Taking, then, this race as we find it, without speculating upon its immediate origin or future, we may endeavour to gather some notion of man’s way of life in these primitive times. It was of the simplest. We may well suppose, for some proofs to the contrary would otherwise most likely have been discovered, that his life was that of the hunter, which is, it has been said, generally the earliest phase of human society, and that he had not yet learned to till the ground, or to keep domestic animals for his use. No bones of animals like the sheep or dog are found among palæolithic remains, and therefore it seems probable that palæolithic man had not yet entered upon the next and higher phase, the pastoral life. He had probably no fixed home, no idea of nationality, scarcely any of obligations beyond the circle of his own family, in that larger sense in which the word ‘family’ is generally understood by savages. Some sort of family or tribe no doubt held together, were it only for the sake of protecting themselves against the attacks of their neighbours. For the rest, their time was spent, as the time of other savages is spent, out of doors in fighting and hunting, within doors in preserving their food and their skins, in elaborately manufacturing their implements of stone and bone. In the inclement seasons they were crowded together in their caves, perhaps for months together, as the Eskimo are in winter, almost without moving. As appears from the remains in the caves, they were in the habit at such times of throwing the old bones and the offal of their food into any corner (the Eskimo do so to this day), without taking the smallest trouble to obviate the unpleasant effects produced by the decay of all this animal matter in an atmosphere naturally close. Through the long winter nights they found time to perfect their skill in those wonderful bone carvings, and to lay up a store of weapons which they afterwards—anticipating the rise of commerce—exchanged with the inhabitants of some other cave for their peculiar manufacture; for in one of the caves of the Dordogne we find the remains of what must have been a regular manufactory of one sort of flint-knife or lance-head, almost to the exclusion of any other of the ordinary weapons, while another cave seems to have been devoted as exclusively to the production of implements of bone.
Man had no doubt a hard life, not only to obtain the food he needed, but to defend himself against the attacks of many wild animals by whom he was surrounded, animals whose particular species have in many cases become extinct, and whose classes have long ceased to inhabit Europe. Such are the cave lion, cave bear, cave hyæna, brown bear, grizzly bear, mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, urus, bison, and such rarities (with us) as the reindeer, the Irish elk, and the beaver.
Some people have thought that they discovered in the traces of fires which had been sometimes lighted before caves in which were found human skeletons, the indication of sepulchral rites, and that these caves were used as burial-places. But these suppositions are too vague and uncertain to be relied upon. It may, however, be said that we have evidence pointing to the fact that even in the drift period men buried their dead, and it is hardly possible to believe that they did so without paying some obsequies to the remains. On this interesting subject of sepulchral rites we must forbear to say anything until we come to speak of the second stone age. Our knowledge of the early stone-people must close with the slight picture we have been able to form of their life; of their death, of their rites of the dead, and the ideas concerning a future state which these might indicate, we cannot speak.
This, then, is all we know of man of the first stone age, and it is not probable that our knowledge will ever be greatly increased. New finds of these stone implements are being made almost every day, not in Europe only, though at present chiefly there, but in many other parts of the globe. But the new discoveries closely resemble the old, the same sort of implements recur again and again, and we only learn by them over how great a part of the globe this stage in our civilization extended. Further information of this kind may change some of our theories concerning the duration or the origin of this civilization, but it will not add much to our knowledge of its nature. Yet it cannot be denied that the thought of man’s existence only, though we know little more than this, a contemporary of the mammoth at the time which immediately succeeded the glacial period, or perhaps before the glacial period had quite come to an end, is full of the deepest interest for us. The long silent time which intervenes between the creation of our first parents and those biblical events whereof the narration is to a certain extent continuous and consecutive, till the dawn of history in the Bible narrative in fact, is to some small extent filled in. We shall see in the next chapter how the second stone age serves to carry the same picture further. In rudest outline the life of man is placed before us, and if we have no more than this, we have at any rate something which may occupy our imaginations, and prevent them, as they otherwise would do, as, of old, men’s minds did, from leaping almost at a bound from the Creation to the Flood, and from the Flood to the time of Abraham.
CHAPTER II.
THE SECOND STONE AGE.
The age of
polished stone.
Between the earlier and the later stone age, between man of the drift period and man of the neolithic era, occurs a vast blank which we cannot fill in. We bid adieu to the primitive inhabitants of our earth while they are still the contemporaries of the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, or of the cave lion and the cave bear, and while the very surface of the earth wears a different aspect from what it now wears. With a changed condition of things, with a race of animals which differed not essentially from those known to us, and with a settled conformation of our lands and seas not again to be departed from, comes before us the second race of man—man of the polished stone age. We cannot account for the sudden break; or, what is in truth the same thing, many different suggestions to account for it have been made. Some have supposed that the palæolithic men lived at a time anterior to the last glacial era, for there were many glacial periods in Europe, and were either exterminated altogether or driven thence to more southern countries by the change in climate. Others have imagined that a new and more cultivated race migrated into these countries, and at once introduced the improved weapons of the later stone age; and lastly, others have looked upon the first stone age as having existed before the Deluge, and hold that the second race of man, the descendants of Noah, began at once with a higher sort of civilization. Two of these four theories, it will be seen, must suppose that man somewhere went through the stages of improvement necessary to the introduction of the newer sort of weapons, and they therefore take it for granted that the graduated series of stone implements, indicating a gradual progress from the old time to the newer, though they have not yet been found, are to be discovered somewhere. The first and last theories would seem to be more independent of this supposition, and therefore, as far as our knowledge yet goes, to be more in accordance with the facts which we possess. It is, however, by no means safe to affirm that the graduated series of implements required to support the other suppositions will never be found.
The
kitchen-middens.
Be this as it may, with the second era begins something like a continuous history of our race. However scanty the marks of his tracks, we may feel sure that from this time forward man passed on one unbroken journey of development and change through the forgotten eras of the world’s life down to the dawn of history. We take the rudest condition in which we find man to be the most primitive, and we start with him in this new stone age as still a fisher or a hunter only. He first appears before us as depending for his nourishment chiefly upon the shell-fish on certain coasts of northern Europe. In the north of Europe—that is to say, upon the shores of the Baltic—are found numbers of mounds, some five or ten feet high, and in length as much, sometimes, as a thousand feet, by one or two hundred feet in breadth. The mounds consist for the most part of myriads of cast-away shells of oysters, mussels, cockles, and other shell-fish; mixed up with these are not a few bones of birds and quadrupeds, showing that these also served for food to the primitive dwellers by the shell mounds. The mounds are called in the present day kjökken-möddings, kitchen-middens. They have been chiefly found in Denmark. They are, in truth, the refuse heaps of the earliest kitchens which have smoked in these northern regions;[6] for they are the remains of some of the earliest among the polished-stone age inhabitants of Europe. So primitive are the weapons of the Danish kitchen-middens, that they have sometimes been classed with the old stone age implements. But I believe some traces of grinding if not of polishing have been found on them. And at any rate the mammalia contemporary with the kitchen-midden men are very different from those of the drift or of the caves.
The raisers of these refuse mounds were, we may judge, pre-eminently fishers; and not generally fishers of that adventurous kind who seek their treasure in the depths of the ocean. They lived chiefly upon those smaller fish and shell-fish which could be caught without much difficulty or danger. Yet not only on these; for the bones of some deep-sea fish have also been discovered, whence we know that these mound-raisers were possessed of the art of navigation, though doubtless in a most primitive form. Among remains believed to be contemporary with the shell mounds are found canoes not built of planks, as our boats and as most canoes are nowadays, but merely hollowed out of the trunks of trees; sometimes these canoes are quite straight fore and aft, just as the trunk was when it was cut, sometimes a little bevelled from below, like a punt of the present day; but we believe they are never found rounded or pointed at the prow. Here, then, we see another discovery which has been of the greatest use to mankind, whereof the first traces come to us from these northern shell mounds. That ‘heart with oak and bronze thrice bound,’ the man who first ventured to sea in the first vessel, had lived before this time. Whoever he was, we cannot, if we think of it, refuse to endorse the praise bestowed upon him by the poet; it required no mean courage to venture out to sea on such a strange make-shift as was the first canoe. Perhaps the earliest experiment was an involuntary one, made by some one who was washed away upon a large log or felled tree. We can fancy how thence would arise the notion of venturing again a little way, then of hollowing a seat in the middle of the trunk, until the primitive canoes, such as we find, came into existence.