Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

Fig. 37.—Carved Baton, or Mace (1/3).

This most ancient example of imitative art was found in the Madelaine Cave, on the river Vézère, by M. Lartet, when in company with M. Verneuil and Dr. Falconer. The circumstances of the discovery, therefore, no less than the character of the explorers, place its genuineness beyond suspicion. Its worth is great as a piece of contemporary portraiture of an animal known to us only by its fossil remains. But this sinks into insignificance in comparison with its value as a gauge of the intellectual capacity of the men of the reindeer age of central Europe. Many of their carvings ornament the horn or ivory handles of implements and weapons; but the etching referred to was manifestly executed with no other aim than the gratification of the artistic taste of the draughtsman, and resembles the free sketches thrown off by an artist in an idle hour.

Fig. 38.—The Mammoth, engraved on ivory.

But there is another point worthy of notice here, the interest of which is greatly increased by the undoubted antiquity of the relic. This palæographic tablet is a right-handed drawing; and the same may be affirmed of the group of reindeer, and of others of the Madelaine etchings. They are executed in profile, looking to the left, as any right-handed draughtsman naturally does, unless he has some special reason for deviating from the direction which the facility of his pencil suggests.

The question of right-handedness, as a natural or acquired practice peculiar to man, has a special interest when viewed in relation to his innate instincts or attributes in the remote dawn of human intelligence thus anew brought to light. The universality of right-handedness as a characteristic of man has been assumed, partly on the concurrent evidence of language, which shows the general habit of using one hand in preference to another. But the prevalence of the use of the right hand among savage nations is still a mere assumption. The statistics have yet to be collected, and are by no means readily accessible. Any evidence of the prevalence of right-handedness among a people still in the primitive stage of stone implements must be exceedingly vague. In the rude manipulations of a purely savage life, with the imperfection of the tools and the general absence of combined operations, the distinction in the use of one hand rather than the other is of little importance. In digging roots, climbing rocks or trees, in the rude operations of the primitive boat-maker or hut-builder, in hunting, flaying, cooking, or most other of the operations pertaining not only to the hunter, but even to the pastoral stage, there is little manifest motive for the use of one hand more than the other; and on the supposition of either becoming more generally serviceable, it would neither attract notice, nor interfere in any degree with the arts of life, though some gave a preference to the right hand, and others to the left. Hence the difficulty of determining the prevalence of right-handedness among savage nations. Its manifestations in the rude arts of the isolated workman are obscure, and any uniformity of action becomes apparent only in those combined operations which are comparatively rare in savage life. Yet even in the languages of the Hawaiians, Fijians, Maoris and Australians, terms are met with showing the preferential use of one hand. In the rudest state of society, man as a tool-using animal has this habit engendered in him; and as he progresses in civilisation, and improves on his first rude weapons and implements, there must arise an inevitable tendency to give the preference to one hand over the other, not only in combined action, but from the necessity of adapting certain tools to the hand.[^[45]]

An interesting episode relating to this assumed speciality of man is introduced in a communication by the Rev. W. Greenwell to the Ethnological Society of London, on the opening of some ancient Norfolk flint pits, popularly known as “Grime’s Graves.” In these were found not only implements of flint, a hatchet of basalt, hammers, stones of quartzite and other pebbles, and numerous clippings and cores of flint, along with a bone-pin, and another implement of bone which Mr. Greenwell supposes to have been used in detaching the flakes of flint for knives and arrow-heads; but also a number of primitive deer-horn picks, which had been used by the ancient quarrymen by whom the flint was thus procured, and fashioned into tools.

The picks made from the antlers of the red-deer were constructed simply by detaching the horn at a distance of about sixteen or seventeen inches from the brow end, and then breaking off all but the large brow-tine, with the help of fire and rude cutting implements of flint. They had been used both as picks and hammers, the point of the brow-tine serving for a pick, and the broad flat part opposite to it as a hammer for breaking off and detaching the flint from the chalk; while excavations through the solid chalk were effected by means of hatchets of basalt. The marks of both tools were abundant on the walls of the galleries; and many of the rude picks, including the two specially referred to, were coated with an incrustation of chalk, bearing the impress of the workmen’s fingers. Here, as in the Brixham cavern, an accident, which brought the ancient operations to an abrupt close, sealed up the evidence of them beyond reach of all obscuring interpolations, until their discovery in recent years. In clearing out one of the subterranean galleries excavated in the chalk, it was found that “the roof had given way about the middle of the gallery, and blocked up the whole width of it. On removing this, it was seen that the flint had been worked out in three places at the end, forming three hollows, extending beyond the chalk face of the end of the gallery.” In front of two of these hollows lay two picks, corresponding to others found in various parts of the shafts and galleries, made from the antler of the red-deer. But in this case the writer notes that the handle of each was laid towards the mouth of the gallery, the tines, which formed the blades of the tools, pointing towards each other, “showing, in all probability, that they had been used respectively by a right and a left-handed man. The day’s work over, the men had laid down each his tool, ready for the next day’s work; meanwhile the roof had fallen in, and the picks had never been recovered,” until their reproduction in evidence of the supposed habits of the right and left-handed workmen, by whom they were employed at the close of that last day’s labour, in the prehistoric dawn.[^[46]]

Fig. 39.—Scottish Stone Bracer.