Anthropology

by A. L. Kroeber

214. Race Influence and Regional Differentiation in the Lower Palæolithic

This profound change raises a natural conjecture. The Lower Palæolithic culture, at least in its latest form, was carried by Neandertal man; Upper Palæolithic culture is in great part associated with Cro-Magnon man, whose anatomy was nearer our own. Did not this relatively modern structure involve also a relatively modern set of mental faculties, and these in turn, by their own sheer worth, produce the richer culture? The supposition is plausible enough, and has been made. But it is sounder procedure to withhold commitment of opinion. The inference involves the assumption that approach to our own bodily type is accompanied by higher native intelligence; and the further assumption that higher intelligence will automatically produce advance in civilization. Probable as both these assumptions may seem, they are still undemonstrated, in general and in particular. The application of the assumptions to the facts therefore gives an apparent explanation in terms of an ultimate but really unknown causality. By accepting this hypothetical causality, it turns attention away from the question of its validity. But the validity of the causal relation between the body and intelligence, and between intelligence and culture, is precisely a point that needs elucidation. It needs elucidation as much as does the change of civilization that occurred in Europe about 25,000 years ago; and is a much broader problem—indeed, part of the most fundamental problem that anthropology still faces as unsolved. Instead of a snapping interpretation of a dubious point in human history in terms of a couple of still more dubious principles, it will be wiser to lay these principles aside, for a time at least, and to reconsider more intensively the facts bearing on the particular point at issue.

There are two obvious lines of evidence that may help to throw light on the change from the Lower to the Upper Palæolithic, and in fact aid understanding of the whole Palæolithic. The first comprises the relations between western Europe and other areas during that period; the second, regional differences within Europe. In the previous chapter on the Palæolithic, such considerations have been disregarded in favor of a schematic presentation of what seemed the salient facts in a field made sufficiently difficult by the antiquity and incompleteness of data. The best of these data, and those which arrange themselves most systematically, are those from Europe, which have therefore been presented as if they constituted a self-sufficient unit. But it is unlikely that the culture should have developed in Europe in complete detachment for a hundred thousand years or that it should have remained identical over the whole of that continent. It is necessary, in short, to revise the simple outline of Chapter [VI] by giving heed to geographical and other disturbing considerations.

First of all, it is well to realize that what has heretofore been called the first tool, the Chellean pick or coup-de-poing, was not so much the only tool of its period as the most characteristic one. It seems to have been accompanied at all times and everywhere by smaller, less regularly made implements, some of which were even worked out of flakes instead of cores and subjected to crude blow-retouching. Further, these medium-sized pieces were probably “invented” before the coup-de-poing; which is after all what might be expected, the coup-de-poing being a comparatively effective, regularly shaped, symmetrical implement involving both an ideal of form and a tolerable, rough skill to produce. Several Pre-Chellean stations, containing such smaller implements but no coups-de-poing, are now recognized by many specialists in prehistory. The most notable are those of St. Acheul and Abbeville, in northern France; the remainder are in the same part of that country, in Belgium, or in southern England, which at that time formed part of the continent. The fauna of some of these sites is an early one and has been attributed to the second interglacial era (§ [69]) as compared with the third interglacial in which the Chellean and Acheulean fall.

When the Chellean proper, with its typical, well-developed picks, is examined, it becomes clear that the distribution of this distinctive form is limited to a narrow strip of westernmost Europe from Belgium to Spain. The picks recur in north and east Africa and the districts of Asia bordering on the Mediterranean. They may not be of exactly the same age in these regions as in westerly Europe, but they are of the same type, and in view of the continuity of their distribution must be historically connected. In fact, the coup-de-poing Chellean might well be described as essentially an African (or Africo-Asian) development which underwent an extension across what was then the land-bridge of Gibraltar up the Atlantic face of Europe ([Fig. 37]).

The remainder of Europe was evidently also inhabited in this era; but by people of a variant culture. From Germany eastward into Russia, possibly Siberia, implements were worked which in part suggest the Pre-Chellean ones of northern France, in part developments of such Pre-Chellean pieces, and in part forms approaching Mousterian types. They do not include Chellean picks. The name Pre-Mousterian has been proposed for this central and east European culture. This name is appropriate, provided it is remembered that Pre-Mousterian denotes not a phase intermediate between the Acheulean and Mousterian of western Europe, but a culture developed, like the Chellean, yet more or less independently, out of the Pre-Chellean, and approximately coeval with the pure Chellean of western Europe and its Acheulean continuation. In other words, two culture-areas, an African-west-European and an east European, begin to be discernible from an extremely early time in the Lower Palæolithic ([Fig. 37]).

Fig. 37. Early Lower Palæolithic culture-areas (about 100,000-50,000 B.C.). Vertical shading, Chellean-Acheulean culture, with coups-de-poing. The principal European districts containing typical Chellean coups-de-poing are marked “C.” Stippling, “Pre-Mousterian” culture, probably contemporaneous with Chellean and Acheulean, but lacking coups-de-poing. White, uninhabited or unexplored. (Mainly after Obermayer.)

During the Acheulean, the western culture spread somewhat: into southern England, southeastern France, Italy, and began to overlap with the eastern culture along the Rhine. In the Mousterian, an assimilation seems to have taken place: culture, or at least flint industry, became more uniform over the whole of Europe, and in a measure the near parts of Asia and Africa also. This general Mousterian culture, with its small implements and emphasis on retouching, seems more likely to have evolved out of the pickless eastern Pre-Mousterian than out of the western Chellean-Acheulean with its large hewn coups-de-poing.

This would suggest an eastern origin for Mousterian man—the Neandertal race. But it is well not to proceed beyond some slight probability on this point because it is by no means certain that culture traveled only as races traveled. In their simple way, culture contacts without migrations may have been substantially as effective in shaping or altering civilization fifty thousand years ago as to-day. For all that can be demonstrated at present, the Mousterian Neandertal men of western Europe may have been the blood descendants of the undiscovered Chellean-Acheulean inhabitants of western Europe who had learned more effective retouching and smaller tools from the east Europeans.