68. The Eolithic Age
The earliest of all periods of human handiwork, although a somewhat doubtful one, is the Eolithic, or age of the “dawn of stone” implements.
On purely theoretical grounds it appears likely, indeed almost inevitable, that the first definitely chipped implements did not develop full-fledged, but were preceded by still cruder tools, made perhaps without clear intent, and at any rate so rough and half-shaped that they would be difficult to recognize.
After the evolution of Palæolithic implements had become pretty well known, this conjecture began to be supported by evidence, or at least by alleged evidence. Investigators, especially Rutot in Belgium, found flints of which it was difficult to say whether or not they had been used by human hands. These pieces occurred in extremely ancient deposits. On the basis of these discoveries Rutot and his followers established the Eolithic period. Some have consistently assailed this Eolithic age as imaginary, asserting that the so-called eoliths were nothing but accidental products of nature. Others have accepted the eoliths and recognize the stage of embryonic or pre-human civilization which they imply. Still other students remain in doubt; and their attitude is perhaps still the safest to share.
The view now most prevalent is that the alleged Eolithic flints may have been used by early human hands, but that they were almost certainly not manufactured. This would make them tools only in the sense in which the limb of a tree is a tool when a man in distress seizes it to defend himself.
The eoliths are more or less irregular pieces of flint or similar stone, some of them so blunt that they must have been very inefficient if used for chopping or cutting or scraping. Small nocks or chips along the edge are believed not to have been flaked off with the conscious intent of producing an edge, but to have become chipped away through usage while the stone was being manipulated as a naturally formed tool. This would be much in line with our picking up a cobblestone in default of an ax or hammer, and continuing to maul away with it until the rough handling broke off several pieces and happened accidentally to produce an edge. That the eoliths were such unintentionally made tools is the most that can safely be claimed for them.
Even so some doubts remain. Stones similar to eoliths in every respect, except that their fractures show a fresher appearance, have been taken by dozens out of modern steel drums in which flint-bearing chalk was being broken for industrial purposes.
Then, too, the first believers in the authenticity of the eoliths reported them as occurring from the middle and earlier layers of the Pleistocene, in which periods we know that nearly human or half-human types like Heidelberg man and Pithecanthropus were already in existence. These two species being more similar to modern man than to the apes or other animals, we must imagine them to have been gifted with at least some human intelligence. It would therefore have been entirely possible for them to supplement the tools with which nature endowed them—their hands and teeth—with flints which they picked up and manipulated in one useful way or another without particularly troubling to shape the stones.
So far the argument is all in favor of the reality of the eolith. Before long, however, it was discovered that eoliths were not especially more abundant in the middle Pleistocene just previous to the opening of the Palæolithic, when we should expect them to have been most numerous, than they were in the early Pleistocene, when the human species must still have been most rudimentary. Then it was found that eoliths occur in lower strata than the earliest Pleistocene, namely, in the Pliocene, in the Miocene, and perhaps even earlier, in the Oligocene. Yet these periods are divisions of the Tertiary, or Age of Mammals—the age before man had been evolved! In short, the argument cuts too far. Once one begins to accept eoliths it is difficult to stop accepting them without carrying them back into a period of geological history when evolution could scarcely have produced a form sufficiently advanced in intelligence to use them.[8]
Perhaps on the whole the strongest argument in favor of the authenticity of the Pleistocene eoliths is the fact that the first implements known positively to belong to the Old Stone Age are just a little too well shaped and efficient to represent the products of the very beginnings of human manual dexterity. One cannot help but look for something antecedent that was simpler and ruder; and this need of the imagination the eoliths do go a long way to satisfy.