Prehistory

“ For example, in History, the ill-defined period called the Middle and Dark Ages makes a considerable hiatus before, in the process of retrospection, we get back to a civilization which (in Europe at least) we ordinarily regard as Ancient. Again, in History, we distinguish commonly two provinces within the undoubted area of the Ancient, the Prehistoric and the Historic, the first comprising all the time to which human memory, as communicated by surviving literature, ran not, or, at least, not consciously, consistently and credibly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Meaning of History.—History, as it is written and understood, comprises many centuries of human life and achievement, and we must begin our study by discussing a little what history means. Men may live for thousands of years without having a life that may be called historical; for history is formed only where there are credible written records of events. Until we have these records, we have no ground for historical study, but leave the field to another study, which we call Archeology, or Prehistoric Culture. ”

“ Great Divisions of History.—The history of civilization begins with the oldest civilized people and continues to the present time. Antiquity is the most remote period, Modern Times the era in which we live.
Ancient History.—Ancient History begins with the [Pg 12] oldest known nations, the Egyptians and Chaldeans (about 3,000 years before our era) , and surveys the peoples of the Orient, the Hindoos, Persians, Phœnicians, Jews, Greeks, and last of all the Romans. It terminates about the fifth century A.D., when the Roman empire of the west is extinguished. ”

“ Whatever antiquity may be attributed to the human race, whatever the initial date to which its first appearance may be relegated, this antiquity is but slight, this date is but modern, if we compare it with the truly incalculable ages of which geology reveals the existence. ”

“ A systematic process of enquiry would shew that, as in geology, so here, the subject-matter lies in layers. We have the prehistoric period concerning palæolithic and neolithic man; then follow the British, the Roman, the Saxon, the Danish, and the Norman strata, or eras; so many have been the elements which have contributed to the moulding of our country and our people, as we find them at the present day. But again, as in geology, so here, we find few traces in our own immediate neighbourhood of the earlier links in this series—the people who preceded the historic Britons. ”

“ As the historian recognizes Ancient History, the Middle Ages, and Modern History as distinct phases in the growth of the human race, so they distinguished between what they called the Primary period, when, as they believed, no life stirred on the surface of the earth; the Secondary or middle period, when animals and plants were introduced, and the land began to assume continental proportions; and the Tertiary period, or comparatively modern geological times, when the physical features of the earth as well as its inhabitants were approaching more nearly to the present condition of things. ”

“ Yet his first appearance on earth goes back to an age compared with which the ancients, as we call them, are but moderns. The few thousand years of recorded history only take us back to a præhistoric period of untold length, during which took place the primary distribution of mankind over the earth and the development of the great races, the formation of speech and the settlement of the great families of language, and the growth of culture up to the levels of the old world nations of the East, the forerunners and founders of modern civilized life. ”

“ Prehistoric remains, characteristics of bodily form, traits of language, industrial and economic achievements, peculiar customs and beliefs, are the only evidence that we can use,—evidence that was little regarded by history until the anthropological standpoint began to develop. ”

“ They thus afford us living illustrations of the social customs, the forms of government, laws, and warlike practices, which belonged to the ancient races from which they remotely sprang, whose implements, resembling, with but little difference, their own, are now found low down in the soil, in situations, and under circumstances in [54] which, alone, they would convey but little evidence to the antiquary, but which, when the investigations of the antiquary are interpreted by those of the ethnologist, are teeming with interesting revelations respecting the past history of our race ”

“ One fact is becoming more prominent with every advance of archaeology over the world, a fact of the greatest linguistic interest, namely that ancient civilizations and empires, as a whole, lasted longer than ours of today. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Moreover, the historical value of early tradition does not lie exclusively in the fragments of real history it may preserve. Even the myths which it carries down to later times may become important indirect evidence in the hands of the ethnologist. And ancient compositions handed down by memory from generation to generation, especially if a poetic form helps to keep them in their original shape, often give us, if not a sound record of real events, at least a picture of the state of civilization in which the compositions themselves had their origin. ”

“ If then all memory of a period so comparatively recent as that of the neolithic stone age and of the latest extinct animals was completely lost when the first dawn of history commences, it follows as a matter of course that nothing like an historical tradition survives anywhere of the immensely longer palæolithic period and of the origin of man. ”

“ If we are justified, as I think we are, in regarding the various grades of culture, observable among the more lowly of the still existing races of man, as representing to a considerable extent those vanished cultures which in their succession formed the different stages by which civilization emerged gradually from a low state, it surely becomes a very important duty for us to study with energy these living illustrations of early human history, in order that the archaeological record may be supplemented and rendered more complete. ”

“ In searching back through the successive stages of human civilisation we arrive at a period when both written history and traditions fail. This prehistoric period, up to the commencement of the present century, was entirely lost in the thick veil of darkness which surrounded everything pertaining to the past history of the globe. ”

“ Leaving now the past, expressed by geological terms, or by periods of thousands of years, we draw near to our own tribes, near, at least, comparatively speaking, and behold, here, also, we discern evidence that an ancient culture, as marked as that which built its cities along the fertile water-courses of the Old World, had its seat on the banks of our great rivers; that here flourished in full vigor for an unknown length of time a people whose origin and fate are yet in doubt, though, thanks to the combined efforts of many able men, we begin to have clearer ideas of their social organization. ”

“ Next to written and well-authenticated historical annals, the clearest insight that can be afforded us of the civilization, polity, and social condition of the nations of antiquity is derived from the study of ancient laws and customs, when their authenticity is guaranteed by existing contemporary authorities, and they bear in themselves the intrinsic evidence of adaptability to time, place, and circumstance, so easily recognized by the antiquarian and the philologist. ”

“ It now leads us on to clinging to the life of our ancestors, their being, and their natures; and beyond that to the fascination of all history, as being the continuity of life, the ever-shifting changes of the one great chain which we see around us at its present stage, and of which we form part. ”

“ So in speculations as to the origin and evolution of the human race, history affords the standard from which we start, through the successive 6 stages of prehistoric, neolithic, and palæolithic man, until we pass into the wider ranges of geological time. ”

“ DURING the unlettered youth of the race there were no written records from which the antiquity of man can be read. So the anthropologist on the one hand, and the geologist on the other, have sought to construct an early human history from prehistoric relics, and from the formations in which they are imbedded or the fossils with which they are associated. ”

“ If, as above seen, the study of human origins is largely a geological problem, the investigation of the later developments, during the Metal Ages and prehistoric times, belongs mainly to the field of Archaeology. ”

“ Nor does there appear to be any reason why those methods of examination which have proved so successful in geology, should not also be used to throw light on the history of man in prehistoric times. Archæology forms, in fact, the link between geology and history. But, while other animals leave only teeth and bones behind them, the men of the earliest ages are to be studied principally by their works; they have left behind them houses, tombs, fortifications, temples, implements for use, and ornaments for decoration. ”

“ If we scrutinize the field carefully, it is evident that one of the greatest and far reaching facts of ancient civilization, as it emerges from the darkness of prehistoric times, as well as one of the most considerable facts of subsequent history is just this cleavage into two principal classes. ”

“ The earliest signs of man appear about the beginning of this next period, which is conveniently broken into sections or ages marked off from each other by the degree of civilisation to which man had attained: viz. the Eolithic Age in which man makes use of only such tools as he picks up that are already shaped by Nature's hand, the Palaeolithic Age in which he chips and fashions stones to suit his purpose, the Neolithic Age in which he works stones into shape by rubbing and polishing, and the succeeding Ages of Bronze and Iron. ”

“ But we have been over many mountains, and in more valleys, without finding a trace of the ancient civilization I feel sure once flourished here. There are no relics of a lost race—not so much as an arrow or spear head. ”

“ In thus reducing the periods of the organic history of the earth, and the neptunic strata containing petrifactions deposited during those periods into a connected system, we proceed exactly 8 like the historian who divides the history of nations into the three main divisions of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times, and each of those sections again into subordinate periods and epochs. ”

“ But were these, indeed, wanting—were there no mounds or pyramids of sepulture or sacrifice—no remains of art—no inscriptive testimonies to speak of by-gone centuries—we have before us one of the most interesting of all monumental proofs in the lost and enigmatical race, who yet rove the boundless forests of the West and South. Whether there be evidences to separate the eras and nations of the most ancient inhabitants from those whose descendants yet remain, is one of the very points at issue. ”

“ Altogether, the evidence of ancient monuments, geography and history, goes to prove that the great race-divisions of mankind are of no recent growth, but were already settled before the beginning of the historical period. ”

“ In all ways we thus recognise, amid diversities of race, climate, and other external circumstances, many minute analogies between the men of palæolithic and neolithic ages of Europe, and those of the new world’s more recent centuries, in regions apart from its singular centres of a native civilisation. ”

“ They antedate human history by thousands of years. They are the ruins of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age of mankind. In all of these remains there is evidence of a slow but gradual improvement as we approach the present. There are places on the earth where the evolution of human implements, from the rudest chipped stones to the comparatively finished products of historic peoples, is epitomised in the deposits of a few feet in depth. ”

“ In reading off the geological structure of a country, we ascertain its history during many thousand ages long prior to that of man. We become, as it were, - xii - interpreters of hieroglyphics, and historians of long-perished dynasties. ”

“ But if we desire to study antiquity itself, to see how ideas have been evolved, to understand, in short, the earlier chapters of our own history, then we must needs go to the mental records of our European ancestors. ”

“ The Prehistoric and the Historic Age.—The uncounted millenniums which lie back of the time when man began to keep written records of what he thought and did and of what befell him, are called the Prehistoric Age.
The comparatively few centuries of human life which are made known to us through written records comprise the Historic Age. ”