House in a rock of the Montezuma Cañon.
Such are the facts with which we have to deal. In the following chapters we shall consider more at length the problems they present, but already we are led to one important conclusion: in every part of the globe, in every latitude, in every climate, worked flints, whether but roughly chipped or elaborately polished, present analogies which must strike the most superficial observer. “We find them,” remarks an American author, “in the tumuli of Siberia, in the tombs of Egypt, in the soil of Greece, beneath the rude monuments of Scandinavia; but whether they come front Europe or Asia, from Africa or America, they are so much alike in form, in material, and in workmanship, that they might easily be taken for the work of the same men.”
At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1871, Sir John Lubbock showed worked flints from Chili and New Zealand with others found in England, Germany, Spain, Australia, the Guianas, and on the banks of the Amazon; which one and all belonged to the same type. More recently the Anthropological Society of Vienna compared the stone hatchets found near the Canadian lakes and in the deserts of Uruguay, with others from Catania in Italy, Angermünde in Brandenburg, and a tomb in Scandinavia, deciding that they were all exactly alike. Lastly, those who studied at the French Exhibition of 1878 the hatchets, hammers, and scrapers, the bone implements, pottery, and weapons brought from different places, the inhabitants of which had no communication with each other, could not fail to notice in their turn how impossible it was to distinguish between them. “So evident is this resemblance,” says Vogt,[47] “that we may easily confound together implements brought from such very different sources.”
The same observation applies to megalithic monuments. Everywhere we find these primitive structures assuming similar forms. It is difficult enough to believe that the wants of man alone, such as the craving for food, the need of clothing, and the necessity of defending himself, have led in every case to the same ideas and the same amount of progress. Even if this be proved by the worked flints, we cannot accept a similar conclusion with regard to the megalithic monuments, which imply reflection and a thought of the future far beyond the material needs of daily life. Is it not more reasonable to regard a similitude so striking as a proof of the unity of our race?
The human bones discovered are yet more convincing testimony. Excavations have yielded some which may date from the very earliest period of the existence of man upon the earth. They have been found in caves and in the river drift, beneath the mounds of America and the megalithic monuments of Europe, in the ice-clad districts of Scandinavia and of Iceland, and in the burning deserts of Africa, but not one of them owes its existence to men of a type different from those of historic times or of our own day.[48] MM. Quatrefages and Hamy in their magnificent work “Crania Ethnica,” have been able to distinguish prehistoric races and indicate the area they occupied. These races are still represented, and their descendants of to-day retain the characteristics of their ancestors.
One final conclusion is no less interesting. These absolutely countless flints, these monuments of imposing size, these stones of immense weight often brought from afar, these marvellous mounds and tumuli, bear witness to the presence of a population which was already considerable at the time of which we are endeavoring to make out the traces. A long series of centuries must have been needed for a people to increase to such an extent as to have spread over entire continents. And time was not wanting. Whatever antiquity may be attributed to the human race, whatever the initial date to which its first appearance may be relegated, this antiquity is but slight, this date is but modern, if we compare it with the truly incalculable ages of which geology reveals the existence. At every turn we are arrested by the immensity of time, the immensity of space, and yet our knowledge is still confined to the mere outer rind of the earth, and science cannot as yet even guess at the secrets hidden beneath that rind.
In concluding these introductory remarks, we must add that very great difficulties await those who devote themselves to prehistoric studies—difficulties such as noise but those who have attempted to conquer them can realize. The rare traces of prehistoric man must be sought amongst the effects of the cataclysms that have devastated the earth, and the ruins piled up in the course of ages. We must show mall wrestling with the ever-recurrent difficulties of his hard life, and gradually developing in accordance with a law which appears to be immutable. Such is the aim of this work, and it is with gratitude that we assert at the beginning that the pianta uomo, the human plant, as Alfieri calls our race, was endowed by the Creator from the first with a very vigorous vitality, to enable it to contend with the dangers besetting its steps in the early days of its existence, and with a truly marvellous spirit, to be able to make so humble a beginning the starting-point for a destiny so glorious.
[1] M. Gaston.
[2] Pliny calls them ceraunia gemma (“Natural History,” book ii., ch. 59 book xxxvii., ch. 51).