73. Other Materials: Bone and Horn
Stone implements must perhaps always remain in the foreground of our understanding of the Old Stone Age because they were made so much more numerously than other objects, or at any rate have been preserved so much more abundantly, that they will supply us with the bulk of our evidence. At the same time it would be an error to believe that the life of these men of long ago was filled with the making and using of stone tools to the exclusion of everything else. Gradually during the last fifty years, through unremittingly patient explorations and the piecing of one small discovery to another, there has accumulated a fair body of knowledge of other sides of the life of Palæolithic men. There is every reason to believe that as time goes on we shall learn more and more about them, and thus be able to reconstruct a reasonably complete and vivid picture of their behavior.
Implements of bone and horn are next most abundant after those of stone, but it is significant that the Lower Palæolithic still dispensed with these materials. In the Chellean and Acheulean stations, although broken bones of devoured animals occur, bone was not shaped. In the Mousterian this material first came into use, but as yet only as so-called “anvils” on which to chip flint or cut, and not as true tools.
One of the changes that most prominently mark the passage from the Lower to the Upper Palæolithic is the sudden development in the use of bone at the beginning of the Aurignacian, and then of reindeer horn. These materials came more and more into favor as time went on. The Aurignacians had bone awls or pins, polishers, paint tubes of hollowed reindeer leg bone, and points with a grooved base for hafting, generally construed as javelin heads. In the Solutrean, eyed needles were added. The greatest development was attained in the Magdalenian. Bone javelin and spear heads were now made in a variety of forms, with bases pointed, beveled, or grooved. Hammers, chisels or wedges, and perforators were added to the list of bone tools. Whistles and perhaps flutes were blown. Reindeer antler was employed for carved and perforated lengths of horn, “rods of command” or magic, they are usually called; as well as for harpoons and throwers, to be discussed below.
By the close of the Palæolithic, objects of organic substances began to approach in frequency those of flint. This may well have been a sort of preparation for the grinding and polishing of stone which is the distinctive technique of the New Stone Age. Bone cannot well be chipped or retouched. It must be cut, ground, or rubbed into shape. The Neolithic people therefore may be said to have extended to stone a process which their predecessors of the Upper Palæolithic were familiar with but had failed to apply to the harder substance.