One of our most brilliant and once progressive archaeologists naïvely expressed to me some years ago his sentiments on this question [evidences of early man in America]. He said it would be a pity to have new evidence come to light which would overthrow all the admirable scientific work of the past indicating the recent arrival in the New World of the American Indian.[4]
Of course early man is not a subject that can hope to be free from error and contradiction—even early man in the Old World. Perhaps an account of some of the errors and misconceptions about him that crept into the study of prehistory may be as good a means as any of preparing your mind for new facts or new heresies in the Americas.
The Problem of the Ages
The first confusion that confronts the student of early man is one of nomenclature. It is a by-product of the human animal’s inveterate and estimable love of system. Give us some new subject, such as prehistoric relics, and we immediately set up a scheme of classification. The scheme works beautifully for a while, but presently new evidence accumulates which doesn’t fit the framework. By that time, unfortunately, it is too late to change the classification. In vulgar parlance, it is our story, and we are stuck with it.
An outstanding example of this tendency to set up a classification system prematurely is the division of the story of man into ages. As far back as A.D. 52 a Chinese with a scientific bent of mind suggested that man had passed through three periods: a stone age, a bronze age, and an iron age. A French magistrate named Goguet wrote a book in 1758 in which he expounded a similar order of ages, inserting copper ahead of bronze. In 1813 a Dutch historian named Vedel-Simonsen argued for stone, bronze, and iron periods in Scandinavian history. A Dane, Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, gave the system permanent and indeed international status in 1836 when he arranged on this basis the exhibits of the institution he directed, the National Museum in Copenhagen.
The scheme is neat but far from scientific. To begin with a small matter, but one that may confuse the layman, the ages overlap. Bronze did not wholly replace stone; neither did iron. The use of chipped flint and polished stone continued into the Iron Age.
The Bronze Age—a Phantasm
“Bronze Age” itself is a misnomer and a phantasm. While “Stone Age” and “Iron Age” do define important culture periods—though not the only periods of man’s early activity—the Bronze Age, says T. A. Rickard, “represents a minor phase in the use of copper.”[5] This alloy is merely an incident in the much longer history of the first metal used by man. At the start copper seemed to him to be merely a soft stone. He beat it into ornaments. When he began to melt and cast the native metal instead of pounding it, he took the first step in the true use of metals; but when he smelted copper ore—turning a hard rock into a soft metal—he made himself the master of metallurgy. Bronze—at first an accidental mixing of copper and tin—was merely an episode along the way. “The superiority of copper or bronze over flint and stone tools is, I think,” says Gordon Childe, “generally overestimated. Not only for tilling the land but also for the execution of monumental carvings and even for shaving, the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom were apparently content with stone.”[6]
The Bronze Age was very limited in area. Because of the rarity of tin, the primitive use of the alloy was confined to southern Europe, Asia Minor, and the Inca empire. Most of the world used iron before bronze. Furthermore, the Bronze Age is as delimited in time as it is in space. The earliest bronze in the Danube region is dated about 2300 B.C., and the earliest iron about 1350 B.C., at Gerar in Judea. “Thus,” said Rickard, “the so-called Bronze Age shrinks, at most, to a mere millennium ... the merest fraction of human existence.”[7]
The Iron Age is not so significant as it sounds. It was many centuries after the first use of iron and bronze that either played a really important part in the economic life of man. Like the domesticated horse, the trained elephant, and the wheeled vehicle, bronze and iron were first used chiefly in the making of war.