Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life and Art

by Henry Fairfield Osborn

The above outline of the beginnings of the Neolithic Age shows that the Palæolithic represents a complete cycle of human development; we have traced its rise, its perfection, its decline. During this dawning period of the long prehistory of Europe the dominant features are the very great antiquity of the spirit of man and the fundamental similarity between the great steps of prehistory and of history.

The rise of the spirit of man through the Old Stone Age cannot be traced continuously in a single race because the races were changing; as at the present time, one race replaced another, or two races dwelt side by side. The sudden appearance in Europe at least 25,000 years ago of a human race with a high order of brain power and ability was not a leap forward but the effect of a long process of evolution elsewhere. When the prehistoric archæology of eastern Europe and of Asia has been investigated we may obtain some light on this antecedent development.

During this age the rudiments of all the modern economic powers of man were developed: the guidance of the hand by the mind, manifested in his creative industry; his inventive faculty; the currency or spread of his inventions; the adaptation of means to ends in utensils, in weapons, and in clothing. The same is true of the æsthetic powers, of close observation, of the sense of form, of proportion, of symmetry, the appreciation of beauty of animal form and the beauty of line, color, and form in modelling and sculpture. Finally, the schematic representation and notation of ideas so far as we can perceive was alphabetic rather than pictographic. Of the musical sense we have at present no evidence. The religious sense, the appreciation of some power or powers behind the great phenomena of nature, is evidenced in the reverence for the dead, in burials apparently related to notions of a future existence of the dead, and especially in the mysteries of the art of the caverns.

All these steps indicate the possession of certain generic faculties of mind similar to our own. That this mind of the Upper Palæolithic races was of a kind capable of a high degree of education we entertain no doubt whatever because of the very advanced order of brain which is developed in the higher members of these ancient races; in fact, it may be fairly assumed from experiences in the education of existing races of much lower brain capacity, such as the Eskimo or Fuegian. The emergence of such a mind from the mode of life of the Old Stone Age is one of the greatest mysteries of psychology and of history.

The rise and fall of cultures and of industries, which is at this very day the outstanding feature of the history of western Europe, was fully typified in the very ancient contests with stone weapons which were waged along the borders of the Somme, the Marne, the Seine, and the Danube. No doubt, each invasion, each conquest, each substitution of an industry or a culture had within it the impelling contest of the spirit and will of man, the intelligence directing various industrial and warlike implements, the superiority either of force or of mind.

(1) Cartailhac, 1903.1, pp. 330, 331.

(2) Déchelette, 1908.1, vol. I, pp. 314-320.

(3) Op. cit., p. 320.

(4) Op. cit., pp. 505-510.