Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

The nearest type which we can now conceive of to the Drift-Folk of Europe’s post-glacial era is the Esquimaux. It is even possible that, like them, they may have occupied winter snow-huts; and only retreated to their cave-dwellings during the brief heat of a semi-arctic summer. Among a people so situated the industrial arts are called into utmost requisition, alike for clothing and tools; and the simplest experience of the hunter directs him to the produce of the chase for the most easy supply of both. The pointed horn of the deer furnishes the ready-made dagger, lance-head, and harpoon; the incisor tooth of the larger rodents supplies a more delicately edged chisel than primitive art could devise; and the very process of fracturing the bones of the larger mammalia in order to obtain the prized marrow, produces the splinters and pointed fragments which an easy manipulation converts into bodkins, hair-pins, and needles. The ivory of walrus, narwhal, or elephant is more readily wrought into many desirable forms, and is less liable to fracture, than the intractable flint or stone; and all those materials are abundant in the most rigorous winters, when flint and stone are sealed up under the frozen soil. Tools and weapons of bone and ivory may therefore be assumed to have preceded all but the rudest stone implements; and although, owing to the indestructible nature of their material, it is from the latter that our ideas of earliest post-glacial art are chiefly derived, enough has been found in contemporary cave-deposits to confirm this inference from the analogous hyperborean arts of our own day.

Flint, indeed, though so widely used as the primitive tool-maker’s material, is unknown in many localities. We are familiar with regions at the present time, where man not only subsists, but supplies himself with implements and weapons adapted to his need, though neither flint nor stone is available. This fact has been practically ignored in the accepted terminology of the science. As now reduced to system, it proceeds in retrospective order thus:—Historic, prehistoric, neolithic, palæolithic, with a possible protolithic period of still older geological epochs. An awkward misnomer inevitably results from this assumption of stone as the sole basis of primitive art: as where the archæologist speaks of palæolithic bone implements, or neolithic pottery. I have therefore substituted here the more comprehensive terms palæotechnic and neotechnic. They suffice equally for the classification of implements and personal ornaments of flint, stone, bone, ivory, or even of metal: as in the neotechnic gold and bronze work; and also for those made from marine shells. Many of the latter have been recovered under circumstances which establish their claim to be classed with other examples of primitive art; and even find illustration among the rarer disclosures of the ancient cave-drift. In the great Archipelago of the Caribbean Sea, as well as in widely scattered islands of the Pacific Ocean, the primeval stage of native art might indeed be more correctly designated a shell period; for until their discovery by Europeans, the large shells which the mollusca of the neighbouring oceans produce in great abundance, furnished to the native artificers the most convenient and easily wrought material. For the natives of the coral islands of the Pacific especially, marine shells supplied the want not only of copper and iron, but of flint and stone; and left them at little disadvantage when compared, for example, with the Indians of the copper regions of Lake Superior.

Fig. 22.—Bone Spatula, Keiss. Fig. 23.—Bone Comb, Burghar. Fig. 24.—Bone Comb, Burghar.

Alike in the ivory and bone carvings of the modern Esquimaux, and in the rare but invaluable evidences of primitive art furnished by those of the ancient Cave-Folk of the Dordogne and other oldest human dwellings, it is seen how favourable such easily wrought material was to the development of a mechanical skill and artistic ingenuity such as must have lain dormant had the primitive artificers been wholly limited to flint and stone. The same result is traceable, though in a less degree, to the analogous material of the Islanders’ shell-period. But implements and ornaments made of marine shells have a further interest from the evidence they occasionally afford of distant traffic, or interchange of foreign commodities.

Tools of horn, bone, and ivory possess a value of another kind. With them, as on a common ground, the palæontologist and the archæologist meet and determine the relative ages of the primitive artist and his materials. In the Glamorganshire cavern at Paviland Dr. Buckland found the skull of a mammoth, or other fossil proboscidian, and beside it the remains of cylindrical rods and armlets made from its ivory. In the famous Aurignac cave, on the northern slope of the Pyrenees, were arrows and other implements of reindeer horn, a bodkin fashioned out of the horn of the roedeer, and a tusk of the ursus spelæus, perforated and carved in imitation of the head of a bird. The Dordogne caves in like manner reveal the natives of Southern France in its old post-glacial era, hunting the aurochs and reindeer, and fashioning their horns and bones into lances, bodkins, needles, clubs, ceremonial or official batons, and other implements of varied purpose and design. Among the “prehistoric remains of Caithness,” which rewarded the explorations of Mr. Samuel Laing in the mounds at Keiss, were numerous implements made from the horns and bones of the reindeer, red-deer, ox, horse, and whale. Some of them are of the rudest character; and all indicate a condition of life akin to that of the tribes of the Labrador, or the Alaska coast at the present day. Fig. 22 is a spatula roughly formed from the bone of an ox; unless, as Mr. Joseph Anderson has suggested, it be the first stage in the process of fabricating a comb, of the type shown in Figs. 23, 24. The latter, found at Burghar, in Orkney, is a precise counterpart of the long-handled combs still in use by the Esquimaux for separating the sinew-threads, which supply them with one important resource in making their clothing. Those relics point to times when the fauna differed even more than the men of this era from those of the present day. In the mounds of the Ohio Valley, on the other hand, the bone implements and animal remains appear to be referable to existing species; and so supply evidence in contradiction of the extreme antiquity assigned by some to the mounds and their builders. One special value of primitive tools of horn, bone, and ivory is thus manifest. They embody glimpses of truth in relation to climate, native fauna, culinary practices, and special objects of the chase; and to this easily worked material we owe disclosures of an æsthetic faculty, and of artistic capabilities pertaining to the Troglodytes of the Dordogne, to whom, but for such evidence, might, and probably would have been assigned a rank in humanity as far below the standard of the modern savage as the Patagonian or Australian falls short of that of the average European of our own day.

The artificial origin of many of the rudest of the worked drift-flints has been challenged. But of the human workmanship of the large flint implement found alongside of the bones of a fossil elephant in the quaternary gravels of the London basin, near Gray’s Inn Lane; or of the spear-heads which lay under similar fossil bones in the drift of the valley of the Waveney, at Hoxne, in Suffolk, no doubt has ever been suggested. Both were discovered upwards of a century before the idea of man’s contemporaneous existence with the mammals of the drift had been mooted; but if such specimens of his art are to be made the sole test of human capacity in that primeval era, they might justify the idea of some lower type even than the wretched Patagonian or Australian. But contemporary cave deposits check our conclusions from such partial evidence; and suggest that in those rudest specimens of palæolithic art we have only the most indestructible relics of an epoch by no means destitute of inventive ingenuity or artistic skill.

All the cave deposits referred to were accompanied with human remains. In the Glamorganshire Cavern a female skeleton lay in close proximity to the skull of the fossil elephas, embedded in a mass of argillaceous loam. Adapting his deductions to the ruling idea which then guided the author of the Reliquiæ Diluvianæ, Dr. Buckland refers to the cylindrical rods and rings of ivory as “made from part of the antediluvian tusks that lay in the same cave; and,” he adds, “as they must have been cut to their present shape at a time when the ivory was hard, and not crumbling to pieces as it is at present on the slightest touch, we may from this circumstance assume to them a high antiquity.” Dr. Buckland’s idea of the antiquity implied by such cave remains was very different from what is now universally accepted. But it is not to be overlooked that here, as in the Aurignac, and other sepulchral caverns, the interment may belong to an epoch long subsequent to that of the fossil mammals. The tusk of a mammoth from the Carse of Falkirk, now in detached pieces in the museum of the University of Edinburgh, was rescued from the lathe of an ivory-turner; and the fossil ivory of Siberia is a regular article of commerce.

But in other examples of a like character we are left in no doubt. The deer’s-horn harpoons of the whalers of Blair-Drummond Moss are unquestionably contemporaneous with the fossil whales; and although the implements are rude enough, they will class with harpoons and fish-spears here described, some of which have been found associated with works in bone and ivory of great ingenuity and skill. The Greenland whale undoubtedly haunted the northern shores of Scotland within historic times. Its bones occur in Scottish brochs and kitchen-middens; and among the many traces of prehistoric arts and habits of life disclosed by the contents of the Scottish subterranean dwellings, one of the most interesting is a large drinking-cup fashioned from the vertebra of a whale. It was found in a weem on the Isle of Eday, in Orkney, along with a bone scoop, bone pins, combs, and other primitive relics, including some of metal. The cup measures 4½ inches high; and, as shown in Fig. 25, is a very simple adaptation of the natural form of the bone by sawing off the protruding spinous processes.