Anthropology

by A. L. Kroeber

67. The Old and the New Stone Ages

The Stone Age, apart from a rather doubtful introductory era to be mentioned presently, is customarily divided into two periods, the Old Stone Age and the New Stone Age,—the Palæolithic and the Neolithic. These words of Greek origin mean literally “old stone” and “new stone” periods. The criterion by which these two grand divisions were originally distinguished was that in the Palæolithic artifacts were made only by chipping, that is, some process of fracturing stone, whereas Neolithic stone objects were thought to have been pecked, ground, rubbed, and polished. Indeed the two periods have sometimes been designated as the epochs of rough stone and polished stone implements.

This distinction is now known to be inaccurate. It is true that the Old Stone Age did not yet employ frictional processes in shaping stone and confined itself to the older methods of fracturing by blows or pressure. But the converse is not true, that the Neolithic worked stone only by grinding, nor even that grinding was its characteristic process. Stone grinding was invented only toward the middle of the New Stone Age—in what is perhaps best designated the “Full Neolithic.” The Early Neolithic, which lasted half the total Neolithic duration, continued to work stone by fracture. What marked the beginning of the Neolithic was certain inventions having nothing to do with stone: notably pottery and the bow. With these available, human life took on a new color, and it was not until some thousands of years later that shaping of stone by grinding came into use. In other words, the prehistorians’ idea as to what constitutes the Neolithic have changed, and they no longer put stone processes in the first place in characterizing the period. They would do well, therefore, to change its name also to one having reference to its more specific traits. Such a change of designation will perhaps become established in time. But at present the term Neolithic is so intrenched in usage, that to replace it by “Pottery Age” or “Bow Age” would be misleading: all the literature on the subject employs “Neolithic.” The present chapter being concerned specifically with the Palæolithic, and this being an age in which stone implements did loom large and were consistently made by fracture only, the difficulties about the concept of the Neolithic, and its subdivision into an Early and a Full period, can be reserved for discussion later (Chapter [XIV]). But it is well to bear in mind as the Palæolithic is examined in the pages immediately following, that the Neolithic is neither its antithesis nor its logical complement, but rather a period signalized by the appearance of totally new directions of human culture.

Another point in connection with the two processes of working stone has reference to the mental activities involved by them. A tolerable ground ax or mortar can be made without much difficulty by any one willing to take the trouble. A civilized person entirely inexperienced in the working of stone would be likely to produce a fairly satisfactory implement by the rubbing technique. If however he attempted to manufacture a chipped stone tool, even of simple type, he would probably fail repeatedly before learning to control the method well enough to turn out an implement without first ruining a dozen. In short, the manual dexterity required to produce the best forms of chipped stone tools is greater than that needed for ground ones. Inasmuch as the chipping process is, however, the earlier, we are confronted here with a paradox.

Yet the paradox is only on the surface. It is true that so far as skill alone is concerned a good chipped tool is more difficult to make than a ground one. But it can be made in a shorter time. A rough stone tool can be manufactured in a few minutes. A good artifact may be preceded by a number of unsuccessful attempts or “rejects,” and yet be produced in an hour or less. The processes of pecking, grinding, and polishing, on the other hand, are laborious. They are slow even when pursued with steel tools, and when the shaping material is no better than another stone or sand, as was of course always the case in prehistoric times, the duration of the labor must have been discouraging. Weeks or at least days would be required to manufacture a single implement. If the work was done at odd times, one may imagine that many a stone ax was months in being produced. Patience and forethought of a rather high order are thus involved in the making of implements of the Neolithic type. Dexterity is replaced by higher qualities of what might be called the moral order. By comparison, the earliest men lacked these traits. They would not sit down to-day to commence something that would not be available for use until a month later. What they wanted they wanted quickly. To think ahead, to sacrifice present convenience to future advantage, must have been foreign to their way of life. Therefore they chipped; and although in the lapse of thousands of years they learned to do some chipping of high quality, they continued to operate with modifications of the same rough and rapid process. The uses to which their implements could be put were also correspondingly restricted. A first-class ax, a real chisel, or a mortar in which grinding can be done, can scarcely be made by chipping alone. It was not until men had learned to restrain their childish impulse to work only for the immediate purpose, and had acquired an increased self-control and discipline, that the grinding of stone came into use.

One principle must be clearly adhered to in the dating or proper arrangement of the periods of prehistoric time: the principle that it is always the highest types of implements which determine the age of a deposit. Lower forms often persist from the earlier periods into the later, alongside the newly invented higher types. The men of the Full Neolithic time did not wholly give up making chipped implements because they also ground stone. Just so we have not discarded the use of stone because we use metals, and we still employ copper for a great variety of purposes although we live in an age of which iron and steel are characteristic. To reckon a people as Palæolithic because they had chipped implements as well as ground ones, would be as misleading as to assert that we still belong to the Stone Age because we build houses of granite. In fact, stone masonry has had its principal development since metals have been in use.

This caution seems elementary enough. But it has sometimes been overlooked by scholars in the pursuit of a theory that made them try to stamp some prehistoric or savage race as particularly primitive. If in a stratum of ancient remains there are discovered a thousand chipped artifacts and only ten that are ground or polished but the latter unquestionably left there at the same time as the thousand chipped ones, one is justified in reckoning the whole deposit as Full Neolithic in period. For in such a case it is clear that the art of grinding must have been already known, even though it may as yet have been practised only occasionally.

It is found that all surviving peoples of primitive culture—American Indians, Australian black-fellows, Polynesians, Hottentots, and the like—except probably the Tasmanians, have attained the grinding stage of development. It is true enough that many American Indian tribes chipped arrow-points and knives more frequently than they would grind out axes. Yet without exception they also knew the process of grinding stone and applied it to some purpose. For this reason the endeavors that have been made by certain authors, who compare particular modern savage peoples to the races of prehistoric Europe on the basis of a similarity of their chipped implements, are misleading. It is true that tools like those produced in the Mousterian period of the Old Stone Age are made by the modern Australian tribes, and that certain Magdalenian implements from near the end of the Old Stone Age find parallels among those of the Eskimo. But both the Australians and the Eskimo practise the art of rubbing and polishing of stone, which was unknown in the Palæolithic. They therefore belong clearly to a later stage of civilization. Too great an insistence on such parallels would be likely to give rise to the implication that the Australians were a species of belated Mousterian Stone Age men, and the Eskimo only Magdalenians whom the Arctic regions had somehow perpetuated for ten thousand years; whereas their civilizations consist of Mousterian and Magdalenian ingredients plus many subsequent elements. The stage of development of the art of chipping in stone may be the same; the other arts and customs of modern Australian black-fellows and of Eskimos, and their bodily types, differ from those of the prehistoric Europeans.

With the distinction of the Palæolithic, Neolithic, and the Ages of Copper, Bronze, and Iron in mind, it is in order to examine what may have preceded them, and then to trace in outline the development which human culture underwent during the Palæolithic in the continent in which its records are best explored—Europe.