Chapter II: Part 2

Two more skulls, again without faces, are available from a French cave site, Fontéchevade. They come from the time of the last great interglacial, as did the pre-neanderthaloids. The crowns of the Fontéchevade skulls also look quite modern. There is a bit of the forehead preserved on one of these skulls and the brow-ridge is not heavy. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion that the bones belonged to an immature individual. In this case, his (or even more so, if _her_) brow-ridges would have been weak anyway. The case for the Fontéchevade fossils, as modern type men, is little stronger than that for Swanscombe, although Professor Vallois believes it a good case.

It seems to add up to the fact that there were people living in Europe--before the classic neanderthaloids--who looked more modern, in some features, than the classic western neanderthaloids did. Our best suggestion of what men looked like--just before they became fully modern--comes from a cave on Mount Carmel in Palestine.

THE FIRST MODERNS

Professor T. D. McCown and the late Sir Arthur Keith, who studied the Mount Carmel bones, figured out that one of the two groups involved was as much as 70 per cent modern. There were, in fact, two groups or varieties of men in the Mount Carmel caves and in at least two other Palestinian caves of about the same time. The time would be about that of the onset of colder weather, when the last glaciation was beginning in the north--say 75,000 years ago.

The 70 per cent modern group came from only one cave, Mugharet es-Skhul (“cave of the kids”). The other group, from several caves, had bones of men of the type we’ve been calling pre-neanderthaloid which we noted were widespread in Europe and beyond. The tools which came with each of these finds were generally similar, and McCown and Keith, and other scholars since their study, have tended to assume that both the Skhul group and the pre-neanderthaloid group came from exactly the same time. The conclusion was quite natural: here was a population of men in the act of evolving in two different directions. But the time may not be exactly the same. It is very difficult to be precise, within say 10,000 years, for a time some 75,000 years ago. If the Skhul men are in fact later than the pre-neanderthaloid group of Palestine, as some of us think, then they show how relatively modern some men were--men who lived at the same time as the classic Neanderthalers of the European pocket.

Soon after the first extremely cold phase of the last glaciation, we begin to get a number of bones of completely modern men in Europe. We also get great numbers of the tools they made, and their living places in caves. Completely modern skeletons begin turning up in caves dating back to toward 40,000 years ago. The time is about that of the beginning of the second phase of the last glaciation. These skeletons belonged to people no different from many people we see today. Like people today, not everybody looked alike. (The positions of the more important fossil men of later Europe are shown in the chart on page 72.)

DIFFERENCES IN THE EARLY MODERNS

The main early European moderns have been divided into two groups, the Cro-Magnon group and the Combe Capelle-Brünn group. Cro-Magnon people were tall and big-boned, with large, long, and rugged heads. They must have been built like many present-day Scandinavians. The Combe Capelle-Brünn people were shorter; they had narrow heads and faces, and big eyebrow-ridges. Of course we don’t find the skin or hair of these people. But there is little doubt they were Caucasoids (“Whites”).

Another important find came in the Italian Riviera, near Monte Carlo. Here, in a cave near Grimaldi, there was a grave containing a woman and a young boy, buried together. The two skeletons were first called “Negroid” because some features of their bones were thought to resemble certain features of modern African Negro bones. But more recently, Professor E. A. Hooton and other experts questioned the use of the word “Negroid” in describing the Grimaldi skeletons. It is true that nothing is known of the skin color, hair form, or any other fleshy feature of the Grimaldi people, so that the word “Negroid” in its usual meaning is not proper here. It is also not clear whether the features of the bones claimed to be “Negroid” are really so at all.

From a place called Wadjak, in Java, we have “proto-Australoid” skulls which closely resemble those of modern Australian natives. Some of the skulls found in South Africa, especially the Boskop skull, look like those of modern Bushmen, but are much bigger. The ancestors of the Bushmen seem to have once been very widespread south of the Sahara Desert. True African Negroes were forest people who apparently expanded out of the west central African area only in the last several thousand years. Although dark in skin color, neither the Australians nor the Bushmen are Negroes; neither the Wadjak nor the Boskop skulls are “Negroid.”

As we’ve already mentioned, Professor Weidenreich believed that Peking man was already on the way to becoming a Mongoloid. Anyway, the Mongoloids would seem to have been present by the time of the “Upper Cave” at Choukoutien, the _Sinanthropus_ find-spot.

WHAT THE DIFFERENCES MEAN

What does all this difference mean? It means that, at one moment in time, within each different area, men tended to look somewhat alike. From area to area, men tended to look somewhat different, just as they do today. This is all quite natural. People _tended_ to mate near home; in the anthropological jargon, they made up geographically localized breeding populations. The simple continental division of “stocks”--black = Africa, yellow = Asia, white = Europe--is too simple a picture to fit the facts. People became accustomed to life in some particular area within a continent (we might call it a “natural area”). As they went on living there, they evolved towards some particular physical variety. It would, of course, have been difficult to draw a clear boundary between two adjacent areas. There must always have been some mating across the boundaries in every case. One thing human beings don’t do, and never have done, is to mate for “purity.” It is self-righteous nonsense when we try to kid ourselves into thinking that they do.

I am not going to struggle with the whole business of modern stocks and races. This is a book about prehistoric men, not recent historic or modern men. My physical anthropologist friends have been very patient in helping me to write and rewrite this chapter--I am not going to break their patience completely. Races are their business, not mine, and they must do the writing about races. I shall, however, give two modern definitions of race, and then make one comment.

Dr. William G. Boyd, professor of Immunochemistry, School of
Medicine, Boston University: “We may define a human race as a
population which differs significantly from other human populations
in regard to the frequency of one or more of the genes it
possesses.”

Professor Sherwood L. Washburn, professor of Physical Anthropology,
Department of Anthropology, the University of California: “A ‘race’
is a group of genetically similar populations, and races intergrade
because there are always intermediate populations.”

My comment is that the ideas involved here are all biological: they concern groups, _not_ individuals. Boyd and Washburn may differ a bit on what they want to consider a “population,” but a population is a group nevertheless, and genetics is biology to the hilt. Now a lot of people still think of race in terms of how people dress or fix their food or of other habits or customs they have. The next step is to talk about racial “purity.” None of this has anything whatever to do with race proper, which is a matter of the biology of groups.

Incidentally, I’m told that if man very carefully _controls_ the breeding of certain animals over generations--dogs, cattle, chickens--he might achieve a “pure” race of animals. But he doesn’t do it. Some unfortunate genetic trait soon turns up, so this has just as carefully to be bred out again, and so on.

SUMMARY OF PRESENT KNOWLEDGE OF FOSSIL MEN

The earliest bones of men we now have--upon which all the experts would probably agree--are those of _Meganthropus_, from Java, of about 450,000 years ago. The earlier australopithecines of Africa were possibly not tool-users and may not have been ancestral to men at all. But there is an alternate and evidently increasingly stronger chance that some of them may have been. The Kanam jaw from Kenya, another early possibility, is not only very incomplete but its find-spot is very questionable.

Java man proper, _Pithecanthropus_, comes next, at about 400,000 years ago, and the big Heidelberg jaw in Germany must be of about the same date. Next comes Swanscombe in England, Steinheim in Germany, the Ternafine jaws in Algeria, and Peking man, _Sinanthropus_. They all date to the second great interglacial period, about 350,000 years ago.

Piltdown and Galley Hill are out, and with them, much of the starch in the old idea that there were two distinct lines of development in human evolution: (1) a line of “paleoanthropic” development from Heidelberg to the Neanderthalers where it became extinct, and (2) a very early “modern” line, through Piltdown, Galley Hill, Swanscombe, to us. Swanscombe, Steinheim, and Ternafine are just as easily cases of very early pre-neanderthaloids.

The pre-neanderthaloids were very widespread during the third interglacial: Ehringsdorf, Saccopastore, some of the Mount Carmel people, and probably Fontéchevade are cases in point. A variety of their descendants can be seen, from Java (Solo), Africa (Rhodesian man), and about the Mediterranean and in western Europe. As the acute cold of the last glaciation set in, the western Europeans found themselves surrounded by water, ice, or bitter cold tundra. To vastly over-simplify it, they “bred in” and became classic neanderthaloids. But on Mount Carmel, the Skhul cave-find with its 70 per cent modern features shows what could happen elsewhere at the same time.

Lastly, from about 40,000 or 35,000 years ago--the time of the onset of the second phase of the last glaciation--we begin to find the fully modern skeletons of men. The modern skeletons differ from place to place, just as different groups of men living in different places still look different.

What became of the Neanderthalers? Nobody can tell me for sure. I’ve a hunch they were simply “bred out” again when the cold weather was over. Many Americans, as the years go by, are no longer ashamed to claim they have “Indian blood in their veins.” Give us a few more generations and there will not be very many other Americans left to whom we can brag about it. It certainly isn’t inconceivable to me to imagine a little Cro-Magnon boy bragging to his friends about his tough, strong, Neanderthaler great-great-great-great-grandfather!

Cultural BEGINNINGS

Men, unlike the lower animals, are made up of much more than flesh and blood and bones; for men have “culture.”

WHAT IS CULTURE?

“Culture” is a word with many meanings. The doctors speak of making a “culture” of a certain kind of bacteria, and ants are said to have a “culture.” Then there is the Emily Post kind of “culture”--you say a person is “cultured,” or that he isn’t, depending on such things as whether or not he eats peas with his knife.

The anthropologists use the word too, and argue heatedly over its finer meanings; but they all agree that every human being is part of or has some kind of culture. Each particular human group has a particular culture; that is one of the ways in which we can tell one group of men from another. In this sense, a CULTURE means the way the members of a group of people think and believe and live, the tools they make, and the way they do things. Professor Robert Redfield says a culture is an organized or formalized body of conventional understandings. “Conventional understandings” means the whole set of rules, beliefs, and standards which a group of people lives by. These understandings show themselves in art, and in the other things a people may make and do. The understandings continue to last, through tradition, from one generation to another. They are what really characterize different human groups.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF CULTURE

A culture lasts, although individual men in the group die off. On the other hand, a culture changes as the different conventions and understandings change. You could almost say that a culture lives in the minds of the men who have it. But people are not born with it; they get it as they grow up. Suppose a day-old Hungarian baby is adopted by a family in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and the child is not told that he is Hungarian. He will grow up with no more idea of Hungarian culture than anyone else in Oshkosh.

So when I speak of ancient Egyptian culture, I mean the whole body of understandings and beliefs and knowledge possessed by the ancient Egyptians. I mean their beliefs as to why grain grew, as well as their ability to make tools with which to reap the grain. I mean their beliefs about life after death. What I am thinking about as culture is a thing which lasted in time. If any one Egyptian, even the Pharaoh, died, it didn’t affect the Egyptian culture of that particular moment.

PREHISTORIC CULTURES

For that long period of man’s history that is all prehistory, we have no written descriptions of cultures. We find only the tools men made, the places where they lived, the graves in which they buried their dead. Fortunately for us, these tools and living places and graves all tell us something about the ways these men lived and the things they believed. But the story we learn of the very early cultures must be only a very small part of the whole, for we find so few things. The rest of the story is gone forever. We have to do what we can with what we find.

For all of the time up to about 75,000 years ago, which was the time of the classic European Neanderthal group of men, we have found few cave-dwelling places of very early prehistoric men. First, there is the fallen-in cave where Peking man was found, near Peking. Then there are two or three other _early_, but not _very early_, possibilities. The finds at the base of the French cave of Fontéchevade, those in one of the Makapan caves in South Africa, and several open sites such as Dr. L. S. B. Leakey’s Olorgesailie in Kenya doubtless all lie earlier than the time of the main European Neanderthal group, but none are so early as the Peking finds.

You can see that we know very little about the home life of earlier prehistoric men. We find different kinds of early stone tools, but we can’t even be really sure which tools may have been used together.

WHY LITTLE HAS LASTED FROM EARLY TIMES

Except for the rare find-spots mentioned above, all our very early finds come from geological deposits, or from the wind-blown surfaces of deserts. Here is what the business of geological deposits really means. Let us say that a group of people was living in England about 300,000 years ago. They made the tools they needed, lived in some sort of camp, almost certainly built fires, and perhaps buried their dead. While the climate was still warm, many generations may have lived in the same place, hunting, and gathering nuts and berries; but after some few thousand years, the weather began very gradually to grow colder. These early Englishmen would not have known that a glacier was forming over northern Europe. They would only have noticed that the animals they hunted seemed to be moving south, and that the berries grew larger toward the south. So they would have moved south, too.

The camp site they left is the place we archeologists would really have liked to find. All of the different tools the people used would have been there together--many broken, some whole. The graves, and traces of fire, and the tools would have been there. But the glacier got there first! The front of this enormous sheet of ice moved down over the country, crushing and breaking and plowing up everything, like a gigantic bulldozer. You can see what happened to our camp site.

Everything the glacier couldn’t break, it pushed along in front of it or plowed beneath it. Rocks were ground to gravel, and soil was caught into the ice, which afterwards melted and ran off as muddy water. Hard tools of flint sometimes remained whole. Human bones weren’t so hard; it’s a wonder _any_ of them lasted. Gushing streams of melt water flushed out the debris from underneath the glacier, and water flowed off the surface and through great crevasses. The hard materials these waters carried were even more rolled and ground up. Finally, such materials were dropped by the rushing waters as gravels, miles from the front of the glacier. At last the glacier reached its greatest extent; then it melted backward toward the north. Debris held in the ice was dropped where the ice melted, or was flushed off by more melt water. When the glacier, leaving the land, had withdrawn to the sea, great hunks of ice were broken off as icebergs. These icebergs probably dropped the materials held in their ice wherever they floated and melted. There must be many tools and fragmentary bones of prehistoric men on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea.

Remember, too, that these glaciers came and went at least three or four times during the Ice Age. Then you will realize why the earlier things we find are all mixed up. Stone tools from one camp site got mixed up with stone tools from many other camp sites--tools which may have been made tens of thousands or more years apart. The glaciers mixed them all up, and so we cannot say which particular sets of tools belonged together in the first place.

“EOLITHS”

But what sort of tools do we find earliest? For almost a century, people have been picking up odd bits of flint and other stone in the oldest Ice Age gravels in England and France. It is now thought these odd bits of stone weren’t actually worked by prehistoric men. The stones were given a name, _eoliths_, or “dawn stones.” You can see them in many museums; but you can be pretty sure that very few of them were actually fashioned by men.

It is impossible to pick out “eoliths” that seem to be made in any one _tradition_. By “tradition” I mean a set of habits for making one kind of tool for some particular job. No two “eoliths” look very much alike: tools made as part of some one tradition all look much alike. Now it’s easy to suppose that the very earliest prehistoric men picked up and used almost any sort of stone. This wouldn’t be surprising; you and I do it when we go camping. In other words, some of these “eoliths” may actually have been used by prehistoric men. They must have used anything that might be handy when they needed it. We could have figured that out without the “eoliths.”

THE ROAD TO STANDARDIZATION

Reasoning from what we know or can easily imagine, there should have been three major steps in the prehistory of tool-making. The first step would have been simple _utilization_ of what was at hand. This is the step into which the “eoliths” would fall. The second step would have been _fashioning_--the haphazard preparation of a tool when there was a need for it. Probably many of the earlier pebble tools, which I shall describe next, fall into this group. The third step would have been _standardization_. Here, men began to make tools according to certain set traditions. Counting the better-made pebble tools, there are four such traditions or sets of habits for the production of stone tools in earliest prehistoric times. Toward the end of the Pleistocene, a fifth tradition appears.

PEBBLE TOOLS

At the beginning of the last chapter, you’ll remember that I said there were tools from very early geological beds. The earliest bones of men have not yet been found in such early beds although the Sterkfontein australopithecine cave approaches this early date. The earliest tools come from Africa. They date back to the time of the first great alpine glaciation and are at least 500,000 years old. The earliest ones are made of split pebbles, about the size of your fist or a bit bigger. They go under the name of pebble tools. There are many natural exposures of early Pleistocene geological beds in Africa, and the prehistoric archeologists of south and central Africa have concentrated on searching for early tools. Other finds of early pebble tools have recently been made in Algeria and Morocco.

There are probably early pebble tools to be found in areas of the Old World besides Africa; in fact, some prehistorians already claim to have identified a few. Since the forms and the distinct ways of making the earlier pebble tools had not yet sufficiently jelled into a set tradition, they are difficult for us to recognize. It is not so difficult, however, if there are great numbers of “possibles” available. A little later in time the tradition becomes more clearly set, and pebble tools are easier to recognize. So far, really large collections of pebble tools have only been found and examined in Africa.

CORE-BIFACE TOOLS

The next tradition we’ll look at is the _core_ or biface one. The tools are large pear-shaped pieces of stone trimmed flat on the two opposite sides or “faces.” Hence “biface” has been used to describe these tools. The front view is like that of a pear with a rather pointed top, and the back view looks almost exactly the same. Look at them side on, and you can see that the front and back faces are the same and have been trimmed to a thin tip. The real purpose in trimming down the two faces was to get a good cutting edge all around. You can see all this in the illustration.

We have very little idea of the way in which these core-bifaces were used. They have been called “hand axes,” but this probably gives the wrong idea, for an ax, to us, is not a pointed tool. All of these early tools must have been used for a number of jobs--chopping, scraping, cutting, hitting, picking, and prying. Since the core-bifaces tend to be pointed, it seems likely that they were used for hitting, picking, and prying. But they have rough cutting edges, so they could have been used for chopping, scraping, and cutting.

FLAKE TOOLS

The third tradition is the _flake_ tradition. The idea was to get a tool with a good cutting edge by simply knocking a nice large flake off a big block of stone. You had to break off the flake in such a way that it was broad and thin, and also had a good sharp cutting edge. Once you really got on to the trick of doing it, this was probably a simpler way to make a good cutting tool than preparing a biface. You have to know how, though; I’ve tried it and have mashed my fingers more than once.

The flake tools look as if they were meant mainly for chopping, scraping, and cutting jobs. When one made a flake tool, the idea seems to have been to produce a broad, sharp, cutting edge.

The core-biface and the flake traditions were spread, from earliest times, over much of Europe, Africa, and western Asia. The map on page 52 shows the general area. Over much of this great region there was flint. Both of these traditions seem well adapted to flint, although good core-bifaces and flakes were made from other kinds of stone, especially in Africa south of the Sahara.

CHOPPERS AND ADZE-LIKE TOOLS

The fourth early tradition is found in southern and eastern Asia, from northwestern India through Java and Burma into China. Father Maringer recently reported an early group of tools in Japan, which most resemble those of Java, called Patjitanian. The prehistoric men in this general area mostly used quartz and tuff and even petrified wood for their stone tools (see illustration, p. 46).

This fourth early tradition is called the _chopper-chopping tool_ tradition. It probably has its earliest roots in the pebble tool tradition of African type. There are several kinds of tools in this tradition, but all differ from the western core-bifaces and flakes. There are broad, heavy scrapers or cleavers, and tools with an adze-like cutting edge. These last-named tools are called “hand adzes,” just as the core-bifaces of the west have often been called “hand axes.” The section of an adze cutting edge is ∠ shaped; the section of an ax is < shaped.

There are also pointed pebble tools. Thus the tool kit of these early south and east Asiatic peoples seems to have included tools for doing as many different jobs as did the tools of the Western traditions.

Dr. H. L. Movius has emphasized that the tools which were found in the Peking cave with Peking man belong to the chopper-tool tradition. This is the only case as yet where the tools and the man have been found together from very earliest times--if we except Sterkfontein.

DIFFERENCES WITHIN THE TOOL-MAKING TRADITIONS

The latter three great traditions in the manufacture of stone tools--and the less clear-cut pebble tools before them--are all we have to show of the cultures of the men of those times. Changes happened in each of the traditions. As time went on, the tools in each tradition were better made. There could also be slight regional differences in the tools within one tradition. Thus, tools with small differences, but all belonging to one tradition, can be given special group (facies) names.

This naming of special groups has been going on for some time. Here are some of these names, since you may see them used in museum displays of flint tools, or in books. Within each tradition of tool-making (save the chopper tools), the earliest tool type is at the bottom of the list, just as it appears in the lowest beds of a geological stratification.[3]

[3] Archeologists usually make their charts and lists with the
earliest materials at the bottom and the latest on top, since
this is the way they find them in the ground.

Chopper tool (all about equally early):
Anyathian (Burma)
Choukoutienian (China)
Patjitanian (Java)
Soan (India)

Flake:
“Typical Mousterian”
Levalloiso-Mousterian
Levalloisian
Tayacian
Clactonian (localized in England)

Core-biface:
Some blended elements in “Mousterian”
Micoquian (= Acheulean 6 and 7)
Acheulean
Abbevillian (once called “Chellean”)

Pebble tool:
Oldowan
Ain Hanech
pre-Stellenbosch
Kafuan

The core-biface and the flake traditions appear in the chart (p. 65).

The early archeologists had many of the tool groups named before they ever realized that there were broader tool preparation traditions. This was understandable, for in dealing with the mixture of things that come out of glacial gravels the easiest thing to do first is to isolate individual types of tools into groups. First you put a bushel-basketful of tools on a table and begin matching up types. Then you give names to the groups of each type. The groups and the types are really matters of the archeologists’ choice; in real life, they were probably less exact than the archeologists’ lists of them. We now know pretty well in which of the early traditions the various early groups belong.

THE MEANING OF THE DIFFERENT TRADITIONS

What do the traditions really mean? I see them as the standardization of ways to make tools for particular jobs. We may not know exactly what job the maker of a particular core-biface or flake tool had in mind. We can easily see, however, that he already enjoyed a know-how, a set of persistent habits of tool preparation, which would always give him the same type of tool when he wanted to make it. Therefore, the traditions show us that persistent habits already existed for the preparation of one type of tool or another.

This tells us that one of the characteristic aspects of human culture was already present. There must have been, in the minds of these early men, a notion of the ideal type of tool for a particular job. Furthermore, since we find so many thousands upon thousands of tools of one type or another, the notion of the ideal types of tools _and_ the know-how for the making of each type must have been held in common by many men. The notions of the ideal types and the know-how for their production must have been passed on from one generation to another.

I could even guess that the notions of the ideal type of one or the other of these tools stood out in the minds of men of those times somewhat like a symbol of “perfect tool for good job.” If this were so--remember it’s only a wild guess of mine--then men were already symbol users. Now let’s go on a further step to the fact that the words men speak are simply sounds, each different sound being a symbol for a different meaning. If standardized tool-making suggests symbol-making, is it also possible that crude word-symbols were also being made? I suppose that it is not impossible.

There may, of course, be a real question whether tool-utilizing creatures--our first step, on page 42--were actually men. Other animals utilize things at hand as tools. The tool-fashioning creature of our second step is more suggestive, although we may not yet feel sure that many of the earlier pebble tools were man-made products. But with the step to standardization and the appearance of the traditions, I believe we must surely be dealing with the traces of culture-bearing _men_. The “conventional understandings” which Professor Redfield’s definition of culture suggests are now evidenced for us in the persistent habits for the preparation of stone tools. Were we able to see the other things these prehistoric men must have made--in materials no longer preserved for the archeologist to find--I believe there would be clear signs of further conventional understandings. The men may have been physically primitive and pretty shaggy in appearance, but I think we must surely call them men.

AN OLDER INTERPRETATION OF THE WESTERN TRADITIONS

In the last chapter, I told you that many of the older archeologists and human paleontologists used to think that modern man was very old. The supposed ages of Piltdown and Galley Hill were given as evidence of the great age of anatomically modern man, and some interpretations of the Swanscombe and Fontéchevade fossils were taken to support this view. The conclusion was that there were two parallel lines or “phyla” of men already present well back in the Pleistocene. The first of these, the more primitive or “paleoanthropic” line, was said to include Heidelberg, the proto-neanderthaloids and classic Neanderthal. The more anatomically modern or “neanthropic” line was thought to consist of Piltdown and the others mentioned above. The Neanderthaler or paleoanthropic line was thought to have become extinct after the first phase of the last great glaciation. Of course, the modern or neanthropic line was believed to have persisted into the present, as the basis for the world’s population today. But with Piltdown liquidated, Galley Hill known to be very late, and Swanscombe and Fontéchevade otherwise interpreted, there is little left of the so-called parallel phyla theory.

While the theory was in vogue, however, and as long as the European archeological evidence was looked at in one short-sighted way, the archeological materials _seemed_ to fit the parallel phyla theory. It was simply necessary to believe that the flake tools were made only by the paleoanthropic Neanderthaler line, and that the more handsome core-biface tools were the product of the neanthropic modern-man line.

Remember that _almost_ all of the early prehistoric European tools came only from the redeposited gravel beds. This means that the tools were not normally found in the remains of camp sites or work shops where they had actually been dropped by the men who made and used them. The tools came, rather, from the secondary hodge-podge of the glacial gravels. I tried to give you a picture of the bulldozing action of glaciers (p. 40) and of the erosion and weathering that were side-effects of a glacially conditioned climate on the earth’s surface. As we said above, if one simply plucks tools out of the redeposited gravels, his natural tendency is to “type” the tools by groups, and to think that the groups stand for something _on their own_.

In 1906, M. Victor Commont actually made a rare find of what seems to have been a kind of workshop site, on a terrace above the Somme river in France. Here, Commont realized, flake tools appeared clearly in direct association with core-biface tools. Few prehistorians paid attention to Commont or his site, however. It was easier to believe that flake tools represented a distinct “culture” and that this “culture” was that of the Neanderthaler or paleoanthropic line, and that the core-bifaces stood for another “culture” which was that of the supposed early modern or neanthropic line. Of course, I am obviously skipping many details here. Some later sites with Neanderthal fossils do seem to have only flake tools, but other such sites have both types of tools. The flake tools which appeared _with_ the core-bifaces in the Swanscombe gravels were never made much of, although it was embarrassing for the parallel phyla people that Fontéchevade ran heavily to flake tools. All in all, the parallel phyla theory flourished because it seemed so neat and easy to understand.

TRADITIONS ARE TOOL-MAKING HABITS, NOT CULTURES

In case you think I simply enjoy beating a dead horse, look in any standard book on prehistory written twenty (or even ten) years ago, or in most encyclopedias. You’ll find that each of the individual tool types, of the West, at least, was supposed to represent a “culture.” The “cultures” were believed to correspond to parallel lines of human evolution.

In 1937, Mr. Harper Kelley strongly re-emphasized the importance of Commont’s workshop site and the presence of flake tools with core-bifaces. Next followed Dr. Movius’ clear delineation of the chopper-chopping tool tradition of the Far East. This spoiled the nice symmetry of the flake-tool = paleoanthropic, core-biface = neanthropic equations. Then came increasing understanding of the importance of the pebble tools in Africa, and the location of several more workshop sites there, especially at Olorgesailie in Kenya. Finally came the liquidation of Piltdown and the deflation of Galley Hill’s date. So it is at last possible to picture an individual prehistoric man making a flake tool to do one job and a core-biface tool to do another. Commont showed us this picture in 1906, but few believed him.

Time approximately 100,000 years ago]

There are certainly a few cases in which flake tools did appear with few or no core-bifaces. The flake-tool group called Clactonian in England is such a case. Another good, but certainly later case is that of the cave on Mount Carmel in Palestine, where the blended pre-neanderthaloid, 70 per cent modern-type skulls were found. Here, in the same level with the skulls, were 9,784 flint tools. Of these, only three--doubtless strays--were core-bifaces; all the rest were flake tools or flake chips. We noted above how the Fontéchevade cave ran to flake tools. The only conclusion I would draw from this is that times and circumstances did exist in which prehistoric men needed only flake tools. So they only made flake tools for those particular times and circumstances.

LIFE IN EARLIEST TIMES

What do we actually know of life in these earliest times? In the glacial gravels, or in the terrace gravels of rivers once swollen by floods of melt water or heavy rains, or on the windswept deserts, we find stone tools. The earliest and coarsest of these are the pebble tools. We do not yet know what the men who made them looked like, although the Sterkfontein australopithecines probably give us a good hint. Then begin the more formal tool preparation traditions of the west--the core-bifaces and the flake tools--and the chopper-chopping tool series of the farther east. There is an occasional roughly worked piece of bone. From the gravels which yield the Clactonian flakes of England comes the fire-hardened point of a wooden spear. There are also the chance finds of the fossil human bones themselves, of which we spoke in the last chapter. Aside from the cave of Peking man, none of the earliest tools have been found in caves. Open air or “workshop” sites which do not seem to have been disturbed later by some geological agency are very rare.

The chart on page 65 shows graphically what the situation in west-central Europe seems to have been. It is not yet certain whether there were pebble tools there or not. The Fontéchevade cave comes into the picture about 100,000 years ago or more. But for the earlier hundreds of thousands of years--below the red-dotted line on the chart--the tools we find come almost entirely from the haphazard mixture within the geological contexts.

The stone tools of each of the earlier traditions are the simplest kinds of all-purpose tools. Almost any one of them could be used for hacking, chopping, cutting, and scraping; so the men who used them must have been living in a rough and ready sort of way. They found or hunted their food wherever they could. In the anthropological jargon, they were “food-gatherers,” pure and simple.

Because of the mixture in the gravels and in the materials they carried, we can’t be sure which animals these men hunted. Bones of the larger animals turn up in the gravels, but they could just as well belong to the animals who hunted the men, rather than the other way about. We don’t know. This is why camp sites like Commont’s and Olorgesailie in Kenya are so important when we do find them. The animal bones at Olorgesailie belonged to various mammals of extremely large size. Probably they were taken in pit-traps, but there are a number of groups of three round stones on the site which suggest that the people used bolas. The South American Indians used three-ball bolas, with the stones in separate leather bags connected by thongs. These were whirled and then thrown through the air so as to entangle the feet of a fleeing animal.

Professor F. Clark Howell recently returned from excavating another important open air site at Isimila in Tanganyika. The site yielded the bones of many fossil animals and also thousands of core-bifaces, flakes, and choppers. But Howell’s reconstruction of the food-getting habits of the Isimila people certainly suggests that the word “hunting” is too dignified for what they did; “scavenging” would be much nearer the mark.

During a great part of this time the climate was warm and pleasant. The second interglacial period (the time between the second and third great alpine glaciations) lasted a long time, and during much of this time the climate may have been even better than ours is now. We don’t know that earlier prehistoric men in Europe or Africa lived in caves. They may not have needed to; much of the weather may have been so nice that they lived in the open. Perhaps they didn’t wear clothes, either.

WHAT THE PEKING CAVE-FINDS TELL US

The one early cave-dwelling we have found is that of Peking man, in China. Peking man had fire. He probably cooked his meat, or used the fire to keep dangerous animals away from his den. In the cave were bones of dangerous animals, members of the wolf, bear, and cat families. Some of the cat bones belonged to beasts larger than tigers. There were also bones of other wild animals: buffalo, camel, deer, elephants, horses, sheep, and even ostriches. Seventy per cent of the animals Peking man killed were fallow deer. It’s much too cold and dry in north China for all these animals to live there today. So this list helps us know that the weather was reasonably warm, and that there was enough rain to grow grass for the grazing animals. The list also helps the paleontologists to date the find.

Peking man also seems to have eaten plant food, for there are hackberry seeds in the debris of the cave. His tools were made of sandstone and quartz and sometimes of a rather bad flint. As we’ve already seen, they belong in the chopper-tool tradition. It seems fairly clear that some of the edges were chipped by right-handed people. There are also many split pieces of heavy bone. Peking man probably split them so he could eat the bone marrow, but he may have used some of them as tools.

Many of these split bones were the bones of Peking men. Each one of the skulls had already had the base broken out of it. In no case were any of the bones resting together in their natural relation to one another. There is nothing like a burial; all of the bones are scattered. Now it’s true that animals could have scattered bodies that were not cared for or buried. But splitting bones lengthwise and carefully removing the base of a skull call for both the tools and the people to use them. It’s pretty clear who the people were. Peking man was a cannibal.

* * * * *

This rounds out about all we can say of the life and times of early prehistoric men. In those days life was rough. You evidently had to watch out not only for dangerous animals but also for your fellow men. You ate whatever you could catch or find growing. But you had sense enough to build fires, and you had already formed certain habits for making the kinds of stone tools you needed. That’s about all we know. But I think we’ll have to admit that cultural beginnings had been made, and that these early people were really _men_.

MORE EVIDENCE of Culture

While the dating is not yet sure, the material that we get from caves in Europe must go back to about 100,000 years ago; the time of the classic Neanderthal group followed soon afterwards. We don’t know why there is no earlier material in the caves; apparently they were not used before the last interglacial phase (the period just before the last great glaciation). We know that men of the classic Neanderthal group were living in caves from about 75,000 to 45,000 years ago. New radioactive carbon dates even suggest that some of the traces of culture we’ll describe in this chapter may have lasted to about 35,000 years ago. Probably some of the pre-neanderthaloid types of men had also lived in caves. But we have so far found their bones in caves only in Palestine and at Fontéchevade.

THE CAVE LAYERS

In parts of France, some peasants still live in caves. In prehistoric time, many generations of people lived in them. As a result, many caves have deep layers of debris. The first people moved in and lived on the rock floor. They threw on the floor whatever they didn’t want, and they tracked in mud; nobody bothered to clean house in those days. Their debris--junk and mud and garbage and what not--became packed into a layer. As time went on, and generations passed, the layer grew thicker. Then there might have been a break in the occupation of the cave for a while. Perhaps the game animals got scarce and the people moved away; or maybe the cave became flooded. Later on, other people moved in and began making a new layer of their own on top of the first layer. Perhaps this process of layering went on in the same cave for a hundred thousand years; you can see what happened. The drawing on this page shows a section through such a cave. The earliest layer is on the bottom, the latest one on top. They go in order from bottom to top, earliest to latest. This is the _stratification_ we talked about (p. 12).

While we may find a mix-up in caves, it’s not nearly as bad as the mixing up that was done by glaciers. The animal bones and shells, the fireplaces, the bones of men, and the tools the men made all belong together, if they come from one layer. That’s the reason why the cave of Peking man is so important. It is also the reason why the caves in Europe and the Near East are so important. We can get an idea of which things belong together and which lot came earliest and which latest.

In most cases, prehistoric men lived only in the mouths of caves. They didn’t like the dark inner chambers as places to live in. They preferred rock-shelters, at the bases of overhanging cliffs, if there was enough overhang to give shelter. When the weather was good, they no doubt lived in the open air as well. I’ll go on using the term “cave” since it’s more familiar, but remember that I really mean rock-shelter, as a place in which people actually lived.

The most important European cave sites are in Spain, France, and central Europe; there are also sites in England and Italy. A few caves are known in the Near East and Africa, and no doubt more sites will be found when the out-of-the-way parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia are studied.

AN “INDUSTRY” DEFINED

We have already seen that the earliest European cave materials are those from the cave of Fontéchevade. Movius feels certain that the lowest materials here date back well into the third interglacial stage, that which lay between the Riss (next to the last) and the Würm I (first stage of the last) alpine glaciations. This material consists of an _industry_ of stone tools, apparently all made in the flake tradition. This is the first time we have used the word “industry.” It is useful to call all of the different tools found together in one layer and made of _one kind of material_ an industry; that is, the tools must be found together as men left them. Tools taken from the glacial gravels (or from windswept desert surfaces or river gravels or any geological deposit) are not “together” in this sense. We might say the latter have only “geological,” not “archeological” context. Archeological context means finding things just as men left them. We can tell what tools go together in an “industrial” sense only if we have archeological context.

Up to now, the only things we could have called “industries” were the worked stone industry and perhaps the worked (?) bone industry of the Peking cave. We could add some of the very clear cases of open air sites, like Olorgesailie. We couldn’t use the term for the stone tools from the glacial gravels, because we do not know which tools belonged together. But when the cave materials begin to appear in Europe, we can begin to speak of industries. Most of the European caves of this time contain industries of flint tools alone.

THE EARLIEST EUROPEAN CAVE LAYERS

We’ve just mentioned the industry from what is said to be the oldest inhabited cave in Europe; that is, the industry from the deepest layer of the site at Fontéchevade. Apparently it doesn’t amount to much. The tools are made of stone, in the flake tradition, and are very poorly worked. This industry is called _Tayacian_. Its type tool seems to be a smallish flake tool, but there are also larger flakes which seem to have been fashioned for hacking. In fact, the type tool seems to be simply a smaller edition of the Clactonian tool (pictured on p. 45).

None of the Fontéchevade tools are really good. There are scrapers, and more or less pointed tools, and tools that may have been used for hacking and chopping. Many of the tools from the earlier glacial gravels are better made than those of this first industry we see in a European cave. There is so little of this material available that we do not know which is really typical and which is not. You would probably find it hard to see much difference between this industry and a collection of tools of the type called Clactonian, taken from the glacial gravels, especially if the Clactonian tools were small-sized.

The stone industry of the bottommost layer of the Mount Carmel cave, in Palestine, where somewhat similar tools were found, has also been called Tayacian.

I shall have to bring in many unfamiliar words for the names of the industries. The industries are usually named after the places where they were first found, and since these were in most cases in France, most of the names which follow will be of French origin. However, the names have simply become handles and are in use far beyond the boundaries of France. It would be better if we had a non-place-name terminology, but archeologists have not yet been able to agree on such a terminology.

THE ACHEULEAN INDUSTRY

Both in France and in Palestine, as well as in some African cave sites, the next layers in the deep caves have an industry in both the core-biface and the flake traditions. The core-biface tools usually make up less than half of all the tools in the industry. However, the name of the biface type of tool is generally given to the whole industry. It is called the _Acheulean_, actually a late form of it, as “Acheulean” is also used for earlier core-biface tools taken from the glacial gravels. In western Europe, the name used is _Upper Acheulean_ or _Micoquian_. The same terms have been borrowed to name layers E and F in the Tabun cave, on Mount Carmel in Palestine.

The Acheulean core-biface type of tool is worked on two faces so as to give a cutting edge all around. The outline of its front view may be oval, or egg-shaped, or a quite pointed pear shape. The large chip-scars of the Acheulean core-bifaces are shallow and flat. It is suspected that this resulted from the removal of the chips with a wooden club; the deep chip-scars of the earlier Abbevillian core-biface came from beating the tool against a stone anvil. These tools are really the best and also the final products of the core-biface tradition. We first noticed the tradition in the early glacial gravels (p. 43); now we see its end, but also its finest examples, in the deeper cave levels.

The flake tools, which really make up the greater bulk of this industry, are simple scrapers and chips with sharp cutting edges. The habits used to prepare them must have been pretty much the same as those used for at least one of the flake industries we shall mention presently.

There is very little else in these early cave layers. We do not have a proper “industry” of bone tools. There are traces of fire, and of animal bones, and a few shells. In Palestine, there are many more bones of deer than of gazelle in these layers; the deer lives in a wetter climate than does the gazelle. In the European cave layers, the animal bones are those of beasts that live in a warm climate. They belonged in the last interglacial period. We have not yet found the bones of fossil men definitely in place with this industry.

FLAKE INDUSTRIES FROM THE CAVES

Two more stone industries--the _Levalloisian_ and the “_Mousterian_”--turn up at approximately the same time in the European cave layers. Their tools seem to be mainly in the flake tradition, but according to some of the authorities their preparation also shows some combination with the habits by which the core-biface tools were prepared.

Now notice that I don’t tell you the Levalloisian and the “Mousterian” layers are both above the late Acheulean layers. Look at the cave section (p. 57) and you’ll find that some “Mousterian of Acheulean tradition” appears above some “typical Mousterian.” This means that there may be some kinds of Acheulean industries that are later than some kinds of “Mousterian.” The same is true of the Levalloisian.

There were now several different kinds of habits that men used in making stone tools. These habits were based on either one or the other of the two traditions--core-biface or flake--or on combinations of the habits used in the preparation techniques of both traditions. All were popular at about the same time. So we find that people who made one kind of stone tool industry lived in a cave for a while. Then they gave up the cave for some reason, and people with another industry moved in. Then the first people came back--or at least somebody with the same tool-making habits as the first people. Or maybe a third group of tool-makers moved in. The people who had these different habits for making their stone tools seem to have moved around a good deal. They no doubt borrowed and exchanged tricks of the trade with each other. There were no patent laws in those days.

The extremely complicated interrelationships of the different habits used by the tool-makers of this range of time are at last being systematically studied. M. François Bordes has developed a statistical method of great importance for understanding these tool preparation habits.

THE LEVALLOISIAN AND MOUSTERIAN