Joseph McCabe

“ When Europeans began to traverse the globe in the last few centuries, they picked up here and there little groups of men who had, in their isolation, remained just where their fathers had been when they quitted the main road of advance in the earlier stages of the Old Stone Age. The evolution of man is guided by the same laws as the evolution of any other species. Thus we can understand the long period of stagnation, or of incalculably slow advance. Thus, too, we can understand why, at length, the pace of man toward his unconscious goal is quickened. ”

“ We seem justified in thinking that a very robust race had been growing in numbers and power during the Neolithic Age, somewhere in the region of South-east Europe and Southwest Asia, and that a few thousand years before the Christian Era one branch of it descended upon India, another upon the Persian region, and another overspread Europe. We will return to the point later. Instead of being the bearers of a higher civilisation, these primitive Aryans seem to have been lower in culture than the peoples on whom they fell. ”

“ The new principle of evolution, which arises from this superiority, is that man's chief stimulus to advance will now come from his cultural rather than his physical environment. Physical surroundings will continue to affect him. One race will outstrip another because of its advantage in soil, climate, or geographical position. But the chief key to the remaining and more important progress of mankind, which we are about to review, is the stimulating contact of the differing cultures of different races. ”

“ We are still very far from civilisation, but the few tens of thousands of years that separate Magdalenian man from it will be traversed with relative speed—though, we should always remember, with a speed far less than the pace at which man is advancing to-day. A new principle now enters into play: a specifically human law of evolution is formulated. It has no element of mysticism, and is merely an expression of the fact that the previous general agencies of development have created in man an intelligence of a higher grade than that of any other animal. ”

“ There is good reason, as we shall see to think that man did not yet wear clothing, though he had a fairly conspicuous, if dwindling, coat of hair. On the other hand the men who lingered further north, in South-western Asia and North Africa, would lose what pigment they had, and develop the lighter characters of the northerner. It has been noticed that even a year in the arctic circle has a tendency to make the eyes of explorers light blue. We may look for the genesis of the vigorous, light-complexioned races along the fringe of the great ice-sheet. ”

“ There is no sudden leap in culture or intelligence in the story of man.
It would be supremely interesting to trace the evolution of human industries and ideas during the few tens of thousands of years of the New Stone Age. During that time moral and religious ideas are largely developed, political or social forms are elaborated, and the arts of civilised man have their first rude inauguration. The foundations of civilisation are laid. ”

“ But in the later part of the Neolithic—to which much of this finer work also may belong—we find him building huts, rearing large stone monuments, having tame dogs and pigs and oxen, growing corn and barley, and weaving primitive fabrics. He lives in large and strong villages, round which we must imagine his primitive cornfields growing and his cattle grazing, and in which there must have been some political organisation under chiefs. ”

“ Imagine even a modern community without the device of articulate language. A very large proportion of the community, who are now maintained at a certain level by the thought of others, communicated to them by speech, would sink below the civilised standard, and the transmission and improvement of ideas would be paralysed. It would not be paradoxical to regard the social life and developing speech of Magdalenian man as the chief cause of the rapid advance toward civilisation which will follow in the next period. ”

“ Little intelligence would be needed to turn this discovery to account.
Apart from these conjectures as to particular features in the life of prehistoric man, it will be seen that we have now a broad and firm conception of its evolution. From the ape-level man very slowly mounts to the stage of human savagery. During long ages he seems to have made almost no progress. There is nothing intrinsically progressive in his nature. Let a group of men be isolated at any stage of human evolution, and placed in an unchanging environment, and they will remain stationary for an indefinite period. ”

“ The race which chiefly settled in the Swiss region is generally believed to have come from Asia, and advanced across Europe by way of the valley of the Danube. The native home of the wheat and barley and millet, which, as we know, the lake-dwellers cultivated, is said to be Asia. On the other hand, the Neolithic men who have left stone monuments on our soil are said to be a different race, coming, by way of North Africa, from Asia, and advancing along the west of Europe to Scandinavia. ”

“ The human race is already old, yet, as we saw, it is hardly up to the level of the Australian black. The skeleton found at Chapelle-aux-Saints is regarded as the highest known type of the race, yet the greatest authority on it, M. Boule, says emphatically: "In no actual race do we find the characters of inferiority—that is to say, the ape-like features—which we find in the Chapelle-aux-Saints head." The largeness of the head is in proportion to the robust frame, but in its specifically human part—the front—it is very low and bestial ”

“ The building of houses, after living for ages in stone caverns, would not be a very profound invention. The early houses were—as may be gathered from the many remains in Devonshire and Cornwall—mere rings of heaped stones, over which, most probably, was put a roof of branches or reeds, plastered with mud. They belong to the last part of the New Stone Age. In other places, chiefly Switzerland, Neolithic man lived in wooden huts built on piles in the shallow shores of lakes. It is an evidence that life on land is becoming as stimulating as we find it in the age of Deinosaurs or early mammals. ”

“ It must be borne in mind that the whole culture of primitive times is crushed into a few feet of earth. The anthropologist is therefore quite unable to show us the real succession of human stages, and has to be content with a division of the whole long and gradual evolution into a few well-marked phases. ”

“ There are, however, some drawings—cut on bone or horn or stone with a flint implement—which evince great skill in line-drawing and, in a few cases, in composition. Some of the caves also are more or less frescoed; the outlines of animals, sometimes of life-size and in great numbers, are cut in the wall, and often filled in with pigment. This skill does not imply any greater general intelligence than the rest of the culture exhibits. It implies persistent and traditional concentration upon the new artistic life. ”

“ I do not mean that the art is superior, but the complex life represented on the picture-message, and the intelligence with which it is represented, are beyond anything that we know of Palaeolithic man. ”

“ Then the stress of conditions relaxes—the great ice-sheet disappears—and again during a vast period he makes very little progress. The stress returns. The genial country is stripped and impoverished, and the reindeer and mammoth spread to the south of Europe. But once more the adversity has its use, and man, stimulated in his hunt for food, invigorated by the cold, driven into social life, advances to the culmination of the Old Stone Age. ”

“ The finding of early remains in Java is not enough to justify that conclusion, but it obtains a certain probability when we notice the geographical distribution of the Primates. The femurs and the apes are found to-day in Africa and Asia alone; the monkeys have spread eastward to America and westward to Europe and Africa; the human race has spread north-eastward into Asia and America, northwestward into Europe, westward into Africa, and southward to Australia and the islands. ”

“ The needles we have found—round, polished, and pierced splinters of bone, sometimes nearly as fine as a bodkin—show indisputably that man then had clothing, but it is curious that the artist nearly always draws him nude. There is also generally a series of marks round the contour of the body to indicate that he had a conspicuous coat of hair. Unfortunately, the faces of the men are merely a few unsatisfactory gashes in the bone or horn, and do not picture this interesting race to us. The various statuettes of women generally suggest a type akin to the wife of the Bushman. ”

“ Man still advanced with very slow and uncertain steps, his whole progress in that vast period being measured by the invention of one or two new forms of stone implements and a little more skill in chipping them. At its close a great chill comes over Europe—the last ice-sheet is, it seems, spreading southward—and we enter the Mousterian period and encounter the Neanderthal race which we described in the preceding chapter. ”

“ The Neolithic Age, which preceded civilisation, is usually believed to be about four or five times as long, though estimates of its duration vary from about twenty to a hundred thousand years. The Palaeolithic Age in turn is regarded as at least three or four times as long as the Neolithic; estimates of time vary from a hundred to five hundred thousand years. And before this there is the vast stretch of time in which the ape slowly became a primitive human. ”

“ And it is not without interest to notice that a fall in the temperature of the earth is the immediate cause of this social life. The building of homes of any kind seems to be unknown to Magdalenian man. The artist would have left us some sketchy representation of it if there had been anything in the nature of a tent in his surroundings. The rock-shelter and the cave are the homes which men seek from the advancing cold. As these are relatively few in number, fixed in locality, and often of large dimensions, the individualism of the earlier times is replaced by collective life. ”

“ The spread of the race, the gathering of its members into tribes, and the increasing enterprise of men in hunting and migration, lead to incessant contacts of different cultures and a progressive stimulation. ”

“ A few bones tell of a race living, in semi-human shape, in the region of the Indian Ocean; a few crude stones are held by many to indicate that a more advanced, but very lowly race, wandered over the south of Europe and north of Africa before the Ice-Age set in. ”

“ The development of agriculture is not very puzzling. The seed of corn would easily be discovered to have a food-value, and the discovery of the growth of the plant from the seed would not require a very high intelligence. ”

“ But the most remarkable indication of progress in the "cave-man" is his artistic skill. Exaggerated conclusions are sometimes drawn from the statuettes, carvings, and drawings which we find among the remains of Magdalenian life. Most of them are crude, and have the limitations of a rustic or a child artist. There is no perspective, no grouping. Animals are jumbled together, and often left unfinished because the available space was not measured. ”

“ The first effect of the Ice-Age on this primitive humanity would be to lead to a beginning of the development of racial characters. The pigment under the skin of the negro is a protection against the actinic rays of the tropical sun; the white man, with his fair hair and eyes, is a bleached product of the northern regions ”

“ At first Neolithic man is content with finer weapons. His stone axe is so finely shaped and polished that it sometimes looks like forged or moulded metal. He also drills a clean hole through it—possibly by means of a stick working in wet sand—and gives it a long wooden handle. ”

“ When we wish to trace the beginning of these inventions we have the same difficulty that we experienced in tracing the first stages of new animal types. The beginning takes place in some restricted region, and our casual scratching of the crust of the earth or the soil may not touch it for ages, if it has survived at all. ”

“ It is sometimes said that man is distinguished from all other animals by the possession of abstract ideas, but the very imperfect speech of the Tasmanians expressed no abstract ideas. Their mind seems to have been in an intermediate stage of development. ”

“ It was more probably a chance discovery than an invention. Savages so commonly make fire by friction—rubbing sticks, drills, etc.—that one is naturally tempted to regard this as the primitive method. I doubt if this was the case. When, in Neolithic times, men commonly bury the dead, and put some of their personal property in the grave with them, the fire-kindling apparatus we find is a flint and a piece of iron pyrites. Palaeolithic man made his implements of any kind of hard and heavy stone, and it is probable that he occasionally selected iron ore for the purpose. ”

“ But for our literature and illustrations a future generation would be equally puzzled to know how we got the idea of the aeroplane or the electric light. In some cases we can make a good guess at the origin of Neolithic man's institutions. ”

“ The first great centre for the making of iron weapons seems to have been Hallstatt, in the Austrian Alps, whence it spread slowly over Europe, reaching Scandinavia and Britain between 500 and 300 B.C. But the story of man had long before this entered the historical period, to which we now turn. ”