Early Man in the New World

by Kenneth Macgowan; Joseph A. Hester

Weapons and Tools—from Hand Ax to Arrowhead

One of the many mysteries of prehistory is who invented the bow and arrow. The smaller Solutrean points argue that their makers used a bow and invented this primitive but effective machine. But since the bow was made of wood, it has not been preserved in the caves and terraces that spared the bone spear-throwers of the Magdalenians and the flint projectiles; so for evidence we must fall back on the paintings of primitive man. We find the spear-thrower portrayed in South Africa but not in Europe. The newer weapon, the bow, is on the walls of rock shelters in southern and eastern Spain. At first these paintings were thought to be neolithic. Later they were credited to the Magdalenians, in spite of the fact that the use of the human form and the bizarre and almost humorous caricature contrast with the subjects and the style of Magdalenian art. Now they are generally credited to the Capsians, a people from northern Africa. The paintings resemble prehistoric work from Rhodesia and the Tassili Mountains of southern Algeria, and also the historic and protohistoric designs of the Bushmen (see illustrations, pages [111] and [112]).

Our first machine, the spear-thrower, as used by early man and certain later peoples in the New World as well as the Old. An invention difficult to conceive and effect, it marked an important step forward in man’s use of his brain and his body. In effect, it extended the length of the human arm by at least two feet and therefore its power by perhaps 50 per cent. (After Harrington, 1933.)

THE FIRST PAINTINGS

Although prehistoric engravings of animal figures on bone had been discovered in European caves as early as about 1840, and engravings on cave walls in the sixties, it was not till 1878 that paintings were found. The discoverer was a child. While Marcelino de Sautuola was searching among the debris on the floor of the cave of Altamira, near Santander, in Spain, he heard his little daughter cry “Toros! Toros!” and saw her point to polychrome paintings of bison and other animals on the roof of the cave. One of them appears at the top of this page. The other painting shown is from the French cave of Font-de-Gaume. These two caverns contain the finest lineal art of early man, chiefly Magdalenian. (The bison after Cartailhac and Breuil, 1906; the deer after Capitan, Breuil, and Peyroni, 1910.)

The history of even the simplest of man’s tools from the hand ax to the arrowhead is long, interesting, and puzzling. It is hard to say what many of the tools were used for, or indeed what they were not used for. The hand ax would obviously be best for grubbing out roots and tubers, yet, like most of the implements of early man, it must have served a variety of other purposes also. Until the Mousterians began to make spear points, 90,000 to 150,000 years ago, all man’s implements—even what we call his scrapers—were pretty generalized. Later, with the Aurignacians and the Magdalenians, came artifacts that were obviously blades or knives or chisels or harpoons. The tool to make other tools appeared, and this we must add to the list of man’s prehistoric achievements: speech, fire making, stone chipping, pressure flaking, and carving and painting.

The attempt of science to record and interpret the story of early man in the Old World has been an extraordinary triumph over the obstacles of half a million years of prehistoric darkness. Hundreds of men and women, laboring long and ingeniously, have won to an almost miraculous success, and the end is not yet in sight.

The work has suffered, of course, from many a human limitation. Not the least of these has been the desire to interpret knowledge too quickly, to freeze it into forms and classifications, and to stand doggedly by those forms and classifications when they have become weakened by new knowledge. The student and the intelligent layman have been confused by all this. They have been particularly confused—as we think we can show—when it comes to early man in the New World.

Aurignacian and Magdalenian men of France drew and painted animals, almost never the human form. The artists who worked in the caves and rock shelters of eastern Spain drew figures of hunters and women, as well as of animals. These artists may have been Capsians who lived in North Africa in the Aurignacian period and spread into Europe at some time between then and the Neolithic. The style resembles that of the African Bushmen. The two archers on the left are from the cave of Saltadora; the two at the right, from the Cueva del Mas d’en Josep. (After Obermaier and Weinert, 1919.)