Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

THE USE OF TOOLS—TOOL-USING INSTINCT—RUDIMENTARY STAGE OF ART—PRIMITIVE RIVER-CRAFT—THE GUANAHANÈ CANOE—OCEAN NAVIGATION—AFRICAN CANOE-MAKING—OREGON CEDAR CANOES—NATIVE WHALERS OF THE PACIFIC—PREHISTORIC BOAT BUILDERS—MAWAI’S CANOES—THE POLYNESIAN ARCHIPELAGO—THE TERRA AUSTRALIS INCOGNITA—CANOE-FLEETS OF THE PACIFIC—PRIMITIVE NAVIGATION—PORTABLE BOATS—THE CORACLE AND KAIAK—THE PERUVIAN BALSA—OCEAN NAVIGATORS.

The discovery of fire, and its application even to such simple purposes of art as the hardening of the wooden spear, or the hollowing of the monoxylous canoe, suffice to illustrate the characteristics of man, not merely as a reasoning, but also as a tool-using, or, as Franklin defined him, a tool-making animal. Whilst, however, an innate instinct seems to prompt him to supplement his helplessness by such means, mechanical science, the industrial and the fine arts, are all progressive developments which his intellect superinduces on that tool-using instinct. And through all the countless ages revealed to the geologist, with ever new orders of successive life; with beast, bird, crustacean, insect, and zoophyte, endowed with wonderful constructive instincts, and perpetuating memorials of architecture and sculpture, of which the microscope is alone adequate to reveal the exquisite beauty and infinite variety of design: yet so thoroughly is the use of tools the exclusive attribute of man, that the discovery of a single artificially shaped flint in the drift or cave-breccia, is deemed proof enough that man has been there. The flint implement or weapon lies beside bones revealing species kindred to the sagacious elephant, or to those of carnivora allied to the dog, with its wonderful instincts bordering on reason and the forethought of experience; yet no theorist dreams of the hypothesis that some wiser Elephas primigenius, in advance of his age, devised the flint-spear wherewith to oppose more effectually the aggressions of the gigantic carnivora, whose remains abound in the ossiferous caverns.

But if man was created with a tool-using instinct, and with faculties capable of developing it into all the mechanical triumphs which command such wonder and admiration in our day, he was also created with a necessity for such. “The heritage of nakedness, which no animal envies us, is not more the memorial of the innocence that once was ours, than it is the omen of the labours which it compels us to undergo. With the intellect of angels, and the bodies of earth-worms, we have the power to conquer, and the need to do it. Half of the industrial arts are the result of our being born without clothes; the other half of our being born without tools.”[^[66]]

With the growing wants of men as they gathered into communities, novel arts were developed; and the demands of each new-felt want called into being means for its supply. Artificers in brass and iron multiplied, and the sites of the first cities of the earth were adorned with temples, palaces, sculptured marbles, and cunningly-wrought shrines. But whenever communities were broken up and scattered, the elements of an acquired civilisation were inevitably left behind. All but the most indispensable arts disappear during the process of migration; and although the wanderers might at length find a home in “a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass,” no arts are so speedily lost among migratory tribes as those of metallurgy. The hold of the accumulated wisdom and experience of successive generations must be partial and uncertain among an unlettered people, dependent on tradition for all knowledge excepting such as is practically transmitted in the operations of daily experience. Few indeed of all the wanderers from the old centres of European civilisation to the wilds of the New World bring with them the slightest knowledge either of the science or the practice of metallurgy. Every chemical analyst knows what it is to receive pyrites for silver, and ochres for iron or gold. Even now the skill of the American miner has to be imported, and the copper-miners of Lake Superior are chiefly derived from Cornwall, Norway, or the mining districts of Germany.

With all our many artificial wants so promptly supplied, even in the remotest colony, we are slow to perceive how much we owe to the wondrous appliances of modern civilisation, and its division of labour. The Dutchman exported his very bricks across the Atlantic, wherewith to found his New Amsterdam on the banks of the Hudson; and the English colonist, with enterprise enough to mine the copper and iron of Lake Superior, still seeks a market for the ores in England, and imports from thence both the engineers and the iron wherewith to bridge his St. Lawrence. With such facts before us in relation even to the systematic colonisation of a highly civilised and enterprising commercial nation, it is easy to understand what must have been the condition of the earth’s primeval wanderers. Their industrial arts were all to begin anew; and thus we see that the non-metallurgic condition of primitive social life which is designated its Stone Period, is not necessarily the earliest human period, but only the rudimentary state to which man had returned, and may return again, in the inevitable deterioration of a migratory era.

Evidence of various kinds still points to a cradle-land for the human family towards the western borders of Central Asia, and remote from its coasts: probably in that range of country stretching between the head-waters of the Indus and the Tigris. The earliest history of man that we possess represents the postdiluvian wanderers journeying eastward, and at length settling on a plain that long afterwards remained one of the chief centres of history. But the arts there developed belonged exclusively to a far inland people; and to this day the rude craft of the Tigris and the Euphrates betrays a total absence of maritime instinct or skill in navigation. The highest effort of their boat-builders is little more than to construct a temporary raft, on which themselves and their simple freight may float in safety down the current of the great river. Similar rafts are still in use by the Egyptians, formed of earthenware jars bound together by withes and cords, and covered with bulrushes. Like the corresponding river-craft of the Euphrates, these are steered down the Nile, never to return; for, on their arrival at Cairo, the rafts are broken up, and the jars sold in the bazaars. Such was the rudimentary condition of navigation in that great Asiatic hive of nations where man chiefly dwelt for centuries remote from the sea. But from thence the wanderers were scattered over the face of the whole earth. The primitive river-craft, therefore, found an early development into sea-craft; and oceanic migration gave a new character to the wanderings of the primeval nomads. Thenceforth, accordingly, those instinctive tendencies began to characterise certain branches of the human family, as leaders of maritime enterprise, which may be traced under very diverse degrees of social development: as in the Phœnicians, the Northmen, the Malays, and the Polynesians; while other tribes and nations, such as the Celts and the Fijians, though living on the coast, are tempted by no longings to voyage on the ocean’s bosom.

The islands of the Central American archipelago were the first to reward the sagacity of Columbus, as he steered his course westward in search of the old East. The arts of their simple natives accordingly attracted his attention; and although he found among them personal ornaments of gold, sufficient to awaken the avaricious longings of the Spaniards for that fatal treasure of the New World, yet practically they were in ignorance of metallurgic arts, and lacked that stimulus to ingenious industry which the requisites of clothing call forth in less genial climes. The natives of Guanahanè, or San Salvador, were friendly and gentle savages, in the simplicity, if not in the innocence, of nakedness. Their only weapons were lances of wood hardened in the fire, pointed with the teeth or bone of a fish, or furnished with a blade made either of the universal flint, or more frequently, with them, from the large tropical shells which abound in the West Indian seas. They had learned to turn the native cotton-plant to economical account; but their chief mechanical ingenuity was expended on the light barks to which they gave the now universal name of canoe. These were formed from the trunk of a single tree, hollowed by fire, with the help of their primitive adzes of flint or shell, and were of various sizes, from the tiny bark only capable of holding its solitary owner, to the galley manned by forty or fifty rowers, who propelled it swiftly through the water with their paddles, and baled it with the invaluable native calabash, which supplied every domestic utensil, and rendered them indifferent to the potter’s art.

The canoe has a peculiar interest and value in relation to the archæology of the New World. With our wondrous steamships, wherewith we have bridged the Atlantic, we are apt to lose faith in the capacity of uncivilised man for overcoming such obstacles as the dividing oceans which had so long concealed America from the ancient world. But the bark in which Columbus first crossed the Atlantic was in no degree more capable of braving the ocean’s terrors than the navies of the Mediterranean had been a thousand years before; and the primitive canoes of the American archipelago far more nearly resembled the Pinta, or the Niña with its lateen sails, than the smallest of our modern ocean craft.

Throughout the Polynesian archipelago, fragments of foreign vocabularies are the chief traces of that oceanic migration by which alone the descendants of a common race could people those distant islands of the sea. The recognition of certain Malay and Polynesian words in the language of the remote island of Madagascar is one striking illustration of what such intrusive linguistic elements imply. We can thus trace the primitive voyagers, in their praus, or slight Malayan vessels, navigating an ocean of three thousand miles; and perceive how, even by such means, the ocean highway was open to the world’s grey fathers in remotest prehistoric times.