220. The Dog
The first animal was also domesticated about the beginning of the Neolithic. Dog remains have been found in two very late post-Magdalenian Palæolithic sites, one in Scotland, the other in Denmark, both apparently Azilian in age. Then, the Danish kitchenmiddens, which began in the first stage of the Early Neolithic, contain innumerable bones that have been gnawed by dogs. The animals may still have been half wild at this period, since their own skeletons are rare in the middens. Evidently the species was not yet firmly attached to man; its members went off to die in solitude. This is what has generally been predicated on hypothetical grounds of the history of dog and man. Contrary to most domesticated animals, the dog is thought not to have been captured and tamed outright, but to have attached himself to human beings as a parasitic hanger-on, a shy, tolerated, uncared-for scavenger, living in a stage of symbiotic relationship with our ancestors before his real domestication. This view the prehistoric evidence seems to confirm.
221. The Hewn Ax
One more trait signalizes the Early Neolithic: the hewn stone ax. This was a chipped implement, straight or slightly convex along the cutting edge, tapering from that to the butt, about twice as long as broad, rather thick, unperforated and ungrooved; in fact perhaps often unhandled and driven by blows upon the butt: a sharp stone wedge as much as an ax, in short. The whole Palæolithic shows no such implement: even the Azilian has only bone or horn “axes.”
It is hardly necessary to repeat for the Neolithic what has already been said of the Palæolithic periods: the older types, such as chipped flint tools, continued very generally to be made. Such persistence is natural: a survival of a low type among higher ones does not mean much. It is the appearance of new and superior inventions that counts.
The Early Neolithic can be summed up, then, in these five traits: pottery; the bow and arrow; abundant use of bone and horn; the dog; and the hewn ax.
222. The Full Neolithic
It is the later or Full Neolithic, beginning probably between 6000 and 5000 B.C. in western Europe, that is marked by the grinding or polishing of stone. Even this criterion is less deep-going than might be thought from all the references that prehistorians have made to it, since the new process was put to limited service. Practically the only stone implements that were ground into shape in Europe were of the ax class: the ax head itself, the celt or chisel, hammer stones, and clubheads. The mill is the principal artifact that can be added to the list. The ax long remained what we to-day should scarcely dignify with the name of ax head: an unpierced, ungrooved blade. It is only toward the end of the Neolithic in Europe, after metal was already in use in the Orient and Mediterranean countries, that perforated and well ground stone axes appear; many of these make the impression of being stone imitations, among a remote, backward people, of forms cast in bronze by the richer and more advanced nations of the South and East.