The Story of Evolution

by Joseph McCabe

Two stages are distinguished in this first part of the Palaeolithic Age—the Acheulean and Chellean—but it will suffice for our purpose to take the two together as the earlier and longer section of the Old Stone Age. It was a time of temperate, if not genial, climate. The elephant (an extinct type), the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the hyaena, and many other forms of animal life that have since retired southward, were neighbours of the first human inhabitant of Europe. Unfortunately, we have only one bone of this primitive race, the jaw found at Mauer in 1907, but its massive size and chinless contour suggest a being midway between the Java man and the Neanderthal race. His culture confirms the supposition. There is at this stage no clear trace of fire, clothing, arrows, hefted weapons, spears, or social life. As the implements are generally found on old river-banks or the open soil, not in caves, we seem to see a squat and powerful race wandering, homeless and unclad, by the streams and broad, marshy rivers of the time. The Thames and the Seine had not yet scooped out the valleys on the slopes of which London and Paris are built.

This period seems, from the vast number of stone implements referred to it, to have lasted a considerable time. There is a risk in venturing to give figures, but it may be said that few authorities would estimate it at less than a hundred thousand years. Man still advanced with very slow and uncertain steps, his whole progress in that vast period being measured by the invention of one or two new forms of stone implements and a little more skill in chipping them. At its close a great chill comes over Europe—the last ice-sheet is, it seems, spreading southward—and we enter the Mousterian period and encounter the Neanderthal race which we described in the preceding chapter.

It must be borne in mind that the whole culture of primitive times is crushed into a few feet of earth. The anthropologist is therefore quite unable to show us the real succession of human stages, and has to be content with a division of the whole long and gradual evolution into a few well-marked phases. These phases, however, shade into each other, and are merely convenient measurements of a continuous story. The Chellean man has slowly advanced to a high level. There is no sudden incoming of a higher culture or higher type of man. The most impressive relics of the Mousterian period, which represent its later epoch, are merely finely chipped implements. There is no art as yet, no pottery, and no agriculture; and there is no clear trace of the use of fire or clothing, though we should be disposed to put these inventions in the chilly and damp Mousterian period. There is therefore no ground for resenting the description, "the primeval savage," which has been applied to early man. The human race is already old, yet, as we saw, it is hardly up to the level of the Australian black. The skeleton found at Chapelle-aux-Saints is regarded as the highest known type of the race, yet the greatest authority on it, M. Boule, says emphatically: "In no actual race do we find the characters of inferiority—that is to say, the ape-like features—which we find in the Chapelle-aux-Saints head." The largeness of the head is in proportion to the robust frame, but in its specifically human part—the front—it is very low and bestial; while the heavy ridges over the large eyes, the large flat stumpy nose, the thick bulge of the lips and teeth, and the almost chinless jaw, show that the traces of his ancestry cling close to man after some hundreds of thousands of years of development.

The cold increases as we pass to the last part of the Old Stone Age, the Solutrean and Magdalenian periods; and nothing is clearer than that the pace of development increases at the same time. Short as the period is, in comparison with the preceding, it witnesses a far greater advance than had been made in all the rest of the Old Stone Age. Beyond a doubt men now live in caves, in large social groups, make clothing from the skins of animals, have the use of fire, and greatly improve the quality of their stone axes, scrapers, knives, and lance-heads. There is at last some promise of the civilisation that is coming. In the soil of the caverns in which man lived, especially in Southern France and the Pyrenean region, we find the debris of a much larger and fuller life. Even the fine bone needles with which primitive man sewed his skin garments, probably with sinews for thread, survive in scores. In other places we find the ashes of the fires round which he squatted, often associated with the bones of the wild horses, deer, etc., on which he lived.

But the most remarkable indication of progress in the "cave-man" is his artistic skill. Exaggerated conclusions are sometimes drawn from the statuettes, carvings, and drawings which we find among the remains of Magdalenian life. Most of them are crude, and have the limitations of a rustic or a child artist. There is no perspective, no grouping. Animals are jumbled together, and often left unfinished because the available space was not measured. There are, however, some drawings—cut on bone or horn or stone with a flint implement—which evince great skill in line-drawing and, in a few cases, in composition. Some of the caves also are more or less frescoed; the outlines of animals, sometimes of life-size and in great numbers, are cut in the wall, and often filled in with pigment. This skill does not imply any greater general intelligence than the rest of the culture exhibits. It implies persistent and traditional concentration upon the new artistic life. The men who drew the "reindeer of Thayngen" and carved the remarkable statuettes of women in ivory or stone, were ignorant of the simplest rudiments of pottery or agriculture, which many savage tribes possess.

Some writers compare them with the Eskimo of to-day, and even suggest that the Eskimo are the survivors of the race, retreating northward with the last ice-sheet, and possibly egged onward by a superior race from the south. It is, perhaps, not a very extravagant claim that some hundreds of thousands of years of development—we are now only a few tens of thousands of years from the dawn of civilisation—had lifted man to the level of the Eskimo, yet one must hesitate to admit the comparison. Lord Avebury reproduces an Eskimo drawing, or picture-message, in his "Prehistoric Times," to which it would be difficult to find a parallel in Magdalenian remains. I do not mean that the art is superior, but the complex life represented on the picture-message, and the intelligence with which it is represented, are beyond anything that we know of Palaeolithic man. I may add that nearly all the drawings and statues of men and women which the Palaeolithic artist has left us are marked by the intense sexual exaggeration—the "obscenity," in modern phraseology—which we are apt to find in coarse savages.

Three races are traced in this period. One, identified by skeletons found at Mentone and by certain statuettes, was negroid in character. Probably there was an occasional immigration from Africa. Another race (Cro-Magnon) was very tall, and seems to represent an invasion from some other part of the earth toward the close of the Old Stone Age. The third race, which is compared to the Eskimo, and had a stature of about five feet, seem to be the real continuers of the Palaeolithic man of Europe. Curiously enough, we have less authentic remains of this race than of its predecessor, and can only say that, as we should expect, the ape-like features—the low forehead, the heavy frontal ridges, the bulging teeth, etc.—are moderating. The needles we have found—round, polished, and pierced splinters of bone, sometimes nearly as fine as a bodkin—show indisputably that man then had clothing, but it is curious that the artist nearly always draws him nude. There is also generally a series of marks round the contour of the body to indicate that he had a conspicuous coat of hair. Unfortunately, the faces of the men are merely a few unsatisfactory gashes in the bone or horn, and do not picture this interesting race to us. The various statuettes of women generally suggest a type akin to the wife of the Bushman.

We have, in fine, a race of hunters, with fine stone knives and javelins. Toward the close of the period we find a single representation of an arrow, which was probably just coming into use, but it is not generally known in the Old Stone Age. One of the drawings seems to represent a kind of bridle on a horse, but we need more evidence than this to convince us that the horse was already tamed, nor is there any reason to suppose that the dog or reindeer had been tamed, or that the ground was tilled even in the most rudimentary way. Artistic skill, the use of clothing and fire, and a finer feeling in the shaping of weapons and implements, are the highest certain indications of the progress made by the end of the Old Stone Age.

But there was probably an advance made which we do not find recorded, or only equivocally recorded, in the memorials of the age. Speech was probably the greatest invention of Magdalenian man. It has been pointed out that the spine in the lower jaw, to which the tongue-muscle is attached, is so poorly developed in Palaeolithic man that we may infer from it the absence of articulate speech. The deduction has been criticised, but a comparison of the Palaeolithic jaw with that of the ape on one hand and modern man on the other gives weight to it. Whatever may have been earlier man's power of expression, the closer social life of the Magdalenian period would lead to a great development of it. Some writers go so far as to suggest that certain obscure marks painted on pebbles or drawn on the cavern-walls by men at the close of the Palaeolithic Age may represent a beginning of written language, or numbers, or conventional signs. The interpretation of these is obscure and doubtful. It is not until ages afterwards that we find the first clear traces of written language, and then they take the form of pictographs (like the Egyptian hieroglyphics or the earliest Chinese characters).

We cannot doubt, however, that articulate speech would be rapidly evolved in the social life of the later Magdalenian period, and the importance of this acquisition can hardly be exaggerated. Imagine even a modern community without the device of articulate language. A very large proportion of the community, who are now maintained at a certain level by the thought of others, communicated to them by speech, would sink below the civilised standard, and the transmission and improvement of ideas would be paralysed. It would not be paradoxical to regard the social life and developing speech of Magdalenian man as the chief cause of the rapid advance toward civilisation which will follow in the next period.