Their art is another example of the direction the human mind was taking. And when I say human, I mean it in the fullest sense, for this is the time in which fully modern man has appeared. On [page 34], we spoke of the Cro-Magnon group and of the Combe Capelle-Brünn group of Caucasoids and of the Grimaldi “Negroids,” who are no longer believed to be Negroid. I doubt that any one of these groups produced most of the achievements of the times. It’s not yet absolutely sure which particular group produced the great cave art. The artists were almost certainly a blend of several (no doubt already mixed) groups. The pair of Grimaldians were buried in a grave with a sprinkling of red ochre, and were provided with shell beads and ornaments and with some blade tools of flint. Regardless of the different names once given them by the human paleontologists, each of these groups seems to have shared equally in the cultural achievements of the times, for all that the archeologists can say.
MICROLITHS
One peculiar set of tools seems to serve as a marker for the very last phase of the Ice Age in southwestern Europe. This tool-making habit is also found about the shore of the Mediterranean basin, and it moved into northern Europe as the last glaciation pulled northward. People began making blade tools of very small size. They learned how to chip very slender and tiny blades from a prepared core. Then they made these little blades into tiny triangles, half-moons (“lunates”), trapezoids, and several other geometric forms. These little tools are called “microliths.” They are so small that most of them must have been fixed in handles or shafts.
MICROLITHS
BLADE FRAGMENT
BURIN
LUNATE
TRAPEZOID
SCALENE TRIANGLE
ARROWHEAD
We have found several examples of microliths mounted in shafts. In northern Europe, where their use soon spread, the microlithic triangles or lunates were set in rows down each side of a bone or wood point. One corner of each little triangle stuck out, and the whole thing made a fine barbed harpoon. In historic times in Egypt, geometric trapezoidal microliths were still in use as arrowheads. They were fastened—broad end out—on the end of an arrow shaft. It seems queer to give an arrow a point shaped like a “T.” Actually, the little points were very sharp, and must have pierced the hides of animals very easily. We also think that the broader cutting edge of the point may have caused more bleeding than a pointed arrowhead would. In hunting fleet-footed animals like the gazelle, which might run for miles after being shot with an arrow, it was an advantage to cause as much bleeding as possible, for the animal would drop sooner.
We are not really sure where the microliths were first invented. There is some evidence that they appear early in the Near East. Their use was very common in northwest Africa but this came later. The microlith makers who reached south Russia and central Europe possibly moved up out of the Near East. Or it may have been the other way around; we simply don’t yet know.
Remember that the microliths we are talking about here were made from carefully prepared little blades, and are often geometric in outline. Each microlithic industry proper was made up, in good part, of such tiny blade tools. But there were also some normal-sized blade tools and even some flake scrapers, in most microlithic industries. I emphasize this bladelet and the geometric character of the microlithic industries of the western Old World, since there has sometimes been confusion in the matter. Sometimes small flake chips, utilized as minute pointed tools, have been called “microliths.” They may be microlithic in size in terms of the general meaning of the word, but they do not seem to belong to the sub-tradition of the blade tool preparation habits which we have been discussing here.