Anthropology

by Edward B. Tylor

Whether it may be considered or not that Europe was a quarter of the globe inhabited by the earliest tribes of men, it so happens that remains found in Europe furnish at present the best proofs of man’s antiquity. To understand these, it must be explained that the stone age had an earlier and a later period, as may be plainly seen in looking at a good collection of stone implements. [Fig. 1] is intended to give some idea of those in use in the later stone age. The hatchet is neatly shaped and edged by rubbing on a grinding-stone, as is also the hammer-head. The spear and arrows, scraper, and flake-knife it would have been waste of labour to grind, but they are chipped out with much skill. On the whole, these stone implements are much like those which the North American Indians have been using to our own day. The question is, how long ago tribes who made such stone implements were living in Europe. As to this, we may fairly judge from the position in which they are found in Denmark. The forests of that country are mainly of beeches, but in the peat-mosses lie innumerable trunks of oaks, which show that at an earlier period oak-forests prevailed, and deeper still there lie trunks of pine trees, which show that there were pine-forests still older than the oak-forests. Thus there have been three successive forest-periods, the beech, the oak, and the pine, and the depth of the peat-mosses, which in places is as much as thirty feet, shows that the period of the pine trees was thousands of years ago. While the forests have been changing, the condition of the people living among them has changed also. The modern woodman cuts down the beech-trees with his iron axe, but among the oak-trunks in the peat are found bronze swords and shield-bosses, which show that the inhabitants of the country were then in the bronze age, and lastly, a flint hatchet taken out from where it lay still lower in the peat beneath the pine-trunks, proves that stone-age men in Denmark lived in the pine-forest period, which carries them back to high antiquity. In England, the tribes who have left such stone implements were in the land before the invasion of that Keltic race whom we call the ancient Britons, and who no doubt came armed with weapons of metal. The stone hatchet-blades and arrow-heads of the older population lie scattered over our country, hill and dale, moor and fen, near the surface of the ground, or deeper underground in peat-mosses, or beds of mud and silt. Such bogs or mud-flats began at a date which chronologists would call ancient. But they are what geologists, accustomed to vaster periods of time, consider modern. They belong to the newer alluvial deposits, that is, they were formed within the times when the lie of the land and the flow of the streams were much as they are now. To get an idea of this, one has only to look down from a hill-side into a wide valley below, and notice how its flat flooring of mud and sand, stretching right across, must have been laid down by flood-waters following very much their present course along the main stream and down the side slopes. The people of the newer stone age, whose implements are seen in [Fig. 1], lived within this historically ancient, but geologically modern period, and relics of them are found only in places where man or nature could then have placed them.

Fig. 2.—Earlier Stone Age (palæolithic) flint picks or hatchets.

But there had been a still earlier period of the stone age, when yet ruder tribes of men lived in our parts of the world, when the climate and the face of the country were strangely different from the present state of things. On the slopes of river valleys such as that of the Ouse, in England, and the Somme, in France, 50 or 100 feet above the present river-banks, and thus altogether out of the reach of any flood now, there are beds of so-called drift gravel. Out of these beds have been dug numerous rude implements of flint, chipped into shape by the hands of men who had gained no mean dexterity in the art, as any one will find who will try his hand at making one, with any tools he thinks fit. The most remarkable implements of this earlier stone age are the picks or hatchets shown in [Fig. 2]. The coarseness of their finish, and the absence of any signs of grinding even at the edges of hacking or cutting instruments, show that the makers had not come nearly to the skill of the later stone age. It is usual to distinguish the two kinds of implements, and the periods they belong to, by the terms introduced by Sir J. Lubbock, palæolithic and neolithic, that is “old-stone” and “new-stone.” Looking now at the high gravel-beds in which palæolithic implements such as those shown in [Fig. 2] occur, it is evident from their position that they had nothing to do with the water-action which is now laying down and shifting sand-banks and mud-flats at the bottom of the valleys, nor with the present rain-wash which scours the surface of the hill-sides. They must have been deposited in a former period when the condition of land and water was different from what it is now. How far this state of things was due to the valleys not being yet cut out to near their present depth, to the whole country lying lower above the sea-level, or to the rivers being vastly larger than at present from the heavier rainfall of a pluvial period, it would be raising too intricate geological questions to discuss here. Geology shows the old drift-gravels to belong to times when the glacial or icy period with its arctic climate was passing, or had passed away, in Europe. From the bones and teeth found with the flint implements in the gravel-beds, it is known what animals inhabited the land at the same time with the men of the old stone age. The mammoth, or huge woolly elephant, and several kinds of rhinoceros, also extinct, browsed on the branches of the forest trees, and a species of hippopotamus much like that at present living frequented the rivers. The musk-ox and the grizzly bear, which England harboured in this remote period, may still be hunted in the Rocky Mountains, but the ancient cave-bear, which was one of the dangerous wild beasts of our land, is no longer on the face of the earth. The British lion was of a larger breed than those now in Asia and Africa, and perhaps than those which Herodotus mentions as prowling in Macedonia in the fifth century B.C., and falling on the camels of Xerxes’ army. To judge by such signs as the presence of the reindeer, and the mammoth with its hairy coat, the climate of Europe was severer than now, perhaps like that of Siberia. How long man had been in the land there is no clear evidence. For all we know, he may have lasted on from an earlier and more genial period, or he may have only lately migrated into Europe from some warmer region. Implements like his are not unknown in Asia, as where in Southern India, above Madras, there lies at the foot of the Eastern Gháts a terrace of irony clay or laterite, containing stone implements of very similar make to those of the drift-men in Europe.

Fig. 3.—Sketch of mammoth from cave of La Madeleine (Lartet and Christy).

These European savages of the mammoth-period resorted much to shelter at the foot of overhanging cliffs, and to caverns such as Kent’s Hole near Torquay, where the implements of the men and the bones of the beasts are found together in abundance. In Central France especially, the examination of such bone-caves has brought to light evidence of the whole way of life of a group of ancient tribes. The reindeer which have now retreated to high northern latitudes, were then plentiful in France, as appears from their bones and antlers imbedded with remains of the mammoth under the stalagmite floors of the caves of Perigord. With them are found rude stone hatchets and scrapers, pounding-stones, bone spear-heads, awls, arrow-straighteners, and other objects belonging to a life like that of the modern Esquimaux who hunt the reindeer on the coasts of Hudson’s Bay. Like the Esquimaux also, these early French and Swiss savages spent their leisure time in carving figures of animals. Among many such figures found in the French caves is a mammoth, [Fig. 3], scratched on a piece of its own ivory, so as to touch off neatly the shaggy hair and huge curved tusks which distinguish the mammoth from other species of elephant. There has been also found a rude representation of a man, [Fig. 4], grouped with two horses’ heads and a snake or eel; this is interesting as being the most ancient human portrait known.

Fig. 4.—Sketch of man and horses from cave (Lartet and Christy).

Thus it appears that man of the older stone age was already living when the floods went as high above our present valley-flats as the tops of the high trees growing there now reach, and when the climate was of that Lapland kind suited to the woolly mammoth and the reindeer, and the rest of the un-English looking group of animals now perished out of this region, or extinct altogether. From all that is known of the slowness with which such alterations take place anywhere in the lie of the land, the climate, and the wild animals, we cannot suppose changes so vast to have happened without a long lapse of time before the newer stone age came in, when the streams had settled down to near their present levels, and the climate and the wild creatures had become much as they were within the historical period. It is also plain from the actual remains found, that these most ancient known tribes were wild hunters and fishers, such as we should now class as savages. It is best, however, not to apply to them the term primitive men, as this might be understood to mean that they were the first men who appeared on earth, or at least like them. The life the men of the mammoth-period must have led at Abbeville or Torquay, shows on the face of it reasons against its being man’s primitive life. These old stone-age men are more likely to have been tribes whose ancestors while living under a milder climate gained some rude skill in the arts of procuring food and defending themselves, so that afterwards they were able by a hard struggle to hold their own against the harsh weather and fierce beasts of the quaternary period.