The remains which illustrate the development of the human mind are not so scarce. A single man might easily manufacture hundreds or even thousands of implements in the course of a lifetime. When these are of stone they are practically imperishable; whereas it is only the exceptional skeleton, protected by favorable circumstances, of which the bones will endure for thousands of years. For every ancient true fossil trace of man that has been found, we have therefore thousands of the works of his hands.
The inadequateness of the cultural record is not in the insufficient number of the specimens, but in their onesidedness. Objects of stone, even those of horn and of metal, last; clothing, fabrics, skins, basketry, and wooden articles ordinarily decay so rapidly as to have no chance of being preserved for tens of thousands of years. Tools of the most ancient times have often been found in abundance; objects manufactured with tools from softer and less enduring materials are scarce even from moderately old periods. Now and then a piece of an earthenware pot may show the imprint of a textile. Textiles and foodstuffs are occasionally preserved by charring in fire or by penetration of metallic salts. Charcoal or ashes found in pockets or beds indicate that fire was maintained in one spot for considerable periods, and must therefore have been controlled and used, possibly even produced, by human agency. A bone needle with an eye proves that some one must have sewn, and one may therefore assume that garments were worn at the time. But for every point established in this way there are dozens about which knowledge remains blank.
Understanding of the social and religious life of the earliest men is naturally filled with the greatest gaps, and the farther back one goes in time, the greater is the enveloping darkness. The problem is as difficult as that of figuring accurately the degree of intelligence attained by the mailed fishes of the Devonian age some thirty or forty million years ago, or of estimating whether the complexion of Pithecanthropus was black, brown, or white. One can guess on these matters. One may by careful comparisons obtain some partial and indirect indication of an answer. But it is clearly wisest not to try to stretch too far the conclusions which can be drawn. Imagination has its value in science as in art and other aspects of life, yet when it becomes disproportionate to the facts, it is a danger instead of an aid.
Still, now and then something has been preserved from which one may draw inferences with a reasonable prospect of certainty even concerning the non-material side of life. If human bones are discovered charred and split open, there is good reason for believing these bones to be the remains of a cannibal feast. When prehistoric skeletons are found in the position in which death might have taken place, the presumption is that the people of that time abandoned their dead as animals would. If on the other hand a skeleton lies intact with its arms carefully folded, there is little room for doubt that the men of the time had progressed to the point where the survivors put away their dead; in other words, that human burial had been instituted, and that accordingly at least some rude form of society was in existence. When, perhaps from a still later period, a skeleton is found with red paint adhering to the bones, although these lie in their natural places, the only conclusion to be drawn is that the dead body was coated with pigment before being interred and that as the soft tissues wasted away the red ocher came to adhere to the bones. In this case the painting was evidently part of a rite performed over the dead.
66. Stone and Metals
The cultural record of man’s existence is divided into two great periods. In the latter of these, in which we are still living, metals were used; in the earlier, metals were unknown and tools made of stone. Hence the terms “Age of Stone” and “Age of Metals.” The duration of these two main periods is unequal. Metals were first used in Asia and Egypt about 4,000 B.C. and in Europe about 3,000 B.C.—say five to six thousand years ago. The most conservative authorities, however, would allow forty or fifty thousand years for the Stone Age; while others make it cover a quarter million. The assumption, which is here followed, of the intermediate figure of a hundred thousand years gives the Stone Age a duration twenty times as long as the Age of Metals. When one remembers that hand in hand with metals came the art of writing and an infinite variety of inventions, it is clear that larger additions have been made to human civilization in the comparatively brief period of metals than in the tremendously longer time that preceded it. Progress in the Stone Age was not only slow, but the farther back one peers into this age, the more lagging does the evolution of human culture seem to have been. One can definitely recognize a tendency toward the acceleration of evolution: the farther advancement has got the faster it moves.
The Age of Metals is subdivided into the Iron Age, which begins some three thousand years ago, say about 1,500-1,000 B.C.; and an earlier Bronze Age. In the Bronze Age one must distinguish first a period in which native copper was employed in some parts of the world; after which comes an era in which it had been learned that copper melted with a proportion of about one-tenth tin, thus producing bronze, was a superior material. Within the past five thousand years or so, accordingly, there are recognized successively the ages of copper, of bronze, and of iron.
Broadly speaking, these five thousand years are also the historic period. Not that there exist historic records going back so far as this for every people. But the earliest preserved documents that the historian uses, the written monuments of Egypt and Babylonia, are about five thousand years old. The Age of Metals thus corresponds approximately with the period of History; the Stone Age, with Prehistory.