Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

Fig. 45.—Tawatin Ivory carving.

In times still prehistoric, though apparently recent in comparison with the mammoth or reindeer period of France, the works of the ancient Lake-dwellers of Switzerland furnish illustrations of the application of horn, bone, and ivory to many useful purposes for which the metals are now considered as alone suitable. The site of the pfahlbauten at Concise, on Lake Neuchâtel, has been peculiarly rich in the illustrations it has yielded of implements in flint, stone, bone, horn, and also in bronze. The skulls, horns, and bones, both of domesticated animals, and of those procured in the chase, are also abundant; and among the latter, the red deer and the wild boar appear to have predominated as articles of food.

The Natural History Museum of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which owes its existence to the indefatigable zeal of the lamented Professor Agassiz, is enriched by a collection of remains of the ancient Swiss Lake-dwellers, obtained under peculiarly favourable circumstances. The father of the distinguished naturalist was for a period of fifteen years the clergyman of Concise; and it chanced that the son revisited his native canton at a time when the construction of a railway viaduct across part of the neighbouring lake led to the discovery of numerous traces of its ancient population. He was accordingly able to secure a choice collection illustrative of aboriginal arts, including some characteristic specimens of horn and bone implements, from which some illustrative examples are here selected. Fig. 46 may be described as a chisel made of a hog’s tooth inserted in a haft of deer’s-horn, precisely after a fashion familiar to the Red Indian, of converting the incisor of the beaver into a useful cutting tool. The same collection includes knives, daggers, bodkins, or awls, made of bone or ivory, and hafted in like manner with horn; as well as implements of flint and stone hereafter referred to.[^[52]]

Fig. 46.—Hog’s Tooth Chisel, Concise.

Among the tools and personal ornaments wrought of mammoth ivory, which Dean Buckland describes as found in the Goat Hole Cavern at Paviland, is a skewer made of the metacarpal bone of a wolf, flattened at the edge at one end, and terminated at the other by the natural rounded condyle of the bone. Implements of this type are by no means rare. The original disclosures of Kent’s Cavern included arrow and lance-heads, bodkins, pins, hair-combs, netting-tools, and other implements, all made of bone. Similar objects have been repeatedly found in Scottish weems and brochs, and in the kitchen-middens of Britain, Denmark, and other European accumulations of the like kind. Fig. 47 represents a group of such objects, chiefly from one of the primitive subterranean dwellings, at Skara, in Orkney. It includes a small perforated ivory pin, and a bodkin made after the fashion of the Goat Hole wolf-bone implement from the metatarsal bone of a small ox. Implements of this simple character are common to the arts of many periods and states of society; and like the flint and stone implements of nearly every age and country, help to illustrate the tool-making instinct peculiar to man.

Fig. 47.—British Bone Implements.

Isolated in the little island-worlds of the Pacific Ocean, man is found again and again, in a condition which seems to involve all but absolute privation of the materials on which his constructive faculty can operate. The extensive archipelago interposed between the Society and Gambier Islands and the Marquesas, consists exclusively of coral islands. There the native arts are mostly of an inferior character; though their small and slight canoes are propelled with great rapidity by means of a paddle ingeniously formed with a curved blade. But every idea of rudeness in their arts gives way to wonder and admiration on discovering the limited materials at the command of the workmen. The cocoa-palm furnishes supplies for matting and weaving, and the cassytha stems and cocoa-nut fibre are plaited into ropes. A finer cord is made of human hair; and bones of the turtle and the larger kinds of fish supply the only material for fish-hooks and spears. There are no natural productions on the islands harder than shell or coral; and from these accordingly the native tools are made. Here, therefore, we see what reason is capable of achieving in the development of ingenious arts, amid a privation of nearly all that seems indispensable to the first efforts at constructive skill. Compared with such inadequate means, the flint, stone, horn, and bone of Europe’s stone-period seem little less ample, than the contrast of her later metallurgic riches with the resources of that primitive era.

Though the natives of the Antilles possessed some natural advantages over the inhabitants of the volcanic and coral islands of the Pacific: yet the abundance of large and easily-wrought shells invited their application to many useful purposes; and accordingly when first visited by the Spaniards, the large marine shells with which the neighbouring seas abound, constituted an important source for the raw material of their implements and manufactures. The great size, and the facility of workmanship of the widely-diffused pyrulæ, turbinella, strombi, and other shells, have indeed led to a similar application of them among uncivilised races, wherever they abound. Of such, the Caribs made knives, lances, and harpoons, as well as personal ornaments; while the mollusc itself was sought for and prized as food. In Barbadoes the Strombus gigas still furnishes a favourite repast; and numerous weapons and implements made from its shells have been dug up on the island. The accompanying illustrations (Fig. 48) are selected from specimens illustrative of the primitive manufactures of the Antilles presented to me by Dr. Bovell. They were dug up with other relics, in the island of Barbadoes, where traces of the aboriginal Carib blood continued till very recently to mark a portion of the coloured population. The Christy collection includes various examples of axes believed to be of Carib workmanship, from Porto Rico, St. Juan, and St. Thomas. They are worked in greenstone, mottled jade, green jasper, and a hard light green slate, mostly in wedge-form. But the most characteristic specimen of local art is an axe of coral rock, 7½ inches long, semi-cylindrical, and tapering at both ends, which was found in the cave of Cuevetas, twenty miles from Puerto del Principe, Cuba.