At first Neolithic man is content with finer weapons. His stone axe is so finely shaped and polished that it sometimes looks like forged or moulded metal. He also drills a clean hole through it—possibly by means of a stick working in wet sand—and gives it a long wooden handle. He digs in the earth for finer flints, and in some of his ancient shafts (Grimes, Graves and Cissbury) we find picks of reindeer horn and hollowed blocks of chalk in which he probably burned fat for illumination underground. But in the later part of the Neolithic—to which much of this finer work also may belong—we find him building huts, rearing large stone monuments, having tame dogs and pigs and oxen, growing corn and barley, and weaving primitive fabrics. He lives in large and strong villages, round which we must imagine his primitive cornfields growing and his cattle grazing, and in which there must have been some political organisation under chiefs.
When we wish to trace the beginning of these inventions we have the same difficulty that we experienced in tracing the first stages of new animal types. The beginning takes place in some restricted region, and our casual scratching of the crust of the earth or the soil may not touch it for ages, if it has survived at all. But for our literature and illustrations a future generation would be equally puzzled to know how we got the idea of the aeroplane or the electric light. In some cases we can make a good guess at the origin of Neolithic man's institutions. Let us take pottery. Palaeolithic man cooked his joint of horse or reindeer, and, no doubt, scorched it. Suppose that some Palaeolithic Soyer had conceived the idea of protecting the joint, and preserving its juices, by daubing it with a coat of clay. He would accidentally make a clay vessel. This is Mr. Clodd's ingenious theory of the origin of pottery. The development of agriculture is not very puzzling. The seed of corn would easily be discovered to have a food-value, and the discovery of the growth of the plant from the seed would not require a very high intelligence. Some ants, we may recall, have their fungus-beds. It would be added by many that the ant gives us another parallel in its keeping of droves of aphides, which it "milks." But it is now doubted if the ant deliberately cultivates the aphides with this aim. Early weaving might arise from the plaiting of grasses. If wild flax were used, it might be noticed that part of it remained strong when the rest decayed, and so the threads might be selected and woven.
The building of houses, after living for ages in stone caverns, would not be a very profound invention. The early houses were—as may be gathered from the many remains in Devonshire and Cornwall—mere rings of heaped stones, over which, most probably, was put a roof of branches or reeds, plastered with mud. They belong to the last part of the New Stone Age. In other places, chiefly Switzerland, Neolithic man lived in wooden huts built on piles in the shallow shores of lakes. It is an evidence that life on land is becoming as stimulating as we find it in the age of Deinosaurs or early mammals. These pile-villages of Switzerland lasted until the historical period, and the numerous remains in the mud of the lake show the gradual passage into the age of metal.
Before the metal age opened, however, there seem to have been fresh invasions of Europe and changes of its culture. The movements of the various early races of men are very obscure, and it would be useless to give here even an outline of the controversy. Anthropologists have generally taken the relative length and width of the skull as a standard feature of a race, and distinguished long-headed (dolichocephalic), short-headed (brachycephalic), and middle-headed (mesaticephalic) races. Even on this test the most divergent conclusions were reached in regard to early races, and now the test itself is seriously disputed. Some authorities believe that there is no unchanging type of skull in a particular race, but that, for instance, a long-headed race may become short-headed by going to live in an elevated region.
It may be said, in a few words, that it is generally believed that two races invaded Europe and displaced the first Neolithic race. The race which chiefly settled in the Swiss region is generally believed to have come from Asia, and advanced across Europe by way of the valley of the Danube. The native home of the wheat and barley and millet, which, as we know, the lake-dwellers cultivated, is said to be Asia. On the other hand, the Neolithic men who have left stone monuments on our soil are said to be a different race, coming, by way of North Africa, from Asia, and advancing along the west of Europe to Scandinavia. A map of the earth, on which the distribution of these stone monuments—all probably connected with the burial of the dead—is indicated, suggests such a line of advance from India, with a slighter branch eastward. But the whole question of these invasions is disputed, and there are many who regard the various branches of the population of Europe as sections of one race which spread upward from the shores of the Mediterranean.
It is clear at least that there were great movements of population, much mingling of types and commercial interchange of products, so that we have the constant conditions of advance. A last invasion seems to have taken place some two or three thousand years before the Christian era, when the Aryans overspread Europe. After all the controversy about the Aryans it seems clear that a powerful race, representing the ancestors of most of the actual peoples of Europe and speaking the dialects which have been modified into the related languages of the Greeks, Romans, Germans, Celts, Lithuanians, etc., imposed its speech on nearly the whole of the continent. Only in the Basques and Picts do we seem to find some remnants of the earlier non-Aryan tongues. But whether these Aryans really came from Asia, as it used to be thought, or developed in the east of Europe, is uncertain. We seem justified in thinking that a very robust race had been growing in numbers and power during the Neolithic Age, somewhere in the region of South-east Europe and Southwest Asia, and that a few thousand years before the Christian Era one branch of it descended upon India, another upon the Persian region, and another overspread Europe. We will return to the point later. Instead of being the bearers of a higher civilisation, these primitive Aryans seem to have been lower in culture than the peoples on whom they fell.
The Neolithic Age had meantime passed into the Age of Metal. Copper was probably the first metal to be used. It is easily worked, and is found in nature. But the few copper implements we possess do not suggest a "Copper Age" of any length or extent. It was soon found, apparently, that an admixture of tin hardened the copper, and the Bronze Age followed. The use of bronze was known in Egypt about 4800 B.C. (Flinders Petrie), but little used until about 2000 B.C. By that time (or a few centuries later) it had spread as far as Scandinavia and Britain. The region of invention is not known, but we have large numbers of beautiful specimens of bronze work—including brooches and hair-pins—in all parts of Europe. Finally, about the thirteenth century B.C., we find the first traces of the use of iron. The first great centre for the making of iron weapons seems to have been Hallstatt, in the Austrian Alps, whence it spread slowly over Europe, reaching Scandinavia and Britain between 500 and 300 B.C. But the story of man had long before this entered the historical period, to which we now turn.
CHAPTER XXI. EVOLUTION IN HISTORY
In the preceding chapters I have endeavoured to show how, without invoking any "definitely directed variations," which we seem to have little chance of understanding, we may obtain a broad conception of the way in which the earth and its living inhabitants came to be what they are. No one is more conscious than the writer that this account is extremely imperfect. The limits of the volume have permitted me to use only a part of the material which modern science affords, but if the whole of our discoveries were described the sketch would still remain very imperfect. The evolutionary conception of the world is itself undergoing evolution in the mind of man. Age by age the bits of fresh discovery are fitted into the great mosaic. Large areas are still left for the scientific artist of the future to fill. Yet even in its imperfect state the evolutionary picture of the world is most illuminating. The questions that have been on the lips of thoughtful men since they first looked out with adult eyes on the panorama of nature are partly answered. Whence and Why are no longer sheer riddles of the sphinx.