Aurignacian culture

“ Recent study has indeed dissipated that fascinating idyl about the old race of tall, blond Aryans as the originators of our present civilisation, for it has been shown that the so-called Aryan civilisation was inferior in many ways to the primitive culture of neolithic times, and it can now hardly be doubted that our classical civilisation is of Mediterranean origin though Aryanised in speech. ”

“ Other clans and tribes pushed into the peninsulas of Greece and Italy, and, mingling with the peoples already settled there, founded the Greek and Italian city-states, and from the germs of culture which they carried with them, or which they found among the native populations or afterwards received from the Oriental lands, developed what is known as the Classical Civilization. Yet other tribes of the family, either through peaceful expansion, through social relations, or through conquest, had, long before our era, made Aryan in speech almost all the remaining regions of Europe. ”

“ The fact that a great pictorial art was cultivated by Aurignacian man in western Europe, about 20,000 years ago, indicates that the social organization had been sufficiently well developed to permit of certain individuals of a class—possibly the priestly class—devoting themselves to the study of art, while others attended to the food-supply. ”

“ Even if we cannot hold, with Professor Max Müller, in the preface to his translation of the ‘Rig Veda,’ that this collection of Aryan hymns ‘will take and maintain for ever its position as the most ancient of books in the library of mankind,’ and if we do not admit the stringency of his reckonings of its date in centuries B.C., yet we must grant that he shows cause to refer its composition to a very ancient period, where it then proves that a comparatively high barbaric culture already existed. ”

“ C. The appearance of the higher type of humanity in the period next following the Mousterian, viz. that distinguished by the Aurignacian type of implement, has now to be discussed. As already remarked, the man of Aurignac, as compared with him of the Neanderthal, has less protruding jaws, the lower jaw in particular being provided with the rudiment of a chin, while the limb bones are slender and altogether of the modern type. Upon such contrasts a remarkable theory has been based by Professor Klaatsch [49] . ”

“ EARLY CULTURE OF THE ARYANS.—One of the most fascinating studies of recent growth is that which reveals to us the customs, beliefs, and mode of life of the early Aryans, while they were yet living together as a single household. Upon comparing the myths, legends, and ballads of the different Aryan peoples, we discover the curious fact that, under various disguises, they are the same. Thus our nursery tales are found to be identical with those with which the Hindu children are amused. ”

“ But, as Aryans, the Greeks must at one time or another have observed harvest customs like those which are still practised by Celts, Teutons, and Slavs, and which, far beyond the limits of the Aryan world, have been practised by the Incas of Peru, the Dyaks of Borneo, and the Malays of Java—a sufficient proof that the ideas on which these customs rest are not confined to any one race, but naturally suggest themselves [pg 356] to all untutored peoples engaged in agriculture. ”

“ One historic event of great importance had its growth and rise during the Neolithic period out of Neolithic life, conditions, and culture. This was the Aryan culture of Persia and India, of Greece and Rome, and of our northern ancestors. No one seems to deny its importance and value. We must glance at its origin and growth, and see if it supports at all the tentative and often conjectural conclusions at which we have arrived. ”

“ In Australasia we find types of savagery ignorant of the bow and arrow; in aboriginal North America, a type of barbarism familiar with the art of pottery, but ignorant of domestic animals or of the use of metals; among the earliest Romans, a higher type of barbarism, familiar with iron and cattle, but ignorant of the alphabet. Along with such gradations in material culture we find associated gradations in ideas, in social structure, and in deep-seated customs. ”

“ The successive phases of development of Upper Palæolithic industry and art have been traced with extraordinary precision in Dordogne, in the Pyrenees, in northern Spain, and along the Danube and upper Rhine by a host of able workers—Cartailhac, Capitan, Peyrony, Bouyssonnie, Lalanne, and others. Breuil has made himself master especially of the Aurignacian and has succeeded Piette as the great historian of Upper Palæolithic art. ”

“ Nothing absolutely compels us to ascribe a shorter earthly life [pg 127] to those races which speak Chinese, Semitic, Bantu, American, Australian, or other languages, than to the Aryans. That all races have begun on a lower plane of culture, and especially of the knowledge of language, will no doubt be universally acknowledged. But even if we only place the first beginnings of the Aryan race at 10,000 B.C., there is time enough for it and other races to have risen, and also to have again declined. ”

“ Their mythological lore fills, in fact, a period in the history of Aryan thought, half-way between the period of language and the period of literature, and it is this discovery which gives to mythology its importance in the eyes of the student of the most ancient history and psychology of mankind.
And do not suppose that the Greeks, or the Hindus, or the Aryan nations in general, were the only people who possessed such tales. Wherever we look, in every part of the world, among uncivilized as well as a civilized people, we find the same kind of stories, the same traditions, the same myths. ”

“ At most, some symbols are added, such as a bushy tail for a fox or a fin for a whale. It is only in rare cases that any but advanced nations break away from these primitive tendencies and [173] learn to draw things as they really appear. The ancient Egyptians developed such a faculty, and among savages the Bushmen are remarkably gifted, but, on the whole, successful realistic art is an accomplishment of high civilization. It is therefore something of a mystery how the Cro-Magnon men of the Aurignacian brought themselves to do so well. ”

“ Nothing could antecedently be more improbable than the suggestion that they were; and we might fairly regard it as refuted even if we had nothing to go on but the literary character of the tales. They bear the stamp of the genius of more than one race. The pure and placid but often cold imagination of the Aryan has been at work on some. In others we trace the more picturesque fancy, the fierceness and sensuality, the greater sense of artistic elegance belonging to races whom the Aryan, in spite of his occasional faults of hardness and coarseness, has, on the whole, left behind him. ”

“ The terms under these beads enable us to plant Aryan civilisation deeper, showing as they do a more profound grasp of what is in the best sense culture. They prove the truth of the maxim—"Nil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu." Whatever may be the psychologist's verdict on the scholastic question of primum cognitum and primum appellatum, these primitive concepts tell us that the Aryans reached the abstract through the concrete, and moved in a world of quick sensations. ”

“ When the rays of tradition first dawn upon our planet, we discover the primeval ancestors of the Aryan race, before their dispersion from their common home, still gazing with awe and wonder upon the working of the vast nature-powers by which they were environed. ”

“ We may divide the whole Aryan family into two branches, the northern and the southern. The northern nations, Celts, Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Slavonians, have each one act allotted to them on the stage of history. They have each a national character to support. Not so the southern tribes. They are absorbed in the struggles of thought, their past is the problem of creation, their future the problem of existence ”

“ It is similarly quite out of the question that the dolicho-blond, arising as a mutant type late in quaternary time, should have created the Aryan speech and culture in Europe, since neither the archæological evidence nor the known facts of climate and topography permit the hypothesis that a pastoral-nomadic culture of home growth has ever prevailed in Europe on a scale approaching that required for such a result. And there is but little more possibility that the bringers of the new (Aryan) culture should have been of the Mediterranean race ”

“ In the chief countries of Celtic civilisation, Gaul, Cisalpine and Transalpine, Britain and Ireland, abundant materials have been found for elucidating the stages of culture through which man passed in prehistoric times. In Britain, for example, palæolithic man has left numerous specimens of his implements, but the forms even of these rude implements suggest that they, too, have been evolved from still more primitive types. ”

“ The simple formula, pre-Aryan, Aryan, non-Aryan, affords the key to the historical development of European ethnology. PRE-ARYAN PEOPLES. Of the presumably pre-Aryan peoples of western Europe the Iberians occupy easily the first place. The seat of this people at the dawn of history was in Spain and southern France; their ethnology belongs entirely to the realm of conjecture. They are of much darker complexion than the Aryans and their racial characteristic is conservatism even to stubbornness, which places them in marked contrast to their immediate Aryan neighbors, the volatile Celts. ”

“ In the last century it was long held that in countries of Aryan speech the essential features of their civilisation, their religious ideas, their social institutions, nay, more, their inhabitants themselves, were of Aryan origin.
A more critical investigation has, however, enabled us to distinguish clearly between the development of various factors of human life which in their evolution can follow and often have followed more or less independent lines. The physical history of race, for instance, forms a problem by itself and must be studied by anthropological and ethnological methods. ”

“ But in France, for example, the inhabitants of Auvergne, secluded among their mountains, are undoubtedly of a purer race than the inhabitants of the plains in Southern France, where so many different races have come in contact. Well, can the women of Upper Auvergne dispute the prize with the grisette of Arles, Toulouse, or of Montpellier? These three feminine types are very distinct; they clearly point to a mixture of blood. They are not the less remarkable in the matter of beauty, and are undoubtedly superior to the women of Auvergne. ”

“ In this way a more or less complete picture of the state of civilization, previous to the Aryan Separation, can be and has been reconstructed, like a mosaic put together with the fragments of ancient stones; and I doubt whether, in tracing the history of the human mind, we shall ever reach to a lower stratum than that which is revealed to us by the converging rays of the different Aryan languages. ”

“ The process which has gone on may in part have been as follows:—Every race which has acquired very definite characteristics must have been for a long time isolated. The Aryans during their period of isolation probably developed many of their folk-germs into their larger myths, owing to the greater constructiveness of their imagination, and thus, in a way, they used up part of their material. ”

“ Here then, in widely distant regions, in early European, American, Melanesian, African societies, we find those factors in religion which the primitive Aryans are said to have dispensed with, helping to construct society, rank, property. Is it necessary to add that the ancestral spirits still 'rule the present from the past,' and demand sacrifice, and speak to 'him who dreams,' who, therefore, is a strong force in society, if not a chief? ”

“ The same Aryan race that, before the dawn of history, before the Sanskrit-speaking people of India, or the Zends of Persia, entered on their southern homes, spoke in its own cradleland the mother tongue of Sanskrit, Greek, Celtic, and German, at length broke up and went forth on its long wanderings. Whatever peoples it found there; they were replaced by Celts, Romans, Greeks, Slavs, and Teutons, who broke in upon the barbarism of prehistoric Europe; displaced the older races, Allophylian, Neolithic, Iberian, Finnic, or by whatever other name we may find it convenient to designate them ”

“ Though it is not apparent that they possessed any higher culture than the people who already inhabited Europe, yet they everywhere triumphed over them and possessed themselves of the fairest portion of the Neolithic domain, driving the primitive inhabitants to those mountainous regions where their descendants are found to-day.
It is not probable that the Aryan invaders waged exterminating war against the Neolithic tribes. ”

“ And there, getting at the meanings of the things or thoughts the words originally expressed, we see revealed, in the reconstruction of a language that no longer exists, the material objects and habits of thought and life of a people who passed away before history began,--so imperishable are the unconscious embodiments of mind, even in the airy and unsubstantial forms of unwritten speech! By this process, then, we learn that the Aryans were a nomadic people, and had made some advance in civilization. ”

“ It is to the explanation of the Aryan mythology that we are to turn our efforts, and in explaining it, create a science. In this work there is no mythology that will not bear its part, for the highest forms of Aryan myth-thought have beginnings as simple as those of the lowliest race on earth. ”