The New Stone Age in Northern Europe

by John M. Tyler

We notice first of all the commonness or community of Neolithic feeling and life, its almost monotonous uniformity, over Europe, eastern Asia, and probably even far wider areas. We may easily exaggerate this. The cultures of the Mediterranean basin, of Spain and France, of the Danube valley, of northern Germany and Scandinavia, not to mention smaller, more isolated provinces, showed well-marked differences. There was probably more diversity in the people of every one of these provinces, especially at centres of trade, even in every larger village, than our hasty study would lead us to suspect. But in fundamental characters there was wide-spread and marked similarity; and this, like the wide range of dominant genera and species of animals, is a sign of vitality and fitness.

The Neolithic period coincides roughly with the latter part of Wundt’s Totem Age: the Bronze period ushered in his Age of Heroes.[180] During the first period the individual counted for very little, everything was tribal. In the second period the great leaders of popular migrations emerge, young, vigorous, hot-blooded. With the appearance of these “kings of men” comes the rise of nations. Tribal control wanes, and the slow development of individual, personal judgment and conscience, self-control, and responsibility replaces it to a great extent.

We read in the history of Israel that the long Egyptian bondage of a stiff-necked nomad people, being broken to the rudiments of order and civilization, was followed by an exodus and a period of judges or popular leaders, when “there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” It was a period of lawlessness and anarchy; recovery was slow and painful, and finally only partially attained by the appointment of a king. A similar education, on a vastly larger scale both of area and time, was going on all over Europe.

Prehistoric man was guided and controlled by feelings usually expressing the dictates of a long experience out of which instincts had crystallized. His feelings were his instinctive responses to new emergencies. He could not analyze them, reason or argue about them; he was spared the “malady of thought.” He had little or no logic or science; his philosophy, as we have seen, was a way smoothed by the feet of his ancestors. He was a man of taste in the literal sense of the word. He knew what he liked and what he disliked; probably he could not have explained the reason for either feeling. He was wise in following these instinctive feelings and tastes; they represented the accumulated and assimilated experience of millennia.

Of course the experience had been that of individuals. Neolithic man’s school and laboratory of education was mostly the family and the neighborhood. Here he had to learn to get on with other individuals, to live and let live, to practise co-operation and mutual aid. Here he learned the first and grandest lessons in morals; that he would be done by as he did, and hence that it was best to do as he would be done by. He has never lost or forgotten the lessons learned in this excellent “dame’s school.”

Most of his higher education—and hence of his feeling, conscience, religion, and life—was tribal. Laws, or rather customs, were propounded by the elders of the tribe or priests, an exceedingly conservative court. The chief aim was not rapidity of progress, but confirming and practising that which long experience had proved to be good. Slowly but surely the fund of wisdom increased. “It is the three-per-cent man who gets all the money in the end.”

Responsibility was tribal. The man who tried experiments or “fooled” with the forbidden thing was a common nuisance summarily and thoroughly abated by the tribe.

Land was common property, though the individual had probably gained some rights of use. It is doubtful whether he could use the whole or any part of it entirely as he would. Even at a much later date his use was largely limited and controlled by ancient custom.

The ritual which still made up most of his religion was also tribal.[181] Dance and song were practised by the whole community. His creed, so far as he had one, was a belief in spiritual beings, dæmons, of great power and marvellous efficiency. Some or many were beneficent; more were probably maleficent; but those might be appeased, mollified, bribed, won over, or controlled, if rightly approached through magical rites or ceremonies.

These dæmons seem to have been supposed to be almost innumerable. No one was supreme, but some were more important than others. Here then was room for variety of opinion, of ritual, of the spirit occupying the most important place; hence also of change and development. The gods in one country were those of the hills; in another, those of the plains; in a third, of the forest. Fishing and agricultural tribes had different dæmons. The wandering trader, passing from tribe to tribe, in his own heart respected or neglected all alike. Every land had its own gods or goddesses. When a man migrated to another country he usually left his old gods at home. If he was adopted into the brotherhood of another tribe, he changed his religious allegiance also.