Chapter X: Part 10

Upon his first visit to the relic-beds near Abbeville in the spring of 1859, Lyell had obtained seventy specimens of these stone tools from the chief of them. The tools were all of flint, which occurs in abundance in the chalk of the district, and is still obtained and worked for technical purposes at the present day. The worked stones that Boucher found were termed flint or silex tools, according to the material of which they were made. They occurred in the particular beds, as Lyell expressed it, in wonderful quantities. The famous geologist distinguished three chief forms. The first is the spear-head form, and varies in length from six to eight inches. The second is the oval form, not unlike many stone implements and weapons that are still used as axes and tomahawks at the present day--for instance, by the aborigines of Australia. The only difference is that the edge of the Australian stone axes, like that of the European implements of later periods of civilisation known as thunderbolts or lightning-stones, is mostly produced by grinding, whereas on the stone axes from the drift of the Somme valley it has always been obtained by simply chipping the stone, and by repeated, skilfully directed blows. According to Tylor the stone implements of the old Tasmanians were entirely of Drift form and make, all without traces of grinding, being simply angular stones whose cutting-edge had been sharpened by being worked with a second stone. Some of these stone implements of Drift Man may have been simply used in the hand when the natural form of the stone offered a convenient end, but the majority were certainly fastened in a handle in some way or other, to serve as weapons--spear-heads or daggers--both for war and the chase. Lyell’s second chief form would have been used as an axe for such purposes as digging up roots, felling trees, and hollowing out canoes, or to cut holes in the ice for fishing and for getting drinking water in the winter. In the hand of the hunter and warrior the stone axe also became a weapon. As the third form of stone implements Lyell distinguished knife-shaped flakes, some pointed, others of oval form or trimmed evenly at one end, obviously intended partly as knives and arrow-heads, and partly as scrapers for technical purposes.

Most of our knowledge of the earliest life of man has been revealed by the excavator. When at a certain depth below the earth’s surface the skeleton of a man is found, surrounded with rude stone weapons, ornaments, and the remains of domestic animals, a whole chapter in the life of Prehistoric Man stands revealed at one glance. Our photograph shows an actual skeleton and grave of the Stone Age, as discovered in the year 1875 near Mentone.]

Although there are many variations between the first two chief forms, yet the typical difference indicating the different purpose of their use is always easily recognised in well-finished examples. A large number of very rude specimens have also been found, of which many may have been thrown away as spoiled in the making, and others may have been only rubbish produced in the working. Evans has practically proved that it is possible to produce such stone implements in their remarkable agreement of form without the use of metal hammers. He made a stone hammer by fastening a flint in a wooden handle, and worked another piece of flint with this until it had assumed the shape of the axe form--the second, oval form--of the Drift implements.

[Sidenote: Lyell’s Find in the Somme Valley]

Lyell draws attention to the fact that, in spite of the relatively great frequency of stone implements, it would be a great mistake to rely on finding a single specimen, even if one occupied himself for weeks together in examining the Somme valley. Only a few lay on the surface, the rest not coming to light until after removing enormous masses of sand, loam, and gravel. As we may presume with Lyell that the larger number of the Drift stone implements of Abbeville and Amiens were brought into their position by the action of the river, this sufficiently explains why so many were found at great depths below the surface; for they must naturally have been buried in the gravel with the other stones in places where the stream had still sufficient force or rapidity to wash stones away. They can, therefore, not be found in deposits from still water, in fine sediment and overflow mud.

Bones of Drift Man are absent from the deposits of the Somme valley, in spite of the wonderful abundance of stone implements. The “lower jaw from Moulin-Quignon, near Abbeville,” had been fraudulently placed there by workmen. But proof of the existence of man is undeniably assured by the objects, so unpretentious in themselves, that have been recognised as the work of his hands.

When once the recognition of Drift Man, founded on the authority of Lyell, was achieved, search for further relic-beds was made in England and France with success. Yet scarcely one of the newly discovered stations was to be compared to those of the Somme valley as regards purity of stratification and conditions of discovery. The relics of the “earliest Stone Age” or “Palæolithic Period,” as the period of Drift Man was called, frequently came from caves and grottos, whose primary conclusiveness Boucher had rightly doubted.

Under these circumstances it was of the greatest importance that in Germany Drift Man was discovered in two places, where not only was the geological stratification just as clear as at Abbeville and Amiens, but where also the relics of Drift Man were found, not in a secondary _situs_, as they were then, but in a primary one. In addition to this the two German relic-beds may be safely assigned to the last two great divisions of the Drift Period, to the warmer Interglacial Period, and to the cold Glacial Period proper, with its Postglacial Period; and their climatic conditions were made clear from the remains of plants and animals found in them.

Mercier

A WORKER IN THE STONE AGE

Making an axehead of flint, like that photographed on the opposite
page. From the painting by F. Cormon.
]

From the occurrence, in the deposits of the Somme, of reindeer that contain the stone implements of Drift Man, we can not, as we saw, exactly settle in what part of the Drift Era man lived there, whether in the Interglacial Period, to which numerous animal remains found there doubtless belong, or not until the “Reindeer” Period, as the last Glacial and early Postglacial Periods were called, when the reindeer was most largely distributed over France and Central Europe. One is inclined to date man’s habitation of the Somme valley back to the Interglacial Period; but it is certain that the relic-bed near Taubach is the first, and, as far as I can see, the only one hitherto, that has given sure proof of Interglacial Man in Europe. There the oldest vestiges of man in Europe were found that have yet been absolutely proved. We have not hitherto succeeded in Europe in tracing man farther back than the Interglacial Period. Relics of him are hitherto as absent in the older Drift as they are in the Tertiary.

Flint implement found in Gray’s Inn, London; now in British Museum.
]

The Taubach relic-bed also furnished no bones of Drift Man among all the parts of skeletons of Drift animals that we have mentioned. Here, too, as in the Somme valley, the proof of the presence of man is based on the works of his hand and mind. Here, too, stone implements and stone weapons are the chief things to be mentioned. But whereas, in the chalk district of France, flints of every size were to be had in the greatest abundance for the preparation of weapons and tools, corresponding stones are not exactly wanting at the two standard German places, though they occur in limited number and size. It is due to this that the larger forms of flint implements, which are most in evidence in the Somme valley, are absent at Taubach. On the other hand, smaller “knives and flakes”--Lyell’s third form of Drift flint implements--occur here with comparative frequency and variety of form. Next to the usual lancet-shaped knife, worked flint flakes, of triangular prismatic form, with sharp corners, are most numerous at Taubach, and scrapers, chisels, awls, and the chipping-stones with which the stone implements were produced may also be distinguished among other things. The material for the implements was supplied by the older Drift débris of the valley--namely, flint, flinty slate, and quartz porphyry.

Besides the stone implements which alone were observed in the Somme valley, still further important relics were found here in their primary _situs_. Above all, numerous finds of charcoal and burnt bones prove that the Drift Men of Taubach not only knew how to kindle fire, but were also accustomed to roast the flesh of the animals they killed in the chase. Stones and pieces of shell limestone also occur which have become reddish and hard from the action of heat. These are to be regarded as the floors and side-walls of the fireplaces on which the food was then and there prepared. The animal bones, especially those that were taken up from around the fireplace, appear in most cases to be remains of meals. This is shown at once by the fact that bones of young representatives of the large beasts of the chase--such as the rhinoceros, elephant, and bear--are very frequent as compared with the rare occurrence of full-grown animals.

[Sidenote: Hunters of the Stone Age]

[Sidenote: How Drift Man Killed the Great Animals]

It appears that in the hunting and capture of animals the young ones were most easily killed, and therefore served chiefly as food. Whenever a large animal was killed, it was probably cut up on the spot by the fortunate hunters, who consumed at once part of its flesh; the trunk was then left at the scene of the killing, while the head, neck, and fore and hind legs, on which was the most muscular flesh, and which were at the same time easier to carry away, were taken to the settlement. This may explain why, among the many large bones of the rhinoceros that have hitherto been found, the ribs and the dorsal and lumbar vertebræ are almost entirely absent. Some of the bones of the beasts of the chase bear the unmistakable traces of man. They are broken in the manner characteristic of “savages” of all ages and climes--for the sake of the marrow, one of the greatest dainties of men living chiefly on animal fare. The broken-off heads of the metatarsal bones of the bison still show particularly clearly the method of breaking. They are broken off transversely exactly where the marrow canal ends, and on all these bones there is a roundish depression, or hole, at the same place--namely, in the middle of their front or back surface, and just where the end of the marrow canal is, therefore about in the centre of the break of the broken-off piece. The hole is a “blow-mark” of one inch in diameter, evidently driven in by force from without, as several well-preserved specimens still show the edges and splinters of bone pressed inward. These splinters and all the breaks are old, and have on the surface the same greasy coating, full of the sand in which they lay, as the bones themselves. The instrument used for breaking the bones in this way might very well have been the lower jaw of a bear with its large canine tooth, as Oscar Fraas has ascertained to have been the case in other places where Drift Man has been found. Such lower jaws were found at Taubach, and the nature and size of the hole and its edges agree with this assumption. The long bones of the elephant and rhinoceros were whole. Drift Man did not succeed in breaking these huge pieces, and where such bones are found broken they are accidental fractures. On the other hand, almost all bones of the bear and bison are intentionally split--in almost all cases transversely, and seldom lengthways.

[Sidenote: Drift Man at his Meals]

In the Somme valley we have only the flint implements--which, although rude, are very regularly and uniformly made for different recognisable purposes--to tell us of the life and state of Drift Man; but the finds at Taubach afford us a rather closer insight into the conditions of his life and culture. What we had suspected from the first finds is confirmed here. During the Interglacial Period we see near Taubach, on the old watercourse of the Ilm, which had there at that time become dammed up into a kind of pond, a human settlement. This was occupied for a long period, as is proved by the large number of bones, evidently remains of meals, and by the quantity of charcoal. Immediately on the bank were the fireplaces--rude hearths built of the stones obtained without trouble in the neighbourhood. Here the flesh of the beasts of the chase, the bison and the bear, and also the elephant and rhinoceros, was broiled in a crude manner in the hot ashes, as is still done by savages on the level of the Fuegians and primitive tribes of Central Brazil at the present day. For this no utensils are required, a sharpened rod or thin pointed stick being sufficient for turning and taking out the pieces of meat. The ashes that the gravy causes to adhere supply the place of salt and other seasoning. The meat was cut up with the stone knives, and many traces of cuts on the bones may also be attributable to these instruments. For cutting out larger portions a powerful and very suitable instrument was at hand, in the lower jaw of the bear, with its strong canine tooth, which also served for breaking bones to obtain the marrow. In spite of the apparent meanness of the weapons, remains of which we have found, the Drift Men of Taubach were yet able, as their kitchen refuse proves, not only to kill the bison and bear, but also the gigantic elephant and rhinoceros, both young and full grown.

The reindeer was the most familiar animal of the Later Ice Age, its
body supplying food, clothing, and implements for Glacial Man.
]

A collection of neolithic lance and arrow heads found in Ireland,
now to be seen in the British Museum.
]

[Sidenote: Drift Man after the Hunt]

This shows man to have been then, as he is to-day, master even of the gigantic animal forms which so far surpass him in mechanical strength. It is the mind of man that shows itself superior to the most powerful brute force, even where we meet him for the first time. From the finds in the Somme valley it appears that Drift Man already possessed spear, dagger, and axe, besides the knife, as weapons. There the blades were of stone. The relatively small blades of the Taubach stone implements are, it is true, of the same character as the stone implements of Abbeville and Amiens, but they are chiefly, as we have said, merely knife-like articles, very suitable as blades for knives, scrapers, and daggers, and as arrow-heads, but not strong enough as hunting-weapons for such big game. The hunt must, therefore, have been more a matter of capture in pits and traps, as practised at the present day where similar large types of animals are hunted by tribes armed only with defective weapons. The kitchen refuse also proves that the settlement by the Ilm pond, near Taubach, was a permanent one, to which the hunters returned after their expeditions, bringing their game and trophies so far as they were easily transportable. But there is no trace of domestic animals. They could not have completely disappeared, any more than remains of clay vessels, which are still less destructible than bones, and in this respect may be compared to stone implements. There was no trace of potsherds either.

[Sidenote: The Best “Find” of the Ice Age]

The finds in the Somme valley and near Taubach are of incalculable importance as sure, indisputable proofs of Drift Man in Europe; but as regards the wealth of information to be derived from them respecting man’s psychical condition in that first period in which we can prove his existence, they are far and away surpassed by the find at the source of the Schussen, which Oscar Fraas, the celebrated geologist, has personally inventoried and described. Fraas has rightly given to his description of this find of Glacial Man--the most important and best examined hitherto--the title “Contributions to the History of Civilisation During the Glacial Period.”

The geognostic stratification of the relic-bed on one of the farthest advanced moraines of the Upper Swabian plateau proves that it belongs to the Glacial Period, and that this had already pushed its glacier-moraines to the farthest limit ever reached. In point of time the finds are, therefore, to be placed at the end of the Glacial Period, as it was passing into the Postglacial Period; everything still points to Far Northern conditions of life. The finds at the source of the Schussen are thus decidedly more recent, geologically, than those made at Taubach. They are a typical, or, better, _the_ typical example of the so-called “Reindeer Period” of the end of the Drift.

The methods of holding a hammer-stone and of making a flint by
pressure are illustrated at the top, those of using a chopping tool
at the bottom, of this plate. The other objects are spear-heads,
axes, and hammers of stone and flint, and javelin-heads of horn,
the latter being smooth and barbed. The method of tying a flint
chisel to a wooden handle is shown at the right (×). Most of these
objects are to be seen in the British Museum.
]

From Fraas’s description there seems to be no doubt whatever that the relic-bed, with its remains of civilisation, was perfectly undisturbed, and its palæontological contents plainly show its great geological age. It was perfectly protected by Nature. On the top lies peat, the same that covers the lowlands of the whole neighbourhood for miles, and forms the extensive moorlands of Upper Swabia, on which no other formations are to be seen than the gravel drift-walls thrown up by glaciers of the Drift Period. Under the peat lies a layer of calc-tufa, four to five feet thick, a fresh-water formation from the water-courses that now unite with the source of the Schussen. Under this protecting cover of tufa were the remains of the Glacial Period and Glacial Man. The tufa covered a bed of moss of a dark brown colour, inclining to green, the moss still splendidly preserved. Under this bed of moss was the glacier drift. The moss was dripping full of and intermingled with moist sand. In it were the relics of Glacial Man--all lying in heaps as fresh and firm as if they had been only recently collected. A sticky, dark-brown mud filled the moss and sand and the smallest hollow spaces of antlers and bones, and emitted a musty smell.

Reindeer’s skull used as drinking vessel by men of the Stone Age.
British Museum collection.
]

Such to-day are the mounds of prehistoric rubbish accumulated by
the people of the Stone Age. These Danish “kitchen middens” have
vastly enriched our knowledge of the remote past.
]

Glacial Man had used the place as a refuse-pit. Among the bones and splinters of bone of animals that had been slaughtered and consumed by man, among ashes and charred remains, among smoke-stained hearthstones and the traces of fire, there lay here, one upon the other, numerous knives, arrow-heads, and lance-heads of flint, and the most varied kinds of hand-made articles of reindeer horn. All this was in a shallow pit about seven hundred square yards in extent, and only four to five feet deep in the purest glacier drift, clearly showing that the excellent preservation of the bones and bone implements was solely due to the water having remained in the moss and sand. The bank of moss was like a saturated sponge; it closed up its contents hermetically from the air, and preserved in its ever-damp bosom what had been entrusted to it thousands of years before.

Under the peat and tufa at the source of the Schussen we find only the type of a purely Northern climate, with Northern flora and Northern fauna. There are no remains of domestic animals--not even of the dog, nor any bones of the stag, roe, chamois, or ibex. Everything corresponds to a Northern climate, such as begins to-day at 70° north latitude. We see Upper Swabia traversed by moraines and melting glaciers, whose waters wash the glacier-sand into moss-grown pools. We find a Greenland moss covering the wet sands in thick banks; between the moraines of the glaciers we have to imagine wide green pastures, rich enough to support herds of reindeer, which roved about there as they do in Greenland, or on the forest borders of Norway and Siberia, at the present day. Here, also, are the regions of the carnivora dangerous to the reindeer--the glutton and the wolf, and, in the second rank, the bear and Arctic fox.

It was thus that the Danish kitchen middens illustrated on the
opposite page were created. Each family group cast its refuse,
in the shape of shells, bones, wood, etc., on the midden near at
hand, and these heaps of rubbish in process of time became valuable
records of the people’s life, in which the archæologist can read
for us the story of the past.
]

[Sidenote: History in a Rubbish Heap]

According to Fraas, it is on this scene that man of the Glacial Period appears; in all probability, a hunter, invited by the presence of the reindeer to spend some time--probably only the better portion of the year--on the borders of ice and snow. It is true that the relic-bed that tells of his life and doings is only a refuse-pit, which contains nothing good in the way of art productions, but only broken or spoiled articles and refuse from the manufacture of implements. The bulk of the material consists of kitchen refuse, such as, besides charcoal and ashes, opened marrow-bones and broken skulls of game. Not one of the bones found here shows a trace of any other instrument than a stone. It was on a stone that the bone was laid, and it was with a stone that the blow was struck. Such breaking-stones came to light in large numbers. They were merely field stones collected on the spot, particular preference being given to finely rolled quartz boulders of about the size of a man’s fist. Others were rather rudely formed into the shape of a club, with a kind of handle, such as is produced half accidentally and half intentionally in splitting large pieces. Larger stones were also found--gneiss slabs, from one to two feet square, slaty Alpine limes, and rough blocks of one stone or another, which had probably represented slaughtering-blocks, or done duty as hearthstones, as on many of them traces of fire were visible. Where these stones had stood near the fire they were scaled, and all were more or less blackened by charcoal. Smaller pieces of slate and slabs of sandstone blackened by fire may have supplied the place of clay pottery in many respects; for, with all the blackened stones, not a fragment of a clay vessel was found in the layers of charcoal and ashes of the relic-bed.

[Sidenote: Making Drift Man’s Tools]

The flint implements are of the form familiar to us from Taubach and the Somme valley, being simply chipped, not ground or polished. At the source of the Schussen, also, only comparatively small pieces of the precious raw material were found for the manufacture of stone implements. So that here, too, as at Taubach, Lyell’s third form, the knife or flake, was practically the only one represented. They fall into two groups--pointed lancet-shaped knives and blunt saw-shaped stones. The former served as knife-blades and dagger-blades, and lance-heads and arrow-heads; the latter represented the blades of the tools required for working reindeer horn. The larger implements are between one and a quarter and one and a half inches broad and three to three and a half inches long; but the majority of them are far smaller, being about one and a half inches long and only three-eighths of an inch broad. The various flint blades appear to have been used in handles and hafts of reindeer horn. Numerous pieces occur which can only be explained as such handles, either ready or in course of manufacture.

Moreover, owing to the want of larger flints, numerous weapons, instruments, and implements were carved from reindeer horn and bone for use in the chase and in daily life. Fraas has ascertained exactly the technical process employed in producing articles of reindeer horn, and we see with wonder how the Glacial men of Swabia handled their defective carving-knives and saws on the very principle of modern technics. They are principally weapons--for example, long pointed bone daggers, otherwise mostly punchers, awls, plaiting-needles (of wood), and arrow-heads with notched grooves. These may possibly be poison-grooves; other transverse grooves may have served partly for fastening the arrow-head by means of some thread-like binding material, probably twisted from reindeer sinews, as is done by the Reindeer Lapps at the present day; other scratches occur as ornaments.

[Sidenote: The Skilled Workman of the Drift]

The forms of the bone implements show generally a decided sense of symmetry and a certain taste. For instance, a dagger, with a perforated knob for suspension, and a large carefully-carved fish-hook. Groove-like or hollow spoon-shaped pieces of horn were explained by Fraas to be cooking and eating utensils; probably they also served for certain technical purposes--as for dressing skins for clothing and tents, like the stone scrapers found in the Somme valley. A doubly perforated piece of a young reindeer’s antler appears to be an arrow-stretching apparatus, like those generally finely ornamented, used by the Esquimaux for the same purpose. A branch of a reindeer’s antlers, with deep notches filed in, is declared by the discoverer to be a “tally.” The notches are partly simple strokes filed in to the depth of a twelfth of an inch, and partly two main strokes connected by finer ones. “The strokes,” says Fraas, “are plainly numerical signs--a kind of note, probably, of reindeer or bears killed, or some other memento.” Among the objects found were also pieces of red paint of the size of a nut--clearly fabrications of clayey ironstone, ground and washed, and probably mixed with reindeer fat and kneaded into a paste. The paint crumbled between the fingers, felt greasy, and coloured the skin an intense red. It may have been used in the first instance for painting the body. The Glacial men at the source of the Schussen were, according to the results of these finds, fishermen and hunters, without dogs or domestic animals and without any knowledge of agriculture and pottery. But they understood how to kindle fire, which they used for cooking their food. They knew how to kill the wild reindeer, bear, and other animals of the district they hunted over; their arrows hit the swan, and their fish-hooks drew fish from the deep. They were artists in the chipping of flint into tools and weapons; with the former they worked reindeer horn in the most skilful manner. Traces of binding material indicate the use of threads, probably prepared from reindeer sinews; the plaiting-needle may have been employed for making fishing-lines. Threads and finely-pointed pricking instruments indicate the art of sewing; clothing probably consisted of the skins of the animals killed.

Mercier

HUNTING FOR FOOD IN THE LATER ICE AGE

From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon
]

To this material concerning Drift Man, scientifically vouched for, coming from Drift strata that have certainly never been disturbed, other countries have hitherto made no equal contributions really enlarging our view. Yet the numerous places where palæolithic--that is, only rudely chipped--implements of flint, such as were doubtless used by Drift Man, have been found must not remain unmentioned here. We know of them in Northern, Central, and Southern France, in the South of England, in the loess at Thiede, near Brunswick, and in Lower Austria, Moravia, Hungary, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, North Africa, and Russia.

The upper illustrations show handles of celt or stone-cutting
instruments and method of hafting; the lower picture is that of a
handmill of sandstone.
]

One of the earliest forms of habitation in Britain. From the
British Museum “Guide to the Bronze Age.”
]

It is of special importance to note that similar flint tools have also been found along with extinct land mammalia in the stratified drift of the Nerbudda valley, in South India, as the supposition more than suggests itself that Drift Man came to our continent with the Drift fauna that immigrated from Asia. The possibility that man also got from North Asia to North America with the mammoth during the Drift Period can no longer be dismissed after the results of palæontological research. It explains at once the close connection between the build of the American and the great Asiatic (Mongolian) races.

These remains of a large pile hut discovered in Germany show that
Stone Age Man had made good progress in building. The lower diagram
shows a transverse section.
]

The dug-out canoe, hollowed from a single trunk, was the far-off
parent of the ocean-going ship. The upper picture represents a
prehistoric canoe found in Sussex and the lower example is taken
from a German specimen.
]

Stone implements of palæolithic form have been found in Drift strata in North America, and the same applies also, as we have seen, to South America. The best finds there were those made by Ameghino in the pampas formation of Argentina. Here marrow-bones, split, worked, and burnt, and jaws of the stag, glyptodon, mastodon, and toxodon have been repeatedly found along with flint tools of palæolithic stamp; and Santiago Roth, who took part in these researches, supposes that fossil man in South America occasionally used the coats of mail of the gigantic armadillos as dwellings. But the civilisation of South American man is doubtless identical with that of European fossil man--tools and weapons of the stone types familiar in Europe, the working of bones, the use of fire for cooking, and animal food, with the consequent special fondness for fat and marrow.

THE WORLD
BEFORE
HISTORY--IV

Professor
JOHANNES
RANKE
]

PRIMITIVE MAN IN THE PAST & THE PRESENT

To the picture of Drift Man that has been drawn for us by the discoveries of human activity in deposits of uniform character and sharply defined age, the much richer but far less reliable finds in the bone caves add scarcely any entirely new touches. Von Zittel says:

The evidence of the caves is unfortunately shaken by the
uncertainty that, as a rule, prevails with regard to the manner in
which their contents were washed into them or otherwise introduced,
and also with regard to the beginning and duration of their
occupation; moreover, later inhabitants have frequently mixed up
their relics with the heritage of previous occupants.

[Sidenote: First Dwellers in Caves]

This doubt strikes us particularly forcibly as regards man’s co-existence with the extinct animals of the earlier periods of the Drift, the Preglacial and Interglacial Periods. On the other hand, the habitation of the caves by man during the Reindeer Period appears in many cases to be perfectly established, and, according to Von Zittel, the oldest human dwellings in caves, rock-niches, and river-plains in Europe belong for the most part to the Reindeer Period--that is, the second Glacial and, in particular, the Postglacial Period.

In the caves there is also no domestic animal, and no pottery or trace of potsherds, in the best-defined strata where Drift Man has been found. In the Hohlefels cave, in the Ach valley in Swabia, a new utensil was found in the form of a cup for drinking purposes or for drawing water, made out of the back part of a reindeer’s skull. Also a new tool in the form of a fine sewing-needle with eye, from the long bone of a swan, such as have also been found in the caves of the Périgord. Teeth of the wild horse and lower jaws of the wildcat, which are found in the caves, perforated for suspending either as ornaments or amulets, are also hitherto unknown, it appears, in the stratified Drift. As both animals are at a later period connected with the deity and with witchcraft, one could imagine that similar primitive religious ideas existed among the old cave-dwellers. In the stratum of the Reindeer Period at the Schweizerbild, near Schaffhausen, Nüesch found a musical instrument, “a reindeer whistle,” and shells pierced for use as ornaments.

[Sidenote: Drift Man’s Working Materials]

The finds in the French cave districts prove that man was able to develop certain higher refinements of life, even during the Drift in the real flint districts--where a very suitable material was at man’s disposal in the flint that lay about everywhere or was easily dug up; which was worked with comparative ease into much more perfect and efficient weapons and implements than those supplied by the wilder stretches of moor and fen of Germany, with their scarcity of flint.

If we compare the small, often tiny, knives and flint flakes from the German places with the powerful axes and lance-heads of those regions, it is self-evident how much more laborious life must have been for the man who used the former. What labour he must have expended in carving weapons and implements out of bone and horn, while flint supplied the others with much better and more lasting ones with less expenditure of time and trouble! In this light a wealth of flint was a civilising factor of that period which is not to be under-estimated. In the flint districts not only are the stone implements better worked, answering in a higher degree the purpose of the weapon and the tool, but delight in ornament and decoration is also more prominent.

[Sidenote: The Life in the Caves]

[Sidenote: Drift Man as Artist]

Life in the caves and grottos and under the rock shelters in the neighbourhood of rivers was by no means quite wretched. The remains left in the caves by their former inhabitants give almost as clear an idea of the life of man in those primeval times as the buried cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii do of the manners and customs of the Italians in the first century of the Christian era. The floors of these caves in which men formerly lived appear to consist entirely of broken bones of animals killed in the chase, intermixed with rude implements and weapons of bone and unpolished stone, and also charcoal and large burnt stones, indicating the position of fireplaces. Flints and chips without number, rough masses of stone, awls, lance-heads, hammers, and saws of flint and chert lie in motley confusion beside bone needles, carved reindeer antlers, arrow-heads and harpoons, and pointed pieces of horn and bone; in addition to which are also the broken bones of the animals that served as food, such as reindeer, bison, horse, ibex, saiga antelope, and musk-ox. The reindeer supplied by far the greater part of the food, and must at that time have lived in Central France in large herds and in a wild state, all trace of the dog being absent.

[Sidenote: Pictures from the Drift World]

Among these abundant remains of culture archæologists were surprised to find real objects of art from the hand of Drift Man, proving that thinking about his surroundings had developed into the ability to reproduce what he saw in drawing and modelling. The first objects of this kind were found in the caves of the Périgord. They are, on the one hand, drawings scratched on stones, reindeer bones, or pieces of horn, mostly very naïve, but sometimes really lifelike, chiefly representing animals, but also men; on the other hand imitations plastically carved out of pieces of reindeer horn, bones, or teeth. Such engravings also occurred on pieces of ivory, and plastic representations in this material have been preserved. On a cylindrical piece of reindeer horn from the cave excavations in the Dordogne is the representation of a fish, and on the shovel-piece of a reindeer’s horn are the head and breast of an animal resembling the ibex. Illustrations of horses give faithful reproductions of the flowing mane, unkempt tail, and disproportionately large head of the large-headed wild horse of the Drift. The most important among these representations are such as endeavour to reproduce an historical event. An illustration of this kind represents a group consisting of two horses’ heads and an apparently naked male figure; the latter bears a long staff or spear in his right hand, and stands beside a tree, which is bent down almost in coils in order to accommodate itself to the limited space, and whose boughs, indicated by parallel lines, show it to be a pine or fir. Connected with the tree is a system of vertical and horizontal lines, apparently representing a kind of hurdlework. On the other side of the same cylindrical piece are two bisons’ heads. Doubtless this picture tells a tale; it is picture-writing in exactly the same sense as that of the North American Indians. Our picture already shows the transition to abbreviated picture-writing, as, instead of the whole animals--horses and bisons--only the heads are given. The message-sticks of the Australians bear certain resemblances; Bastian has rightly described them as the beginnings of writing.

If we have interpreted them aright, the finds that have been made, with the tally from the source of the Schussen and the message-stick from the caves of the Dordogne, place the art of counting, the beginnings of writing, the first artistic impulses, and other elements of primitive culture right back in the Drift period.

[Sidenote: The Emerging of the Human Mind]

“None of the animals whose remains lie in the Drift strata,” says Oscar Fraas, “were tamed for the service of man.” On the contrary, man stood in hostile relation to all of them and only knew how to kill them, in order to support himself with their flesh and blood and the marrow of their bones. It was not so much his physical strength which helped man in his fight for existence, for with few exceptions the animals he killed were infinitely superior to him in strength; indeed it is not easy, even with the help of powder and lead, to kill the elephant, rhinoceros, grizzly bear, and bison, or to hunt down the swift horse and reindeer. It was a question of finding out, with his mental superiority, the beast’s unguarded moments, and of surprising it or bringing it down in pits and snares. All the more wonderful does the savage of the European Drift Period appear to us, “for we see that he belongs to the first who exercised the human mind in the hard battle of life, and thereby laid the foundation of all later developments in the sense of progress in culture.” And yet, in the midst of this poor life, a sense of the little pleasures and refinements of existence already began to develop, as proved by the elegantly carved and decorated weapons and implements, and there were even growing a sense of the beauty of Nature and the power of copying it. The bone needles with eyes and the fine awls are evidences of the art of sewing, and the numerous scrapers of flint and bone teach us that Drift Man knew how to dress skins for clothing purposes, and did it according to the method still used among the Esquimaux and most northern Indians at the present day. Spinning does not seem to have been known. On the other hand Drift Man knew how to twist cords, impressions and indentations of which are conspicuous on the bone and horn implements; on which also thread-marks were imitated as a primitive ornament. Pottery was unknown to Drift Man. Indeed, even to-day the production of pottery is not a commonly felt want of mankind. The leather bottle, made of the skin of some small animal stripped off whole without a seam, turned inside out as it were, takes the place of the majority of the larger vessels; on the other hand, liquids can also be kept for some time in a tightly-made wicker basket.

Mercier

PRIMITIVE NATURE FOLK ENGAGED IN FISHING

From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon.
]

The art of plaiting was known to Drift Man. This is shown by the ornaments on weapons and implements, the plaiting-needle from the find at the source of the Schussen, and the hurdlework represented on the message-stick mentioned above, which may be either a hurdle made of boughs and branches or a summer dwelling house. To these acquirements, based chiefly on an acquaintance with serviceable weapons and implements, is added the art of representing natural objects by drawing and carving. This results in the attempt to retain historical _momenta_ in the form of abridged illustrations for the purpose of communicating them to others--incipient picture-writing. The tally shows the method of representing numbers--generally only one stroke each, but also two strokes connected by a line to form a higher unit. Of the art of building not a trace is left to us apart from the laying together of rough stones for fireplaces; nor have tombs of that period of ancient times been discovered.

Mercier

EARLY AGRICULTURISTS, WITH IMPLEMENTS OF BONE, STONE, AND BRONZE

From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon.
]

The civilisation of Drift Man and his whole manner of life do not confront the present human race as something strange, but fit perfectly into the picture exhibited by mankind at the present day. Drift Man nowhere steps out of this frame. If a European traveller were nowadays to come upon a body of Drift men on the borders of eternal ice, towards the north or south pole of our globe, nothing would appear extraordinary and without analogy to him; indeed it would be possible for him to come to an understanding with them by means of picture-writing, and to do business with them by means of the tally.

Mercier

AN EMIGRATION OF THE GAULS IN THE BRONZE AGE

From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon.
]

The manner of life led by man beyond the borders of higher civilisation, especially under extreme climatic conditions, depends almost exclusively on his outward surroundings and the possibility of obtaining food. The Esquimaux, who, like Drift Man of Central Europe in former times, live on the borders of eternal ice with the Drift animals that emigrated thither,--the reindeer, musk-ox, bear, Arctic fox, etc.--are restricted, like him, to hunting and fishing, and to a diet consisting almost entirely of flesh and fat; corn-growing and the keeping of herds of domestic animals being self-prohibitive. Their kitchen refuse exactly resembles that from the Drift. Before their acquaintance with the civilisation of modern Europe they used stone and bone besides driftwood for making their weapons and implements, as they still do to a certain extent at the present day, either from preference or from superstitious ideas. Their binding material consisted of threads twisted from reindeer sinews, with which they sewed their clothes and fastened their harpoons and arrows, the latter resembling in form those of Drift Man. They knew no more than he the arts of spinning and weaving, their clothes being made from the skins of the animals they hunted; pots were unknown and unnecessary to them.

The picture-writing of the American Indians in our own day offers
an interesting parallel to that of the primitive peoples of the
remotest past. The Pawnees decorate their buffalo robes with such
drawings as these, representing a procession of medicine men, the
foremost giving freedom to his favourite horse as a sacrifice to
the Great Spirit.
]

It has often been thought that we should have a definite criterion of the period if it could be proved that fresh mammoth ivory was employed at the particular time for making implements and weapons, or ornaments, carvings, and drawings. There can be no doubt that when Drift Man succeeded in killing a mammoth he used the tusks for his purposes. But on the borders of eternal ice, where alone we could now expect to find a frozen Drift Man, no conclusion could be drawn from objects of mammoth ivory being in the possession of a corpse to determine the great age of the latter. For the many mammoth tusks which have been found and used from time immemorial in North Siberia, on the New Siberian Islands, and in other places, are absolutely fresh, and are even employed in the arts of civilised countries in exactly the same way as fresh ivory. Under the name of “mammoth ivory” the fossil tusks dug up by ivory-seekers, or mammoth-hunters, form an important article of commerce.

The same conditions as many parts of Northern Siberia still exhibit at the present day prevailed over the whole of Central Europe at the end of the Glacial Period and the beginning of the Postglacial Period. Here man lived on frozen ground on the borders of ice-fields with the reindeer and its companions, as he does to-day in Northern Asia, and here, too--as he does there to-day--he must have found the woolly-haired mammoth preserved by the cold in the ice and frozen ground. The Drift reindeer-men of Central Europe presumably searched for mammoth tusks just as much as the present reindeer-men in North Asia. The great field of mammoth carrion at Predmost was, therefore, a very powerful attraction, not only for the beasts of prey--chief among them wolves--but also for man.

These illustrations are of engravings on stone and bone and
scratchings on rocks made by prehistoric man, chiefly in France.
The figures of the reindeer and those of the mammoth and the bison,
the two latter found at Dordogne, are astonishingly good, and
indicate genuine power of draughtsmanship at a remote period of
human life.
]

[Sidenote: Drift Man Compared with Modern Man]

In France especially many primitive works of art of the “Ivory Epoch” have been found, and even the nude figure of woman is not wanting; but no proof is given that these carvings belong to the time when the mammoth still lived. Much sensation has been caused by an engraving on a piece of mammoth ivory representing a hairy mammoth with its mane and strongly-curved tusks. This illustration has been taken as unexceptionable proof that the artist of the Drift Period who did it saw and portrayed the mammoth alive. But could the mammoth hunter Schumachow--the Tunguse who, in 1799, discovered, in the ice of the peninsula of Tumys Bykow at the mouth of the Lena, the mammoth now erected in the collection at the St. Petersburg Academy [see page 123]--have pictured the animal otherwise when it was freshly melted out of the ice? And the Madelaine cave in the Périgord, where the piece of ivory with the picture of the mammoth was found, certainly belongs to the Reindeer Period. Had we not independent proofs that Drift Man lived in Central Europe--for instance, at Taubach--with the great extinct pachydermata, neither the finds in the “loess” near Predmost, nor the articles of ivory, nor the illustration of the mammoth itself, could prove it. They furnish absolute proof of the existence of Drift Man only back to the Reindeer Period. To decide whether a corpse frozen in the stone-ice belonged to a Drift Man, the examination of the corpse itself, its skull, bones, and soft parts, would no more suffice than clothing, implements, and ornament. For at least so much is confidently asserted by many palæontologists, that all the skulls and bones hitherto known to have been ascribed to Drift Man by the most eminent palæontologists, geologists, and anthropologists, cannot be distinguished from those of men of the present day. Von Zittel, the foremost scholar in the field of palæontology in Germany, says:

The only remains of Drift Man of reliable age are a skull from
Olmo, near Chiana, in Tuscany; a skull from Egisheim, in Alsace;
a lower jaw from the Naulette cave near Furfooz, in Belgium; and
a fragment of jaw from the Schipka cave in Moravia. This material
is not sufficient for determining race, but all human remains of
reliable age from the drift of Europe, and all the skulls found in
caves, agree in size, form, and capacity with _Homo sapiens_, and
are well formed throughout. In no way do they fill the gap between
man and ape.

Until they came in touch with European travellers the Esquimaux
were in precisely the same condition as Drift Man: they were living
in the Ice Age. They are but little more advanced now, and the
difference between them and prehistoric men is slight. This is a
group of young Esquimau women.
]

“On the other hand,” writes Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, “a large majority of modern anatomists and palæontologists accept the antiquity of such skulls as the Neanderthal specimen, and agree that these point to the existence of a human race inferior to any now existing. This race comprised powerfully-built individuals, with low foreheads, prominent, bony ridges above the eyes, and retreating chins. The radius and ulna were unusually divergent, so that the forearms must have been heavy and clumsy. The thigh-bones were bent and the shin-bones short, so that the race must have been bow-legged and clumsy in gait.”

[Sidenote: A Type Between Man and Ape?]

“The intermediate position of these primitive types has received extraordinary confirmation by the discovery of what may truly be called the link, no longer missing, between man and the apes. In 1894, Dr. Eugene Dubois discovered in the Island of Java in a bed of volcanic ashes containing the remains of Pliocene animals the roof of a small skull, two grinding-teeth, and a diseased femur. These remains indicate an animal which, when erect, stood not less than 5 ft. 6 in. high. The teeth and thigh-bones were very human, and the skull, although very human, had prominent eyebrow ridges like those of the Neanderthal type, and a capacity of about 1,000 cubic centimetres--that is to say, much greater than that of the largest living apes, and falling short by about 100 cubic centimetres of the largest skull capacities of existing normal human beings. This creature, regarded at first by some anatomists as a degenerate man, by others as a high ape, has now been definitely accepted as a new type of being, intermediate between man and the apes and designated as _Pithecanthropus erectus_.” There is no doubt that Asia, Europe, North Africa, and North America, so far as their ice-covering allowed of their being inhabited, form one continuous region for the distribution of Palæolithic Man, in which all discoveries give similar results. In this vast region the lowest and oldest prehistoric stratum that serves as the basis of historical civilisation is the homogeneous Palæolithic stratum. In the Drift Period, Palæolithic Man penetrated into South America, as into a new region, with northern Drift animals. In Central and South Africa and Australia, Palæolithic Man does not yet seem to be known. All the more important is it that in Tasmania Palæolithic conditions of civilisation existed until the middle of the last century.

There are people still living in dwelling-places of prehistoric
type. This photograph of Esquimau stone and turf huts, in
Greenland, shows exactly the kind of dwellings used by prehistoric
men in the Ice Age.
]

The Yukaghirs, natives of Siberia, a division of the Mongolic
family, were formerly a wide-spread race, and, according to their
national tradition, were so numerous that “the birds flying over
their camp fires became blackened with smoke.” The Jesup Expedition
found them reduced to 700 in number. Hunger had forced some of
them to cannibalism and suicide. They are a primitive people, but
considerably superior to the Esquimaux.
]

The skull of the Fossil Ape-man found in 1894, in the island of
Java; restored by Dr. Eugene Dubois.
]

[Sidenote: Backward Races of Europe]

The palæontology of man has hitherto obtained good geological information of the oldest Palæolithic culture-stratum of the Drift in only a few parts of the earth, and only in Tasmania does this oldest stratum appear to have cropped out free, and still uncovered by other culture strata, down to our own times. Otherwise it is everywhere overlaid by a second, later culture-stratum of much greater thickness, which, although opened up in almost innumerable places, is not spread over the whole earth as is the Palæolithic stratum. As opposed to the earliest Stone Age of the Drift, which we have come to know as the Palæolithic Period, this has been called the Later Stone Age or Neolithic Period.

The Neolithic Period is also ignorant of the working of metals; for weapons and implements, stone is the exclusive hard material of which the blades are made. But geologically and palæontologically the two culture-strata are widely and sharply separated.