Paleolithic people

“ And he looks confidently to the future explorer of the earth's fossil records to extend the history back into vastly more remote epochs, for it is little doubted that paleolithic man, the most ancient of our recognized progenitors, is a modern compared to those generations that represented the real childhood of our race. ”

“ These closing essays have impressed on us clearly and distinctly the isolation of the Paleolithic Age. When we reflect on its prolonged duration, its remoteness in time, and its complete severance from the Neolithic and succeeding ages, we are almost ready to wonder whether they were indeed human beings. But beginning with the Neolithic Age, we come to our own era. ”

“ According to this theory, then, the Glacial Age commenced about two hundred and twenty thousand years ago. It continued, with one interruption of mild climate, for one hundred and forty thousand years, and finally passed away eighty thousand years ago.
What shall we say to these results? If true, what a wonderful antiquity is here unfolded for the human race, and what a wonderful lapse of time is included in what is known as the Paleolithic Age! How strikingly does it impress upon our minds the slow development of man! ”

“ Once only does the writer depart from accepted theories of scientific research. After an at least long-continued study of existing evidence and information relating to the Stone Ages, the conviction grew upon him that the mysterious gap supposed by scientific teachers to divide Paleolithic from Neolithic man never really existed. No convulsion of nature, no new race of human beings is needed to explain the difference between the relics of Paleolithic and Neolithic strugglers. ”

“ 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 neolithic implements, on the other hand, are much better made at the starting-point, and they gradually improve, until they give place to implements of bronze. Again, the paleolithic remains are accompanied with the remains of mammalia, such as the mammoth, etc., which are now wholly or locally extinct, while the mammalian remains found with those of neolithic man are of existing species. Lastly, the paleolithic remains are found in the deposits of sand and gravel we have described as imbedded within the till, while the neolithic remains are found only in the upper drift. ”

“ In the generation that has elapsed since the first drawing of the cave-dweller artist was discovered, evidences of the wide-spread existence of man in an early epoch have multiplied indefinitely, and to-day the paleontologist traces the history of our race back beyond the iron and bronze ages, through a neolithic or polished-stone age, to a paleolithic or rough-stone age, with confidence born of unequivocal knowledge. ”

“ The Paleolithic included objects found in caves and glacial gravels; the Neolithic, on the surface and in tombs. The first period ran from some vague beginning hundreds of thousands of years ago up to the advent of the Neolithic after the glaciers had melted. By definition, paleolithic man made chipped stone implements and no other kind. Neolithic man was supposed to be distinguished by the making of ground, or—as we usually say—polished, stone axes and of other tools shaped by rubbing instead of chipping; agriculture, pottery, and textiles came in as secondary traits. ”

“ The Paleolithic Age in Europe seems to have terminated with the Glacial Age. But we are not to suppose it came to an end all over the earth at that time. On the contrary, some tribes of men never passed beyond that stage. When the light of civilization fell upon them they were still in the culture of the old Stone Age. We are to notice that in such cases the tribes thus discovered were very low in the scale. The probable data for the Paleolithic Age have formed the subject of this chapter. ”

“ The amount of positive knowledge in regard to the mysterious tribes of the older Stone Age, or the barbarians of the Neolithic period, or the struggling civilization of the early Metallic Ages, is lamentably deficient. On our Western Continent we have the mysterious remains in the gold-bearing gravels of the Pacific coast, the significance of which is yet in dispute. We have the Paleolithic Age of Europe, represented by the remains found in the gravels of the Delaware at Trenton, New Jersey. ”

“ As we have now spent some time in tracing out the culture of these early ages, it may be well to see if there are any means at our command to determine the absolute chronology of the various ages. At the very outset of our inquiry, we shall perceive that we have no such class of facts as guided our investigations into the age of the Paleolithic remains. ”

“ When European savants had established the science of Archæology, and shown the existence of separate stages of culture, it was but natural that those interested in the matter on this side of the Atlantic should turn with renewed energy to investigate the archæology of this country, to see if here, too, they could find evidence of a Paleolithic Age. ”

“ Referring all relics of stone to the Indians, our scholars have been slow to recognize traces of an earlier race in America. Our sources of information are as yet but few, and much remains to be done in this field. In Europe as in America, scholars are still hard at work on the Paleolithic Age, and we are to hold ourselves in readiness to modify our opinions, or to reject them entirely and adopt new ones as our knowledge increases. ”

“ The more we reflect on these instances the more impressed are we with a sense of duration vast and profound, in which the great forests and grassy plains of Europe supported herds of wild animals all unvexed by the presence of man. We will only mention one more point and then pass on.
We have seen that the highest rank we can assign to Paleolithic man in the scale of civilization is Upper Savagism. But when Neolithic man appeared, he was in the middle status of Barbarism. ”

“ But for a great many reasons, portions of the human skeleton are very rarely found in such circumstances that we are sure they date back to the Paleolithic Age, and especially is this true of the men of the River Drift. ”

“ On the other hand, when we deal with the archaeology of cultures that do not readily connect themselves with historical data, as the Paleolithic cultures of western Europe, and even some of the Neolithic, we are accustomed to find a series of cultures resting one above the other, but between which the connections are broken. ”

“ Whitney: “It is evident that there has been no unfolding of the intellectual faculties of the human race on this continent similar to that which has taken place in Central Europe. We can recognize no Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, or Iron Ages.”46 Others assure us, that if present, the ages stand in reverse order. “The relics last used were by far the rudest, and the historic races, which are the survivors of the prehistoric, are the wildest of the two ”

“ Such persons do not consider the lowliness of his first condition and the extreme slowness with which progress must have gone forward. On this point the geologists and the sociologists agree. Says Mr. Geikie: “The time which has elapsed from the close of the Paleolithic Age, even up to the present day, can not for a moment compare with the aeons during which the men of the old stone period occupied Europe.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ The difference between the culture of the Neolithic and the Iron Age is great, but it is simply a development, the result of a gradual growth. Civilization and history have only hastened this growth. If we look around us to-day we can trace the elements of our civilization back through the eras of history, and though the faint beginning of some can be noticed, yet many of them come down to us from prehistoric times. We have treated of these early people in the three stages of culture known as the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages. ”

“ We must not forget that these are the antiquities of our own country; that the broken archæological fragments we pick up will, when put together, give us a knowledge of tribes that lived here when civilization was struggling into being in the East. It should be to us far more interesting than the history of the land of the Pharaohs, or of storied Greece. Yet, strange to say, the facts we have just mentioned are unknown to the mass of our people. Accustomed to regard this as the New World, they have turned their attention to Europe and the East when they would learn of prehistoric times. ”

“ The contributions to our knowledge of the paleolithic during the decade in question may for convenience be grouped under three heads: (1) Those relating to finds in valley deposits; (2) cavern explorations, and (3) the discoveries of human skeletal remains. As examples of the first group, I have chosen the researches of Commont at Saint-Acheul (France) and of Szombathy, Hoernes, and Obermaier at Willendorf (Austria-Hungary) . ”

“ These races are still represented, and their descendants of to-day retain the characteristics of their ancestors.
One final conclusion is no less interesting. These absolutely countless flints, these monuments of imposing size, these stones of immense weight often brought from afar, these marvellous mounds and tumuli, bear witness to the presence of a population which was already considerable at the time of which we are endeavoring to make out the traces. A long series of centuries must have been needed for a people to increase to such an extent as to have spread over entire continents. ”

“ Between the time that Palæolithic Man left the caves he occupied, and the date when the earlier Neolithic people began to deposit fragments of the records of their history in the kitchen-midden, which they piled in front of their shelters, a long period appears to have elapsed in many districts. ”

“ If we consider that the Glacial Age in America coincides in time with the same age in Europe, then the last statements would imply that the Paleolithic Age here was later than in Europe; in fact, that Paleolithic man had run his course in Europe before he appeared in America, and some might even go further, and say that he migrated from Europe to America. ”

“ The relative ages of Paleolithic human bones and implements are best determined by the associated fossil animals. Thus the most ancient truly human fossils are found directly associated with bones of very old types of elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses which are definitely known to have lived during middle or early middle Glacial (Quaternary) time corresponding to early Paleolithic time. A very conservative estimate would make the age of such very old human remains at least 150,000 to 250,000 years because the Ice Age was at least 500,000 years long. ”

“ During all the long course of time supposed to be covered by the Paleolithic Age, there are but very few evidences of any improvement, as far as we can judge from the implements themselves. This is in itself a melancholy proof of the low condition of man. He had made so little advance in the scale of wisdom, he possessed so little knowledge, he was so much a creature of instinct, that, during the thousands of years demanded for this age, he made no appreciable progress. The advance of the last century was many times greater than that of the entire Paleolithic Age. ”

“ Except for the stone tools, what do we know of the way men lived in the time range after 100,000 to perhaps 40,000 years ago or even later? We know that in the area from Europe to Palestine, at least some of the people (some of the time) lived in the fronts of caves and warmed themselves over fires. In Europe, in the cave layers of these times, we find the bones of different animals; the bones in the lowest layers belong to animals that lived in a warm climate; above them are the bones of those who could stand the cold, like the reindeer and mammoth. ”

“ Great pains were spent in collecting all sorts of objects illustrating the changes of the globe upon which we live, and the distribution and habits of animals and plants—in short, all the departments of Natural History; whilst, strange to say, people for the most part neglected traces of men, the remains not only of their own ancestors, but also of all the different races who have been spread over the world. The antiquities, with the exception of those of Roman and Greek origin, were regarded as mere curiosities, without any scientific value. ”

“ Even after metals were introduced, the cheapness and abundance of stone would cause it to be used, among the poorer people at least. But finally this culture gives way to a higher one in Europe—though it still survived in portions of Asia, the Isles of the Pacific, and in America. We can but reflect on the difference between the two ages of stone. The former ends amidst Arctic scenes—and, in the darkness that ensues, ages pass before we again detect the presence of man. The Neolithic closes gradually, everywhere giving way to a higher culture. ”

“ Following the Palæolithic era, or rude stone age, is the Neolithic, or new stone, age; and now we find man using polished weapons, making pottery, using fire to warm himself with, and developing social manners. Instead of living in caves, he lived in lake dwellings, with others of his species, and gradually developed agricultural tastes. This metamorphosis, we know from the fossil remains found deposited in various strata, occupied a long period of time, probably thousands of years; and even then we are left thousands of years before the historical era, which followed the bronze and iron ages. ”