CHAPTER VI
THE BEGINNINGS OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION
[65.] Fossils of the body and of the mind.—[66.] Stone and metals.—[67.] The Old and the New Stone Ages.—[68.] The Eolithic Age.—[69.] The Palæolithic Age: duration, climate, animals.—[70.] Subdivisions of the Palæolithic.—[71.] Human racial types in the Palæolithic.—[72.] Palæolithic flint implements.—[73.] Other materials: bone and horn.—[74.] Dress.—[75.] Harpoons and weapons.—[76.] Wooden implements.—[77.] Fire.—[78.] Houses.—[79.] Religion.—[80.] Palæolithic art.—[81.] Summary of advance in the Palæolithic.
65. Fossils of the Body and of the Mind
The discovery of fossils has yielded some idea of the history of the human body during the past million years. The evidence is far from complete, but there is enough to prove a development much as might be expected under the hypothesis of evolution. To some extent fossils also afford an insight into the development of the human mind. The capacity of a skull gives the size of the brain. The interior surface of the skull corresponds to the outer surface of the brain. In this way some slight knowledge has been gained of the development in ancient types of man of the convolutions and centers of the brain surface with which mental activity is associated. Even limb bones yield indirect indications. A straight thigh means an erect posture of the body, with the arms no longer used for locomotion. Released from this service, they are freed for other purposes, such as grasping, handling, and various forms of what we call work. But a hand adapted for work would be useless without an intelligence to direct its operations. Thus the bones of our precursors provide suggestions as to the degree of development of their minds. The suggestions are sketchy and incomplete, but they are worth something.
A second line of evidence is fuller. When a human or pre-human hand has made any article, one can judge from that article what its purpose is likely to have been, how it was used, how much intelligence that use involved, what degree of skill was necessary to manufacture the article. All such artifacts—tools, weapons, or anything constructed—are a reflection of the degree of “culture” or civilization, elementary or advanced, possessed by the beings who made them.
On the whole the evidence to be got from artifacts as to the degree of advancement of their makers or users is greater than the information derivable from the structure of skeletons. A large brain does not always imply high intelligence. Even a much convoluted brain surface may accompany a mediocre mind. In other words, the correlation between body and mind has not been worked out with accuracy. On the other hand an advanced type of tool necessarily implies more skill in its use, and therefore a decided development of the use of intelligence. Similarly, if one finds nothing but simple tools occurring among any past or present people, we may be sure that their civilization and the training of their minds have remained backward.
It is true that one cannot always infer from a particular manufactured object the mentality of the particular person who owned and used it. An imbecile may come into possession of a good knife and even possess some ability in using it. But he can acquire the knife only if there are other individuals in his community or time who know how to smelt iron and forge steel. In short, even a single jackknife is proof that human ingenuity has progressed to the point of making important discoveries, and that arts of relatively high order are being practised. In this way a solitary implement, if its discovery is thoroughly authenticated, may suffice to establish a relatively high or low degree of civilization for a prehistoric period or a vanished race.
An implement manufactured by human hands of the past is of course different from an actual fossil of a former human being, and it is always necessary to distinguish between the two. The one is something made by a human being and in some measure reflecting the development of his intelligence; the other something left over or preserved from the human body itself. Nevertheless, in a metaphorical sense, the implements of the past may well be spoken of as the fossils of civilization. They are only its fragments, but they allow us to reconstruct the mode of life of prehistoric peoples and utterly forgotten nations, in much the same way as the geologist and the palæontologist reconstruct from true fossils the forms of life that existed on the earth or in the seas millions of years ago.
There is even a further parallel. Just as the geologist knows that one fossil is older or younger than another from its position in the earth’s crust or the stratum in which it was laid down, so the student of the beginnings of human civilization knows that the deposit at the bottom of a cave must be more ancient than the refuse at the top. He calls in the geologist to tell him the age of a glacial deposit or of a river terrace, and thus he may learn that, of two types of implements found at different places or levels, one is so many thousands of years or geological periods older than the other. In the long run, too, the older implements prove to be the simpler. Thus archæologists have succeeded in working out an evolution of civilization which parallels rather neatly the evolution of life forms. This evolution of human mental operations as it is reflected in the artifacts preserved from the lowest and earliest strata of civilization is the subject of the present chapter.
There is another way in which the evidence on the two lines of evolution is similar: its incompleteness. The geological record has been compared to a book from which whole chapters are missing; of others, but stray leaves remain; and only now and then have consecutive pages been preserved unmutilated. Humanity has always been so much less populous than the remainder of the animal kingdom, especially in its earlier stages, that the number of individuals whose bones have been preserved as fossils is infinitely smaller. The result is that we account ourselves fortunate in having been able to assemble six or seven not quite complete skeletons, and fragmentary portions of two or three dozen other individuals, of the Neandertal race which inhabited western Europe for thousands of years. For still earlier races or species of man the actual data are even scantier. Knowledge of so fundamental a form as Pithecanthropus, the earliest of the antecedents of man yet known, rests on two bones and two teeth, plus a third tooth discovered as the sole result of a subsequent expedition. Heidelberg man has to be reconstructed from a jaw.