“There were years that no one talked of. There were times of horrid doubt.
There was faith and hope and whacking and despair.”
Man was experimenting with all kinds of climates and conditions. It was in the hard and cold northern regions that he developed farthest, though less rapidly at first. We have already glanced at the educational results of language, of family life in the rock-shelter around the fire, of the fashioning and use of tools, of his love of ornaments and display, of his dawning and clearing self-consciousness, of the beginnings of ownership. We have noticed his burial rites and their suggestions. All these may have been rude and crude, but they contained the germs of vast possibilities, though painfully slow of development. His “castles in Spain” were his richest possessions, though he probably never knew or suspected them. One hundred thousand years of human life in Europe produced nothing higher than Neanderthal man.
Suddenly, at the beginning of Upper Paleolithic time Cro-Magnon man appeared. His splendid physique and large brain, his production and appreciation of art, and many other qualities, have led some one to speak of him as the “prehistoric Greek.” In our enthusiasm we may easily overestimate his powers; but, as we study him and his work, we feel that here was a great race, and that now some great human possibilities are to be fully attained and made permanent. Apparently he had come from the plateau region of western Asia. Near his birthplace there must have been other peoples capable of great things. We remember that Susa was probably founded not much later than the beginning of the Magdalenian epoch in Europe. But the Cro-Magnon folk decreased in numbers, in stature, apparently also in ability and vitality. During the period of transition to Neolithic time Europe was occupied only by a sparse population of fishermen along the rivers, while barbarous hunting tribes were working their way northward toward the Baltic. The shell-heaps of Denmark are the monuments of the attainments of this epoch.
A higher civilization had already entered the Mediterranean basin. It was building houses, villages, possibly forerunners of the Greek city-states. Especially in Greece they were sufficiently separated to allow independence of development and great variety, and yet near enough to one another to prevent the ill effects of complete isolation. Here there was rapid interchange and improvement of physical and mental attainments, mental stimulation and rivalry, change and progress. Implements, weapons, pottery; new discoveries, inventions, ideas, arts, and habits of life and thought spread slowly and gradually from these centres of progressing culture far to the northward. This was undoubtedly one important source of stimuli. But we must not overestimate its influence.[172]
It spread through France into England and Denmark. As time went on this northward current increased and strengthened until, during the Bronze period, the Baltic region, especially Denmark, became almost a second Mediterranean centre of culture and art; just as at a far later time Flemish cities became the Venices of the north. But the north was never a beggarly dependent and imitator of the south. It selected and accepted only what it would, almost always modified and frequently improved what it had selected.
ANCIENT FISHERMEN
From the mural painting by Fernand Cormon in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.