The New Stone Age in Northern Europe

by John M. Tyler

Rice growing wild in large fields under suitable conditions is still gathered by all savages. This grain needed no preparation except boiling, while wheat and barley must be crushed or ground between stones, probably used at first for grinding dry nuts. Peas and beans, many vetches, and other members of this family so characteristic of the dryer uplands, were gathered very early, and may have been cultivated before wheat. Melons and many of the gourds always must have been eaten. We shall notice later that the zone of Persia and Asia Minor lay on the boundary line between two great botanical provinces, a northern and a southern, and furnished a very wide range of plants for this earliest experiment station.[83] A great variety of plants were tested sooner or later, and only a few of the very best and most capable of improvement have been retained to our day. On the steppe at a later date wheat and barley were most profitable, and most widely cultivated. But even here hoe-culture was for a long time the only mode. It still exists in Africa, Asia, and Japan; and was the only mode of culture known in America at the time of its discovery. Hoe-culture was at first, and has generally remained, woman’s work; ploughing with cattle was a man’s job. This had far-reaching results to which we must return in a later chapter.

But we must not think that the Iranian plateau, with its great zone of piedmont steppe stretching eastward and westward along its northern border across the continent of Asia, was the only place where agriculture could start and reach a high degree of development in ancient times. Its possibility lay in the habit of the woman of collecting the vegetable food and smaller animals, while the men hunted and fished. Useful food plants furnishing large amounts of food are to be found in all continents, and differ markedly in different soils and climatic zones. Hence even the beginnings of agriculture were probably not confined to any one region, but were wide-spread, manifold, and independent. The Chinese migrating eastward and southeastward down the great river valleys from eastern Turkestan may have carried with them the cultivation of wheat, or adopted it independently. The rice culture of China may have been borrowed from India or independently evolved. India and the Malay Archipelago and Africa have every one its own agriculture, of whose origin and early development we know nothing.

But western Asia, or more precisely the Iranian plateau, had another piedmont region beside the zone stretching along its northern border. This second piedmont zone of grass-land, or oasis, as Breasted has pointed out, bends in the form of a horseshoe along the western slope of the Iranian plateau, then northward and westward around the headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and southward through Syria.[84] Here it dries out in the great Syrian and Arabian deserts. But these also, as well as the Arabian plateau stretching along the Red Sea, may have been well watered and inhabitable in early post-glacial time. The Arabian plateau and its piedmont zone in those days may well have been an independent centre of agricultural development, which gave place to the nomadism so characteristic of the Semitic peoples only at a later date. Of the early history of Arabia we are still completely ignorant. But in the twilight of history we see those Semites coming into the Mesopotamian valley from the west while the Sumerians entered from the east. Those two streams of migration, mingling, founded the great Babylonian Empire, to which all oriental peoples looked up with an awe and reverence, as well as fear, which we can scarcely appreciate. Evidently, and this is the fact of chief importance to us, parts of the nearer east were highly civilized before anything better than savagery had developed in northern Europe.

But far older than these cities of the Mesopotamian river valleys is the culture of the forests, glades, lakes, and riversides of the plateaus. Evidence seems steadily to accumulate that here we are to seek for the beginnings of agriculture and the domestication of animals which were slowly to change the face of the earth and the life and character of man.

Hoe-tillage of the ground is evidently far older than cattle-raising or nomadic life. It had been brought to Anau before 8000 B. C., and had probably already been practised at Susa and elsewhere thousands of years earlier. But we cannot help asking whether other plants may not have been cultivated long before cereals. Roots and tubers are much more conspicuous than the smaller grains. These underground storehouses of nutriment adapted to give the plant a quick and sure start, during a short spring period of growth and flowering, are abundant everywhere. They still form the staple crop in many parts of the world. We remember the potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, the cassava, and a host of others. In our northern regions we still cultivate beets, turnips, and carrots, though now becoming more and more food for cattle. These plants also are less closely limited to the steppes and plateaus. They occur all through the mountain or shore regions, and for this reason would have been likely to attract the attention of “collectors.”

Primitive woman had no plough, only the digging-stick, the agricultural implement of the Australians. Later they learned to make a hoe, sometimes out of a tine of deer’s horn, sometimes of stone or other material, something half-way between a hoe and a pick. With such an implement a fair amount of soil could be broken up and well stirred. When domestic animals were introduced into Africa the plough followed only in the eastern regions; all through the rest of Africa the old hoe-culture held its own. Europeans introduced the plough into America. As a means of breaking up the ground the plough is infinitely superior; for tillage and cultivation the hoe is far more useful. When wheat has once been sown it cares for itself; further cultivation is unnecessary—it is the lazy man’s crop. Perhaps that, with a touch of the spur of necessity, persuaded the male to undertake ploughing. When the plough was invented many vegetables formerly cultivated probably became less profitable or attractive, and were given up. A revolution took place in agriculture. Probably the plough was at first dragged by women. It is impossible to say just when it was invented. It was used during the Bronze period, for it is represented in rock-carvings of that age. Some stone ploughshares may be Neolithic.

Studying European Neolithic agriculture in the light of the methods of savage and barbarous peoples, or even of our pioneer ancestors, we imagine them living on the border of the forests which furnished food and wood for buildings and implements. The first step was to burn and clear a place where the undergrowth was not too heavy, and to break up the soil with pick or hoe. Here the patch of grain was sowed. The soil fertilized by the ashes gave him a fair crop, but became exhausted after a few years of cultivation, and he was compelled to break up a new field. Some investigators have thought that the lake-dwellers used the manure from their cattle on their fields, but in most parts of Europe cultivation of the soil was probably crude and superficial. On the chalk downs of England, chief places of settlement by Neolithic peoples in this region, we find terraces and narrow strips which may have been prepared at this time, though their age is very uncertain. They often are of a size and form not well adapted to plough-culture. They have a look of permanent occupation. These may well have been fertilized. The evidence is very uncertain. When the loess soil was of fair depth cultivation may have gone on for many years without fertilizers of any sort.

The primitive plough was hardly more than a pointed stout branch or stub of a tree, whose longer fork was fastened to the yoke. It made a furrow triangular in cross-section, broad at the top and narrowing to an edge at the bottom. It did not “turn” a strip, and between two furrows a long ridge was left unbroken. Even in Roman times cross-ploughing was common or usual. Even this rude culture needed the strength of cattle to draw the plough. The plough is associated in our minds with oxen, and the first man who made his cow, instead of his wife, draw the plough was a great benefactor.

Even the domestication of cattle was less easy than it seems at first sight. Wild animals rarely reproduce in captivity. Pumpelly thinks that the way toward the domestication of our larger cattle may have been paved by a long period of drought driving them from the steppe into the better-watered oases, and thus into association with man. But this could hardly have been true of the mountain sheep and goats, on which man may well have experimented before he attempted the more difficult task of domesticating the larger, more powerful, and less manageable Bos namadicus. How did man hit upon the plan of castrating the bull and thus changing this intractable, ugly beast into the docile and patient ox? There seems to be a good amount of plausibility in Hehn’s brilliant suggestion that this may have come about in connection with some ancient systems of religious rites and beliefs.[85] There is nothing impossible or very improbable in this view. But the very brilliancy of the conjecture and the clearness with which it is expressed, and the wealth of learning used to support it, warns us against too ready acceptance. We can only confess our complete ignorance and wait for future discoveries as patiently as we can.