230. Summary of Development: Regional Differentiation
Two conclusions emerge from the facts reviewed in this chapter and serve to prevent an over-simple and schematic conception of the growth of prehistoric civilization. The first is that successive phases of culture, even in the earliest times, cannot be identified, much less really understood, by reference to any single criterion such as this or that technique of working stone or the knowledge of this or that metal. In every case the culture is complex and characterized by a variety of traits whose combination produces its distinctive cast. The more important of these culture traits, with particular reference to Europe, may be summarized thus:
| Period | Culture Elements Appearing |
|---|---|
| Iron | Iron, steel; in the Orient, alphabet |
| Bronze | Metals, alloying, megaliths; in the Orient, masonry, writing |
| Full Neolithic | Domesticated animals and plants, stone polishing |
| Early Neolithic | Pottery, bow |
| Upper Palæolithic | Bone work, harpoon, art |
| Lower Palæolithic | Fire, flint work |
The second conclusion is that differentiation of culture according to region is too great to be lightly brushed aside. Even for the Palæolithic, which is so imperfectly known outside of Europe, and whose content is so simple, it is clear that the developmental sequences in Europe cannot be correctly interpreted without reference to provincial growths and their affiliations in other continents (§ [214-216]). In the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages, regional diversity increases. Egypt and China, India and France, present deeply differentiated pictures in 3000 B.C., and again in 1000. Their cultures have throughout a separate aspect. And yet innumerable connections link them. The very bronze and iron that name the later ages, the grains and animals that are the basis of their economic life, were intercontinentally disseminated, and represent in most of the lands that came to possess them an import from an alien focus of growth. And currents usually run both ways. China received metals, wheat, cattle and horses, cotton, architecture, religion, possibly the suggestion of script, from the west; but she gave to it silk and porcelain, gunpowder and paper. Also there are inertias and absences to be reckoned with. The Near East probably gave to Europe most of the elements of civilization which the latter possessed during the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron periods; but much which the Near East had, it failed to transmit. Writing flowed into Europe a full two thousand years after bronze, with which it was coeval in origin. Coinage is far later in the Orient than masonry, but outstripped it and became earlier established in western Europe.
The result is a great tangled web, whose structure is only gradually being revealed by painstaking comparison and intensive study. Often the most convincing evidence as to the composition and direction of the culture currents is provided by highly specialized matters: styles of pottery decoration, shapes of ax heads, forms of ornamental safety-pins. It is not because these minutiæ are so fascinating in themselves that archæologists are endlessly and often tediously concerned with them. It is because these data offer the longest clues through the labyrinth, because on their sure sequences can be strung hundreds of otherwise non-significant or detached facts. But the results are as yet incomplete; they are and promise to remain forever complex; and their systematic presentation in coherent narrative awaits a larger and future treatment. It will be wisest, in a work of the present compass, to outline the whole development of a single area, to serve as a type sample.
231. The Scandinavian Area as an Example
The most satisfactory region for such a purpose is Scandinavia—the peninsula, Denmark, and the Baltic coasts, including much of northeast Germany. This was a glacier-covered area in the Mousterian, and either obliterated or uninhabited in the Upper Palæolithic. It has therefore no Old Stone Age history. During the Magdalenian, the glaciers had shrunk to cover only most of the Scandinavian peninsula and Finland. Denmark was ice-free. But what is now the Baltic stretched as an open sound from the North Sea across southern Finland and northwestern Russia to the Arctic Ocean. From this ocean as well as the remaining glaciers emanated a low temperature, in which there throve arctic forms of life, especially the small shell Yoldia arctica, which flourishes only where the sea bottom temperature ranges between 1° plus and 2° minus Centigrade. This great, chilly sound of some sixteen to ten thousand years ago is known as the Yoldia Sea. Denmark and the German coast must still have been cold, as the remains of the sub-arctic flora show, and were without human inhabitants.
232. The Late Palæolithic Ancylus or Maglemose Period
Around 10,000 B.C., as western Europe was entering upon the Azilian aftermath of the Palæolithic, the land at both ends of the Yoldia Sea was elevated sufficiently to cut this off from the open ocean. The Baltic was thus closed at both ends, instead of neither, as before, or one only, as now. The rivers continued to flow into it; it became brackish and almost fresh, and the fauna changed. The distinctive fossil shell became Ancylus fluviatilis, from which the great lake is known as the Ancylus Lake. The Scandinavian flora once more included real trees, chiefly pines and birches.