the artists also learned to suggest typical positions and movements—the motion of a reindeer lowering its head to browse, the way an angry bull switches his tail or paws the ground, the curl of the end of an elephant’s trunk (Figs. 22, 24). In the Magdalenian, all four legs are usually depicted, and the profile, although remaining most frequent, as it is most characteristic, is no longer the only aspect. There are occasional pictures of animals from before or behind, or of a reindeer with its head turned backward.

There are also some devices which look like the beginnings of attempts at composition. The effect of a row of reindeer is produced by drawing out the first few in some detail, and then suggesting the others by sketching in their horns (Fig. 23). Artists were no longer content, in the Magdalenian, always to do each animal as a solitary, static unit. They were trying, with some measure of success, to represent the animals as they moved in life and perhaps to combine several of them into one coherent picture or to suggest a setting.

By this time they had also acquired considerable ability in handling colors. The Aurignacian and Solutrean artists restricted themselves to monochrome effects. They engraved or painted outlines and sometimes accentuated these by filling them in with pigment. But the best of the later painters in the Magdalenian—those, for instance, who left their frescoes on the walls of the famous cave of Altamira in Spain—used three or four colors at once and blended these into transition tones.

While animals constitute the subjects of probably four-fifths of the specimens of Palæolithic art, and human beings most of the remainder, representations of plants and unrealistic decorative designs are known. The latter seem to have begun to be specially prevalent in the latest Magdalenian, as if in preparation of the conventionalized, non-naturalistic art of the transitional Azilian and Neolithic.

81. SUMMARY OF ADVANCE IN THE PALÆOLITHIC

The history of civilization has herewith been outlined from its first dim beginnings to about twelve thousand years ago—say to the neighborhood of 10,000 B.C., as the historian would put it. Progress is immensely slow at the outset, but gradually speeds up. The tabulation in Figure 25 summarizes some of the principal features of this evolution. This diagram does not pretend to be complete; it does try to include some of the most important and representative inventions, arts, and accomplishments of the Old Stone Age.

Thus it appears that the Chellean and Acheulean periods are characterized essentially by a single art, that of chipping implements on a core of flint, plus perhaps the use of fire. The Mousterian evinces progress: stone tools are now made from the flake as well as the core, possibly are sometimes hafted, bone is occasionally utilized, and there are the first indications of budding religion; four or five entries are required to represent these culture traits.

The greatest advance comes from the Mousterian to the Aurignacian; in other words, between the Lower and the Upper Palæolithic. Three times as many accomplishments are listed as in the Mousterian, and whole series of new inventions are now first met with: body ornaments, bone implements, æsthetic products. This sudden leap in the figures goes far to signalize the importance of the division between the Upper and the Lower Palæolithic. In the Solutrean and Magdalenian still further inventions or refinements appear, until, when the Old Stone Age comes to a close,[12] the stock of human civilization may be described as perhaps twenty times as rich as at the beginning. These figures are not to be taken too literally. The tabulation could easily have been compiled on a more elaborate basis. But even then the relative proportion of culture features in each period would remain approximately as here given. And as regards the general fact of accumulation of civilization, and its range and nature, the diagram may be accepted as substantially representative of what happened.

The end of the Palæolithic thus sees man in possession of a number of mechanical arts which enable him to produce a considerable variety of tools in several materials: sees him controlling fire; cooking food; wearing clothes, and living in definite habitations; probably possessing some sort of social grouping, order, and ideas of law and justice; clearly under the influence of some kind of religion; highly advanced in the plastic arts; and presumably already narrating legends and singing songs. In short, many fundamental elements of civilization were established. It is true that the sum total of knowledge and accomplishments was still pitifully small. The most advanced of the Old Stone Age men perhaps knew and could do about one thing for every hundred that we know and can do. A whole array of fundamental inventions—the bow and arrow, pottery, domestication of animals and plants—had not yet been attempted, and they do not appear on the scene until the Neolithic. But in spite of the enormous gaps remaining to be filled in the Neolithic and in the historic period, it does seem fair to say that many of the outlines of what civilization was ultimately to be had been substantially blocked out during the Upper Palæolithic. Most of the framework was there, even though but a small fraction of its content had yet been entered.