Wood, Bone, and Shell Ages
There is another serious weakness in the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age sequence. It takes no account of the probability that man used wood, bone, and shell before he used stone. The ape swings a stick much as the first man must have done. The carcass of some bison or stag, picked clean by vultures, must have seemed to our earliest ancestors “a whole potential tool-shop”—as George R. Stewart writes in Man: An Autobiography—“thigh bones ready-made for clubs, horns or antlers for awls, shoulder-blades for scrapers.”[8] As early as 1864, a British student of anthropology, John Crawfurd, stood out against Thomsen’s Stone Age as the beginning of culture. At a meeting of the Ethnological Society, he said: “On man’s first appearance, the most obvious materials would consist of wood and bone.... This would constitute the wood and bone age, of which, from the perishable nature of the materials, we, of course, possess but slender records.”[9] Because the discovery of the stone artifacts of early man in Europe was then creating a scientific furore, Crawfurd’s sane observations went unnoticed. Today we have part of a wooden spear made, perhaps, far back in the Great Ice Age (see illustration, [page 74]).
Wood, bone, and shell not only antedated stone; they have continued in use until today. Certain primitive peoples—the Chukchi of Siberia, for example—retained the use of wood and bone after they were given iron.[10] Numerous tribes, when first encountered by explorers and navigators, had not yet begun to use stone; among these were the Aleuts, the Andaman Islanders, Malayans from the hills, and people of the upper Amazon.[11]
Rickard, from whom we have drawn liberally in this discussion, proposes a different scheme of classification for the cultures of man.[12] In the Primordial Age he would include the primary use of wood, bone, and shell. He would accept the Stone Age as the next stage. For the Bronze and Iron ages he would substitute the Metallurgic Age, basing this on the discovery and use of smelting, whatever the metal involved. The dead hand of Thomsen, however, will probably continue to rule. The best we can do will be to take the Stone Age as including all materials except metal, and pay little attention to that illusion the Bronze Age.
Dividing the Stone Age—the Old and the New
Still more conflict and confusion have resulted from attempts to divide the Stone Age into watertight compartments. In 1865 Sir John Lubbock proposed two divisions—the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age—and the Neolithic, or New Stone Age.[13] The Paleolithic included objects found in caves and glacial gravels; the Neolithic, on the surface and in tombs. The first period ran from some vague beginning hundreds of thousands of years ago up to the advent of the Neolithic after the glaciers had melted. By definition, paleolithic man made chipped stone implements and no other kind. Neolithic man was supposed to be distinguished by the making of ground, or—as we usually say—polished, stone axes and of other tools shaped by rubbing instead of chipping; agriculture, pottery, and textiles came in as secondary traits.
After a time, however, archaeologists found some disturbing discrepancies. Before neolithic man grew grain and wove textiles, someone of an earlier age seems to have been making axes from antlers, turning out new artifacts called microliths—tiny chips of flint which were set in a row along a wooden or bone handle to make a kind of saw or a sickle—and also producing a partially polished ax with a ground edge, and making crude pots. This was all very upsetting to the old scheme of dividing prehistory into the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. So science inserted the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, between the two, in order to account for the appearance of the new tools.
The trouble with the system that Lubbock launched is that man’s behavior toward stone is a very poor basis for classifying him in culture or time. For a while it fitted our knowledge of the prehistory of Europe. Now it is out of line on that continent, and completely askew so far as the rest of the world is concerned. The kind of stone available often determines whether a man will chip or grind it. When first discovered, South Sea Islanders were still polishing stone because they had no flint.[14] Some Australian natives make chipped stone tools while their neighbors, who control a supply of diorite, go in for polishing; yet none of these Blackfellows can be considered as anything but paleolithic.
Like the Bronze Age, the Neolithic suffers from having shrunk in length. Rickard figures “that 700 years covers what was meant to be a major division of human chronology.”[15] To reach this figure he puts the end of the Paleolithic at 3000 B.C., which seems much too late, and the beginning of bronze at 2300. Even though we use the date of N. C. Nelson for the beginning of the Neolithic—5500 B.C.[16]—we have a New Stone Age of only 3,200 years.
Gordon Childe goes so far as to declare that “there is no such thing as a neolithic civilization.”[17] Different people, living under different climates and on different soils, have developed different elements of the culture of the New Stone Age and combined them with elements of other cultures.