Wood, Bone, and Shell Ages
There is another serious weakness in the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age sequence. It takes no account of the probability that man used wood, bone, and shell before he used stone. The ape swings a stick much as the first man must have done. The carcass of some bison or stag, picked clean by vultures, must have seemed to our earliest ancestors “a whole potential tool-shop”—as George R. Stewart writes in Man: An Autobiography—“thigh bones ready-made for clubs, horns or antlers for awls, shoulder-blades for scrapers.”[8] As early as 1864, a British student of anthropology, John Crawfurd, stood out against Thomsen’s Stone Age as the beginning of culture. At a meeting of the Ethnological Society, he said: “On man’s first appearance, the most obvious materials would consist of wood and bone.... This would constitute the wood and bone age, of which, from the perishable nature of the materials, we, of course, possess but slender records.”[9] Because the discovery of the stone artifacts of early man in Europe was then creating a scientific furore, Crawfurd’s sane observations went unnoticed. Today we have part of a wooden spear made, perhaps, far back in the Great Ice Age (see illustration, [page 74]).
Wood, bone, and shell not only antedated stone; they have continued in use until today. Certain primitive peoples—the Chukchi of Siberia, for example—retained the use of wood and bone after they were given iron.[10] Numerous tribes, when first encountered by explorers and navigators, had not yet begun to use stone; among these were the Aleuts, the Andaman Islanders, Malayans from the hills, and people of the upper Amazon.[11]
Rickard, from whom we have drawn liberally in this discussion, proposes a different scheme of classification for the cultures of man.[12] In the Primordial Age he would include the primary use of wood, bone, and shell. He would accept the Stone Age as the next stage. For the Bronze and Iron ages he would substitute the Metallurgic Age, basing this on the discovery and use of smelting, whatever the metal involved. The dead hand of Thomsen, however, will probably continue to rule. The best we can do will be to take the Stone Age as including all materials except metal, and pay little attention to that illusion the Bronze Age.