Albrecht Mueller

“ If we are to attain even an approximate notion of the grade of culture reached by what we must provisionally regard as the autochthonic, primitive man of Europe, we must infer it from the yet preserved works of his hands rather than from the lamentably few osseous remains yet found with them. ”

“ Thanks to the discoveries of the past few decades, we trace the existence of man back to a point antedating our earliest history by we know not how many centuries. Of this time, only a few bones and rudely-wrought stones are left as the witnesses—dumb, yet eloquent, and fulfilling in their way the saying, "If men hold their peace, the very stones will cry out." ”

“ Strongly in favor of this view are the erratic bowlders and blocks of stone, and the heaps and ridges of drift, so widely scattered over the mountains, plains, and valleys of Europe and North America, precisely similar as they are to those left by the retreat of the glaciers at the present time. And then, as now happens, the melting of floating icebergs, that were detached from the foot of glaciers as they reached the coast, strewed the ocean-bed with stones, gravel, and mud. The wide plains of Northern Germany are abundant in rocks and gravel from Scandinavia and Finland, for example. ”

“ The preservation of animal and vegetable remains in the gravelly deposits of our lowlands is naturally rare, comparatively, they being, for the most part, soon destroyed in beds so loose and permeable by air and water. And yet in Germany, France, Belgium, England, Switzerland, and other parts of Europe, there are found, in this very formation, the bones and teeth of mammals, mostly of long-extinct species, the nearest congeners of which are now native either to Africa and Asia, or else to the colder parts of Northern Europe and America, and the higher Alps and Pyrenees. ”

“ So far as is yet known, these are the most important contemporaries of primeval man in Europe. They are his competitors and enemies in the "struggle for existence," to meet which he must needs have had all his powers of body and of mind.
Now, it is important to remember that we find both these extinct animals' remains and man's bones and implements in the same deposits and caves of the Diluvial period; that is, that these animal and these human relics were contemporaneous, first as to their deposition, and secondly as to then-unearthing and exposure to our observation. ”

“ The present is thus the era of the highest types. We are still told by many, however, that although every thing in Nature—stone, plant, animal—is stamped with tokens of the law and proofs of the fact of gradual development, man, though equally with them a link in the chain of being—man, forsooth, must have come from the hand of his Creator immediately, and perfect from the first. ”

“ We are to picture to ourselves, then, a people very like the Esquimaux in circumstances and activities. It lived in our own Europe, but Europe covered to a considerable extent with glaciers, and keeping up a hard and continuous resistance both to wild beasts and the rigors of a climate at once very cold and very damp. The mammoth and rhinoceros, as we have seen, were protected by thick, woolly hair, and fed upon the twigs of the abundant conifers, as fragments yet found in the interstices of the teeth and ribs show. ”

“ And yet, for each of us, as years steal over us, the days of our own vanished youth are ever "the good old days."
The Age of Bronze.—The predominance of bronze, as the material of the articles found in the later pile-dwellings, has given to the fourth prehistoric human epoch its name—the Age of Bronze. While some of these lake-villages continued in use from the Stone age, others—usually those farthest out in the lakes—evidently originated in the Age of Bronze. ”

“ The Neanderthal cave [10] has become celebrated. An entire human skeleton of good size and proportions, save its ape-like, low-browed skull, was discovered here in 1856, [11] a full account of which was given by Dr. Fuhlrott. This discovery, since become the occasion of so much discussion, indicates quite clearly the existence in that remote period of a race of men of marked characteristics, and in some peculiarities closely resembling certain now-living Australian tribes. The skull is not nearly of so high a type as that from the Engis cave just mentioned. ”

“ And seeing how few are the human remains yet found in these ancient layers, it is not strange that many hesitate to follow those who already extend the principles of the Darwinian hypothesis to man, and find our very own brethren in the anthropoid apes—brethren sprung from a common ancestry, but immeasurably outstripped by us in the long, long course of a development begun in a previous geological era. ”

“ Contrary to rule, bones of the mammoth were here associated with those of the reindeer.
At Chavaux, Belgium, was a deposit of remains, the disposition and other indications of which almost compel the belief that the place was the scene of a cannibal feast. The human skulls and bones are all of young women and boys, witnessing to a decided preference for young and tender flesh on the part of our anthropophagic ancestors. These bones were split open longitudinally, as was the custom with those of animals, for the extraction of marrow. ”

“ Cuvier was confuted; the existence of man in the Diluvial period was established. Similar discoveries in the open country and caves of Germany, Spain, Italy, England, Belgium, and especially France, followed in rapid succession.
We cannot mention, much less describe, all the localities in which have been found the closely-conjoined remains of man and of animals, confessedly belonging to the drift or Diluvial period. We shall discuss only a few of the many cases, of which we may safely affirm that the often easy and common mingling of ancient with recent remains could not have occurred. ”

“ There, in a cave closed by a vertical slab of stone, which was itself hidden by accumulated stone fragments dropped from the cliff above, were found no less than seventeen human skeletons, mingled with bones of the cave-bear, cave-lion, mammoth, rhinoceros, giant-elk, and other now-extinct diluvial animals, weapons of wrought-flint and implements of bone, stag's-horn, and ivory articles probably buried with the dead for use in the life beyond the grave ”

“ No trace of writing, drawing, or sculpture, is to be found—a fact the more remarkable in view of the existence of the works of art mentioned as belonging to the preceding age.
The literature of the pile-dwellings is already quite extensive. Keller, Desor, Troyon, Morlot, and others, have written valuable manuals, while Heer and Rütimeyer have given in extenso the results of their thorough study of the vegetable, animal, and human remains, found in these curious habitations. ”

“ We will vainly seek in this earliest man for evidences of that creaturely perfectness which, according to the common view, he must have inherited from his first parents in paradise—the charming paradise of Genesis, of art, and of poetry. ”

“ But those who accept Darwinism as applied to the animal and vegetable kingdoms, implying as that theory does the progress of organic life from low to higher, from simple to more complex forms and functions—these can hardly resist the conclusion that man also, as to his physical part at least, is but a highly-developed member of the animal kingdom. ”

“ In these, the formerly so abundant remains of the cave-bear are wholly wanting, those of the mammoth very rare. The common animals are the giant-elk, primitive ox, aurochs, horse, chamois, steinbok, moose, monkey, and various species at present confined to arctic and high Alpine and Pyrenean tracts. The characteristic animal of the time, however, is the reindeer, heretofore absent or very rare, and hence the name—the Age of Reindeers. ”

“ The Age or Iron.—The nearer we approach the present, with its rapid growths and changes, the shorter become the several ages into which we divide the history of man as to his physical surroundings and peculiarities, and the successive grades of spiritual and social development through which he has passed. Last of the prehistoric eras is the Age of Iron, represented in some of the pile-dwellings and their contents, but best, and with least admixture from earlier and later times, in the station of La Têne on Lake Neuchâtel. ”

“ As a natural result and confirmation of the latter instance, we find on these islands and the contiguous main-lands the remains of mammals peculiarly African, especially certain species of elephants. These strips of dry land divided the Mediterranean into several inland seas. If man existed in that remote epoch, as many arguments tend to prove, he could cross dry-shod between Africa and Europe, as did the animals just mentioned, and was a witness of a distribution of land and water in Europe and adjacent lands widely different from that of our day. ”

“ The continued prevalence of a northern and Alpine fauna in the lowlands of Europe, proves the continuance of the severity of climate; we are still dealing with the Ice period, or probably with a second ice-period, as many infer from the peculiarities of the more recent drift. ”

“ With the Age of Reindeers ends the Diluvial period proper, of which most of the characteristic animals, the reindeer among them, were by this time extinct, or else had wandered to distant regions. Hence the absence of their remains in later formations. Evidences of the domestication of animals now appear for the first time. Pottery is still rude and unburnt, but ornamented with odd stripes and rows of dots. ”

“ Instead of dolmens we now have mounds, in which the dead are laid at full length, with weapon* and ornaments by their side. Some localities offer indications that the burning of the dead was practised. Here belong the so-called Celtic mounds, and the Terremare or Emilian mounds near Parma abound in relics of this age. Rütimeyer and others show that, although the characteristic animals of this and the preceding age are identical as to their species, in this age the domesticated animals predominate, another evidence of advancing culture. ”

“ And the people who made the stone axes and the pile-dwellings is probably the same that reared the huge funeral piles known as dolmens [7] . A dolmen consists of two immense blocks of stone placed on end, [8] upon which a third is laid, forming a sort of table. The dead were buried beneath, with various implements and weapons at hand. How a people, without engineering skill and contrivances,-could rear such masses into position, is a problem yet unsolved. ”

“ But when, in 1858, and in the same locality, he discovered a human skull and various stone implements, in intimate association with remains of the various animals of that period, the attention of the French Academy was aroused, and the study of historical geology received a new impetus. Some, indeed, see in the discovery of De Perthes only a cheat, or at best a mistake, and doubt the antiquity of this skull and its contemporaneousness with the animals found with it. ”

“ So much artistic taste and mechanical skill are shown in these various articles—needles, rings, armlets, etc.—that many of them might be used by modern ladies without discredit to their work-boxes or toilets. But, in singular contrast to the Stone age, there is no relic of any portrayal of man or beast or plant. ”

“ They thus become interesting as early traits of human industry and habits. From the remains as yet found we infer the existence in Europe of a race originally rather ape-like, but progressing toward a build and culture in the complete sense human. ”

“ There was also going on about him and beneath his feet the slow rising and sinking of vast continental and insular territories—processes requiring thousands of years for their accomplishment—and, if man's existence during them be admitted, constituting another proof of the great antiquity of the race. ”

“ That primitive race contented itself with the wild products of the forest, the chase, and the waters, as to food, and for dwellings used caves, generally in cliffs difficult of access and easy of defense, like those on the river Lesse, near Namur. ”

“ Even the Indian, Persian, Assyrian, and Egyptian civilizations, with their languages, literatures, and architectural monuments, required a long, long time for their development from their rude beginnings, and hence a far longer time for the whole lifetime of that race. ”

“ Although the anthropoid apes resemble man in structure more closely than they resemble their lower congeners, still the lowest men are far superior, in mental character at least, to these highest apes. ”

“ To do this the more intelligently, we shall speak briefly first of the characteristics and deposits of the Diluvial and later prehistoric periods, and then of the human remains therein found.
The Drift or Diluvial Deposits.—The bottom-lands of our new valleys, of the Rhine, for example, chiefly consist of widely-extended deposits of loam, sand, gravel, and rocks, evidently brought from considerable distances by some vast current that once covered the lowlands, and even lesser hills ”

“ Their tusks—considerably curved, and eight to ten feet in length—are in quantities still sufficient to be the staple of a not inconsiderable trade in ivory. Brandt believes the mammoth to have been somewhat larger than the East Indian elephant of to-day, with tusks of much greater curvature. ”

“ And many localities yield human bones and implements mingled with remains of diluvial animals, especially of the mammoth, the rhinoceros of the species previously described, and the cave-bear. Especially rich in these combined relics are caves of Lenu and Sombrive, in the department of Ariége, France, and of Engihoul and Engis, near Lüttich (Liège) , Belgium. ”

“ And such researches were discredited and discouraged by Cuvier's magisterial dictum, that man did not exist in the Diluvial period, and that it was, therefore, vain to look for evidences of his existence. ”

“ And we insist that it is a legitimate subject of inquiry whether the wide chasm now separating the highest apes from the lowest men has existed from the beginning, or whether the spiritual powers of the latter have been developed from the rude beginnings of intellectuality in the former. ”