The history of even the simplest of man’s tools from the hand ax to the arrowhead is long, interesting, and puzzling. It is hard to say what many of the tools were used for, or indeed what they were not used for. The hand ax would obviously be best for grubbing out roots and tubers, yet, like most of the implements of early man, it must have served a variety of other purposes also. Until the Mousterians began to make spear points, 90,000 to 150,000 years ago, all man’s implements—even what we call his scrapers—were pretty generalized. Later, with the Aurignacians and the Magdalenians, came artifacts that were obviously blades or knives or chisels or harpoons. The tool to make other tools appeared, and this we must add to the list of man’s prehistoric achievements: speech, fire making, stone chipping, pressure flaking, and carving and painting.
The attempt of science to record and interpret the story of early man in the Old World has been an extraordinary triumph over the obstacles of half a million years of prehistoric darkness. Hundreds of men and women, laboring long and ingeniously, have won to an almost miraculous success, and the end is not yet in sight.
The work has suffered, of course, from many a human limitation. Not the least of these has been the desire to interpret knowledge too quickly, to freeze it into forms and classifications, and to stand doggedly by those forms and classifications when they have become weakened by new knowledge. The student and the intelligent layman have been confused by all this. They have been particularly confused—as we think we can show—when it comes to early man in the New World.
Aurignacian and Magdalenian men of France drew and painted animals, almost never the human form. The artists who worked in the caves and rock shelters of eastern Spain drew figures of hunters and women, as well as of animals. These artists may have been Capsians who lived in North Africa in the Aurignacian period and spread into Europe at some time between then and the Neolithic. The style resembles that of the African Bushmen. The two archers on the left are from the cave of Saltadora; the two at the right, from the Cueva del Mas d’en Josep. (After Obermaier and Weinert, 1919.)
The Danger in Universal Time-Scales
When we apply to the paleolithic cultures of the rest of the world the names of the European culture sequence—Abbevillian, Acheulean, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian—we produce acrimonious argument and not much more. These terms are of no use in the rest of the world except as a description of types of tools. In parts of Africa, for example, Mousterian and Aurignacian objects are found together; in other parts, Mousterian and Solutrean. In the first case, the Aurignacian includes primitive pottery; in the second, Aurignacian is missing altogether.
An archer drawn in the cave of Saltadora, Spain. (After Obermaier and Weinert, 1919.)
