Fig. 25. Growth of civilization during the Palæolithic.
The end of the Palæolithic thus sees man in possession of a number of mechanical arts which enable him to produce a considerable variety of tools in several materials: sees him controlling fire; cooking food; wearing clothes, and living in definite habitations; probably possessing some sort of social grouping, order, and ideas of law and justice; clearly under the influence of some kind of religion; highly advanced in the plastic arts; and presumably already narrating legends and singing songs. In short, many fundamental elements of civilization were established. It is true that the sum total of knowledge and accomplishments was still pitifully small. The most advanced of the Old Stone Age men perhaps knew and could do about one thing for every hundred that we know and can do. A whole array of fundamental inventions—the bow and arrow, pottery, domestication of animals and plants—had not yet been attempted, and they do not appear on the scene until the Neolithic. But in spite of the enormous gaps remaining to be filled in the Neolithic and in the historic period, it does seem fair to say that many of the outlines of what civilization was ultimately to be had been substantially blocked out during the Upper Palæolithic. Most of the framework was there, even though but a small fraction of its content had yet been entered.
CHAPTER VII
HEREDITY, CLIMATE, AND CIVILIZATION
[82.] Heredity.—[83.] Geographical environment.—[84.] Diet.—[85.] Agriculture.—[86.] Cultural factors.—[87.] Cultural distribution.—[88.] Historical induction.
82. Heredity
The first of the several factors through which it is logically possible to explain the life and conduct and customs of any people is race or heredity: in other words, the inborn tendencies, bodily and mental, of the people that carry these customs. At first sight it may seem that this element of race might be quite influential. Since peoples differ in inherited characteristics of body—complexion, features, hair, eye color, head form, and the like—these bodily inherited peculiarities ought to be accompanied by mentally inherited traits, such as greater or less inclination to courage, energy, power of abstract thought, mechanical ingenuity, musical or æsthetic proclivities, swift reactions, ability to concentrate, gift of expression. Such racial mental traits, again, might conceivably be expressed in the conduct and culture of each people. Races born to a greater activity of the mechanical faculties would achieve more or higher inventions, those innately gifted in the direction of music would develop more subtly melodious songs, and so on.