Old Stone Age

“ The men of the Old Stone Age were attracted to these natural camps and dwelling-places both by the abundance of the raw flint materials from which the palæoliths were fashioned and by the presence of game. ”

“ Man, emerging as a distinct species, entered upon the Old Stone age, testified to by flint implements which we can just begin to see bear evidences of human shaping. The Old Stone Age lasted a long while. ”

“ We may therefore imagine that the family tree or lines of descent of the races of the Old Stone Age consisted of a number of entirely separate branches, which had been completely formed in the great Eurasiatic continent, a land mass infinitely larger and more capable of producing a variety of races than the diminutive peninsular area of western Europe. ”

“ We feel that the life-story of prehistoric man can best be divided—certainly for the purposes of this book—into a Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, which included the making of artifacts out of wood, bone, shell, and chipped and sometimes polished stone, and a Neolithic, or New Stone Age, which was defined by the invention of agriculture and the perfecting of pottery, 42 of weaving, and of the polishing of stone. This may reduce a little the confusions that are inevitable in the study of early man tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years ago. ”

“ For we cannot fail to be impressed by the regular and very close and unbroken succession of the geologic layers containing the Chellean and Acheulean artifacts. (See Fig. 55.)
None the less it follows that a long lapse of time must be allowed for each culture period, and for the advance in technique. (3) It is this wide distribution that has enabled the de Mortillets (father and son) , Capitan, Rivière, Reboux, Daleau, Peyrony, Obermaier, Commont, Schmidt, and others to establish in various parts of Europe the main stages of the industrial evolution of the Old Stone Age, or Lower Palæolithic. ”

“ The length of the Old Stone Age no one knows; we do not attempt to reckon its duration by centuries or millenniums even, but only by geologic epochs. But we do know—and this is something of vastly greater moment than a knowledge of the duration of the age—that the long slow epochs did not pass away without some progress having been made by primeval man, which assures us that though so lowly a creature he was a creature endowed with capacity for growth and improvement. ”

“ All these culture stages of the Old Stone Age have left us little but material vestiges of its industries—bones, a few carvings on cave walls or on bones and ivory, and very many chipped flints. Nothing of wood, skin, fiber or other material for binding, which must have been used, survives.32 Much as these bones and stones tell us, they37 have really done more to increase our curiosity than to satisfy it. ”

“ No domesticated plants or animals. No pottery. Man a collector or hunter, more rarely a fisherman.
C. Transition Period, resembling B in most respects.
[A, B, and C make up the Old Stone Age, before the use of metals.]
[Pg 35]
D. Neolithic Period. Some stone implements polished. No metal except that copper is introduced toward the end of the period. Agriculture with domestic plants and animals. Pottery but no potter’s wheel. Dawn of Civilization.
E. Bronze Period. Bronze implements or utensils. Dawn of History. Begins about 2500 B. C. in northern Europe. ”

“ We dimly perceive the gradual advance of human culture in this important period. During the Old Stone Age man had made more progress than he had made in the preceding million years; during the New Stone Age—at least one-fourth as long as the Old—he made even greater progress; and, we may add, in the historical period, which is one-fourth the length of the Neolithic Age, he will make greater progress still. ”

“ Having at least this space of time at their disposal, the tendency of modern antiquaries has been to sweep everything into this great gulf. Why, they ask, may not Stonehenge and Avebury be 10,000, 20,000, or 50,000 years old? Man then existed, and why may he not have erected such monuments as these? ”

“ Thus prehistoric chronology is based on observations of the geologist, who in turn is greatly aided by the archæologist, because the evolution stages of each type of implement are practically the same all over western Europe, with the exception of unimportant local inventions and variations. ”

“ They were essentially growths in and from the mass of the people, usually owing comparatively little to the genius of any individual inventor or discoverer. We have called them Neolithic, but some or many of them were old far back in Paleolithic time. ”

“ The stage in European history we are thus called upon to inspect is known by the name Neolithic Age, so-called because a new and improved mechanical principle then came into general use, viz. the art of polishing stone implements by rubbing them with some hard material, so as to give them a sharper cutting edge than was possible by the old process of chipping. How far we have travelled in time to reach this phase of culture we cannot say in so many years, or centuries, or even millenniums. ”

“ Such beliefs, and customs like incineration, are a slow growth, probably far older in origin than the Indo-European or Aryan migrations, of which some have thought them characteristic. May not this old and wide-spread belief be merely a continuance of views and conceptions already held by our Neolithic folk?
We have already noticed the wide distribution [Pg 129] of these megalithic structures.92 They stretch along the shore of the Baltic, North Sea, and Atlantic Ocean down to the Mediterranean. Here they form a band along the south shore. ”

“ The development of the implements in different regions is so uniform as to prove that the evolution of the early Palæolithic cultures extended all over western Europe and that the various types or stages were essentially contemporary. ”

“ In the long years before primitive man learned to weld iron or bronze he formed his weapons and his tools from stone and flint; and geologists and antiquarians have discovered several of these "Ages of Stone" of different periods. For example, the Stone Age which our grandfathers spoke of is now called the Neolithic Age; and in the second quarter of the last century it became gradually admitted that man had existed earlier than that and had swung hammers and chipped edges in what we now call Palæolithic times. ”

“ The Stone Age is that period in the history of mankind during which stone is habitually used as a material for weapons and tools. Antiquaries find it convenient to make the Stone Age cease whenever metal implements come into common use, and the Bronze Age, or the Iron Age, supervenes. ”

“ The period in man's life on the earth at which these people lived--the period before metals were known--has been named by archæologists the Stone Age. But the Stone Age covers two stages of human culture--one in which stone implements were fashioned unskilfully, and a second in which they were finished with expert and careful hands. ”

“ After countless centuries of slow advance, savages learned to fasten wooden handles to their stone tools and weapons and also to use such materials as jade and granite, which could be ground and polished into a variety of forms. Stone implements continued to be made during the greater part of the prehistoric period. Every region of the world has had a Stone Age. ”

“ The remains that we have gathered of primitive man are divided into paleolithic, or those belonging to the Old Stone Period, and neolithic, or these belonging to the New Stone Period. The paleolithic remains are characterized by the rudest kind of stone implements, implements merely chipped out of stone, without any attempt at finish, and from first to last there is no evidence of improvement in their make. ”

“ The age which we thus reach is called the Palæolithic, or "ancient" Stone age, because men made use of stone, which they chipped into shape, but, unlike the Neolithic people, never polished it. We find enormous numbers of these rough or Palæolithic stone implements both in caves and in the gravels deposited in the ancient beds of rivers. They are so abundant as to prove the existence of a very considerable human population in the remote ages when they were fashioned and used. ”

“ Too recent to appear picturesque, the Middle Ages were, to the pioneers of the new era, out of date and old-fashioned, terms far more injurious than the most violent word-war of the preachers. Filled with the new wine of the Renaissance, these youthful enthusiasts formed the nucleus of that phalanx of life-loving, [Pg 259] exuberant personalities who, throwing all their energies into the glorification of liberty, fame, pleasure, and earthly beauty, gave us subsequently the Elizabethan age. ”

“ Men write of and wonder at the strange gap between what are called the Paleolithic and the Neolithic ages, that is, between the ages when the spearheads and ax and arrowheads were of stone chipped roughly into shape, and the age of stone even-edged and smoothly polished. ”

“ THE NEW STONE AGE IN
NORTHERN EUROPE CHAPTER I THE COMING OF MAN
MAN has been described as a “walking museum of paleontology.” He is like a mountain whose foundations were laid in a time so ancient that even the paleontologist hardly finds a record to decipher; whose strata testify to the progress of life through all the succeeding ages; whose surface, deeply ploughed by the glaciers, is clothed with grass and forest, flower and fruit, the harvest of the life of to-day. ”

“ In the same manner, if we detect in any strata of the past any undoubted products of human industry—such as weapons, or implements and ornaments—in such position that we know they could not have been deposited there since the formation of the bed itself, we have no hesitancy in asserting that man himself is of the same antiquity as the strata containing the implements. In the great majority of cases, this is the only kind of evidence possible to advance.
It is now well known that the first stage in the culture of any people, is what is called the Stone Age. ”

“ I am at present concerned with the Stone Age, and if, as all agree, there was a time when the use of iron or of bronze, or of both together, first became known to the barbarous nations of the West of Europe, then it is evident that before that time they were unacquainted with the use of those metals, and were therefore in that stage of civilization which has been characterized as the Stone Age. ”

“ Some of them made limited use of raw metals and minerals, believing them to be only peculiar kinds of stone, never dreaming that they could be melted and refined and cast into implements and ornaments. Stone and Flint were the “metals” of the Mound-builders and other primitive peoples, while bone, shell, clay, wood and fibers were also much used. If peoples of the Stone Age had not made their humble beginnings, we would not be today living in the Age of Iron and enjoying the conveniences of civilization. ”

“ The neolithic period has often been loosely called the age of polished stone, from the fact that in no case has a polished or ground stone implement been found in a palaeolithic deposit. The term is not only loose but inaccurate. In the first place, there is no reason why the cave-men should Neolithic.not be found to have polished a stone implement on occasion, for they habitually polished their weapons of bone. Secondly, neolithic man was by no means uniform in his methods; he polished or ground the surfaces of such tools or weapons as would be improved by the process ”

“ The Stone Age itself was a long era of great if slow progress in civilisation, and the evolution of the practices and ideas which emerge as the concomitants of its agricultural stage, when closely regarded, bear testimony to the mind’s capacity for religious progress in the light of experience and intelligent experiment, and at the same time to the errors into which it fell. The Stone Age has left its sediment in all the folk-lore of the world. ”

“ This aspect of primitive interchange, both of the raw material and the products of industrial skill, in so far as it is illustrated in the practice of the American Indian tribes, merits the most careful study, as a help to the interpretation of the archæological evidence pertaining to prehistoric times. To the superficial observer, stone is of universal occurrence; and it seems, therefore, needless to inquire where the implement-maker of any Stone age procured the rough block out of which he fashioned his weapon or tool. ”

“ From the foregoing observations we may infer that the ages of iron and bronze in Northern and Central Europe were preceded by a stone age, the Neolithic, referable to that division of the post-tertiary epoch which I have called Recent, when the mammalia as well as the other organic remains accompanying the stone implements were of living species. ”

“ With the better material which was thus obtained the neolithic craftsmen fashioned implements of which some can hardly be distinguished, even by experts, from those of the older period, though the greater number are recognizable even by a tiro. It must, however, be remembered that in many cases one cannot tell whether a find of stone implements belongs to the Neolithic or to the Bronze Age ”

“ But the last traces of a Stone Age are hardly known to disappear anywhere, in spite of the general use of metals; and in studying this phase of the world's history for itself, it may be considered as still existing, not only among savages who have not fairly come to the use of iron, but even among civilized nations. Wherever the use of stone instruments, as they were used in the Stone Age proper, is to be found, there the Stone Age has not entirely passed away. ”