The New Stone Age in Northern Europe

by John M. Tyler

Déchellette has called attention to the striking analogies in form of settlement, in primitive idols, in pottery with painting and spiral ornament between the villages of the Balkans, Troy (Hissarlik) and of the Troad and Phrygia, and of the pre-Mycenæan culture of Crete and Greece. “Between Butmir and Hissarlik these discoveries mark the routes which already undoubtedly connected pre-Hellenic peoples and pre-Celtic tribes.”

Meyer tells us that the banded pottery shows the same motives in ornament in Butmir and Tordos as in Troy and the Ægean, and spreads thence northward and westward; and that painted pottery in Europe starts at the end of the Neolithic (2500-2000 B. C.) in the great plain east of the Carpathians in the region of the Dniester and Dnieper, a region of high culture in other respects. “Here the connection with the Ægean world is evident (augenfällig).” This people was agricultural. They burned their dead, and Meyer thinks that incineration spread northward and westward from this centre. They show no use of metal. Their culture breaks off suddenly at the end of the Neolithic period.

Here is a region which stands in free communication with the agricultural population of the parkland zone, open to influences from the steppe, accepting the higher civilization of Phrygia and the Ægean. It is a people of advanced agriculture, hence probably of rapidly increasing population, open to trade and commerce. Here wide and free communications would be likely to prevent the formation of an unyielding cake or crust of custom. People meeting from all lands and cultures might well make and use a language capable of expressing a great variety of shades of thought peculiar to a variety of peoples and cultures; we might safely call it a mixed language springing from a mixture of peoples. Here, as in the Ægean region, the more or less fortified town or village would be a necessity. Here the horse and wagon would be early introduced from the east. Here the patriarchate, so characteristic of nomadic tribes, would be early imported from the steppe, or may have been developed independently.

There is a universality in the Indo-European religion, a sanity and proportion in their whole mode of thought, a broad sympathy, a willingness to accept new ideas and conditions—in general, a breadth of mind which could hardly be the product of isolation but rather of men who had “seen the customs of many men and many cities,” and could look with tolerance and charity on alien cultures and fully appreciate their worth and advantages. Our Teutonic ancestors carried their mental and cultural environment with them wherever they went. They were apostles of purity of blood and hence of isolation. They were never good mixers, as were Celt and Achæan. All three migrated and conquered far and wide, and both usually disappeared in the alien population. But the Teuton left little impression on the alien culture, while Achæan and Celt leavened the whole mass. Here, as in other respects, Celt and Teuton show an incompatibility and oppositeness which strongly suggest difference of origin.

But we must carefully avoid too great certainty and definiteness of assertion. The weight of probability seems to be against any theory which locates the first, original homeland in the far east or in the far northwest. But we deal only with probabilities, and may well “carry our theories on our finger-tips.” If the cradle was somewhere in southern Russia north of the Black Sea, or somewhat farther east or west, its second homeland just before the great dispersal was vastly larger. Myres thinks that it extended far to the eastward of the Volga, which perhaps was the boundary between the eastern and western branches, and whose upper waters drained a very early home of the Finns.

The Indo-Europeans were settled in a goodly land capable with their improved agriculture of supporting a very large population. Why did they migrate in all directions? Here, again, we are left much in the dark. But Pumpelly, in his explorations at Anau, found the settlement deserted during the Bronze period about the same time when we find the Indo-Europeans leaving the homeland. At Anau there are signs that the desertion was due primarily to aridity or to disturbances accompanying such a change. It seems highly probable that climatic changes may have played a most important part in this movement, as they seem to have done in the later historical migrations from this region or from farther eastward.

We may close this chapter of uncertainties with one deduction which seems fairly evident. If the Germans were the first and original Indo-Europeans, the movement developed here directly out of preceding Neolithic conditions. If, as seems more probable, it originated farther to the southeast, and was introduced by the Celts, or in connection with the amber trade, it made little marked interruption in the development of the Germans. They and the Scandinavians continued to take from the south whatever they would, but their development was largely independent. A complete conquest of Germany and Scandinavia by the Celts seems very improbable.

The Teutonic and Scandinavian peoples were not precocious, and appear in history very late. But here apart, in the misty northland, a people was very slowly developing who, after the decadence and fall of Rome, could come forward and slowly and wearily rebuild a civilization better than that which had fallen, and a government of, by, and for the people, guaranteeing to the individual the right of free action and development, the grandest feature of Indo-European culture. This, rather than any precocity, is the glory of the northern peoples. Once again we find history in the making in an inconspicuous people during an apparently dormant period.

He that believeth will not despise the day of small things, neither will he make haste. If the vision tarries long, he will wait for it. “It shall come and shall not tarry.” It will probably come by the way which he least suspects.

There seems to be a wide-spread opinion that the rise of the Indo-Europeans was the first dawn of day in a benighted world. Their migrations were a missionary movement on a grand scale. They dispelled darkness, ignorance, and superstitions, broke the crust of a stagnant conservatism, overthrew outworn customs, brought an entirely new culture, and revolutionized life and the world. We might call attention to the fact that Indo-European culture and life were a product of Neolithic experience, that it was the blossoming of Neolithic growth, that it represented only one part or phase of Neolithic attainment. “The best traditions make the best rebels.”[179] The question remains: Was Neolithic thought and feeling destroyed by their coming, or did it still persist, like a river flowing underground, and is most of our deepest life to-day a fairly direct continuation of the older current only somewhat modified by the revolution?