Prehistoric man

by Sir Daniel Wilson

The special characteristics of the native civilisation which the early Spanish adventurers found already existing in Mexico and Central America, will come under review at a later stage; but it cannot admit of question that throughout the whole Red Indian forest-area metallurgic arts were unknown, as they still are among the Indians of the North-west after an intercourse of upwards of three centuries and a half with Europeans. Copper, indeed, was wrought among them, but it was used without any application of fire, and as what maybe most fitly designated a mere malleable stone. In Britain, as I have already observed, “the working of gold may have preceded the age of bronze, and in reality have belonged to the Stone Period. If metal could be found capable of being wrought and fashioned without smelting or moulding, its use was perfectly compatible with the simple arts of the Stone Period. Masses of native gold, such as have been often found both in the Old and the New World, are peculiarly susceptible of similar application by the workers in stone; and some of the examples of Scottish gold personal ornaments fully correspond with the probable results of such an anticipatory use of the metals.”[^[68]] The idea thus formed from an examination of some of the most artless examples of primeval British goldsmiths’ work, has been amply confirmed by observing the mode of using the native copper, and the traces of its former working, among the American Indians. Even now their highest attainment in metallurgic skill extends only to grinding the iron hoops with which the Hudson’s Bay fur-traders supply them, into knives, arrow-heads, and the like substitutes for the older implements chipped out of flint, or ground from the broken stone. Further opportunities will occur for illustrating this subject; which is full of interest to the ethnologist, from the light it throws on the rate of progress of a barbarous people towards civilisation; or rather on the capacity of man in a certain undeveloped stage, for witnessing the most remarkable products of the useful arts, without evincing any desire to master them.

After centuries devoted to the elucidation of Roman remains, and the assignment to Roman artificers of much which more discriminating classification now awards to totally different workmen: the discovery of weapons and implements of stone, shell, or bone, in nearly every quarter of the globe, has at length excited a lively interest among the archæologists of Europe. Made, as these primitive relics are, of the most readily wrought materials, and by what may be styled the constructive instincts, rather than the acquired skill of their rude artificers, they belong to one condition of man, in relation to the progress of civilisation, though pertaining to many periods of the world’s history, and to widely separated areas. In one respect, however, those relics possess a peculiar value to the ethnologist. The materials employed in their manufacture have within themselves, most frequently, the evidence of their geographical origin, and in some of them also of their era. The periods to which numerous European relics pertain may frequently be determined, like those of older strata, by the accompanying imbedded or buried fossils. The bones of the Bos primigenius have been found indented with the stone javelin of the aborigines of Northern Europe, and dug up even in places of regular British sepulture. Those of the Megaceros Hibernicus seem, in like manner, to be traced to a period of ancient Irish colonisation, when flint-knives and stone hatchets prove the simple character of the native arts; though even then they furnished the material for constructing one of the earliest musical instruments. Yet other evidence shows that the same gigantic Irish deer was contemporary with the woolly rhinoceros, the mammoth, and the fossil carnivora of the caverns. The Bos longifrons, doubtless, traces its descent from an ancestry not less ancient; but from its wild herds the native Briton derived his domesticated cattle, and its most recent relics pertain to an era later than the Roman times. The ornamented tusks of the wild boar, the bones of the brown bear, the teeth and skulls of the beaver, carvings wrought from the walrus ivory, skates formed from the metatarsal and metacarpal bones of the red-deer and small native horse, with numerous kindred relics of palæontology within the era of the occupation of the British Islands by man, all serve to assign approximate dates to the examples of his ancient arts which they accompany.

Thus within the historic period, as in prior geological eras, the progress of time is recorded by the extinction of races. The advent of man was speedily marked by the disappearance of numerous groups of ancient life which pertain to that transitional era where archæology begins; though the most recent discoveries of works of art along with the fossil mammals of the drift, confirm, by new and striking evidence, the fact that man entered on this terrestrial stage, not as the highest in an entirely new order of creation, and belonging to an epoch detached by some overwhelming catastrophe from all preceding periods of organic life: but as the last and best of an order of animated beings whose line sweeps back into the shadows of an unmeasured past.

The disclosures of British tumuli, along with rarer chance deposits, show that the Celtic Briton was an intruder upon older allophylian occupants; while the presence of the Roman is recorded for us by the extinction of an ancient fauna, as well as of whole British tribes. What the Roman partially accomplished, the Saxon, the Dane, and the Norman completed: displacing the Briton everywhere but from the fastnesses of Wales; and gradually extirpating all but such animals as are either compatible with the development of social refinement, or are worthy of protection as a means of ministering to man’s pleasures. And as it has been in the Old World, so it is in the New. The progress of the European colonists not only involves the extirpation alike of the wild animals and the forests which formed their haunts; but also the no less inevitable disappearance of the aborigines who made of them a prey. Thus the grave-mound of the Red Indian, and the relics of his simple arts, become the memorials of an extinct order of things no less clearly defined than the post-tertiary fossils of the drift.

But while the remains of extinct species thus serve to determine the periods at which certain eras had their close, the traces of living or extinct fauna are no less valuable as fixing the geographical origin of the ancient colonists, amid whose relics they are found: just as the elephants, the camels, the monkeys, and baboons of the Nimrod obelisk, or the corresponding sculptures on the walls of Memphis or Luxor, indicate the countries whence tribute was brought, or captives were carried off, to aggrandise their Assyrian or Egyptian conquerors. Among relics which help to fix the geographical centres of ancient arts, the sources of early commerce, or the birthplaces of migrating races, might be noted the tin and amber of the Old, and the copper of the New World. So also the Mexican obsidian, the clay-slate of Columbia, the favourite red pipe-stone, or Catlinite, of the Couteau des prairies, and the pyrulæ and conch-shells of the Gulf of Florida, indicate varied sources of ancient trade or barter, and lines of migration extending over fully twenty degrees of latitude. Objects wrought in the favourite materials brought from such remote sources have been found mingling with relics of ancient tribes in the islands and on the north shores of the great Canadian lakes, along the southern slope of the same water-shed whence the Moose and the Abbitibbe pour their waters into the frozen sea of Hudson’s Bay.

The designation of any primitive stage of industrial arts as a Stone Period signifies, as has been already sufficiently indicated, that condition in which, in the absence of metals, and the ignorance of the simplest rudiments of metallurgy, man has to find materials for the manufacture of his tools, and the supply of his mechanical requirements, in the commoner objects which nature places within his reach.

Nothing can well be conceived much more artless than some of the stone implements still in use among savage tribes of America. Yet it is worthy of note that it is not amid the privations of an Arctic winter, but in southern latitudes, with a climate which furnishes abundant resources for savage man, that the crudest efforts at tool-making are found. In the report of the United States Geological Survey for 1872, which embraces Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah, Professor Joseph Leidy furnishes an interesting account of numerous implements of art, rude as any found in the drift, met by him during a survey of the Bridgers Basin at the base of the Unitah Mountains, in Southern Wyoming. “In some places the stone implements are so numerous, and at the same time are so rudely constructed, that one is constantly in doubt when to consider them as natural or accidental, and when to view them as artificial.”[^[69]] But with them are mingled implements of the finest finish. The Shoshones who haunt the region have no further knowledge of them than is indicated in their belief that they were a gift of God to their ancestors. But many are sharp, and fresh in appearance, as if recently worked from the parent block; and though others are worn, and decomposed on the surface, Professor Leidy does not assume more than a date of “centuries back” for the oldest of them. For, indeed, he found that the Shoshone Indians had in use a stone implement of so simple a character that he says, “had I not observed it in actual use, and had noticed it among the materials of the buttes, or horizontal strata of indurated clays and sandstone, I would have viewed it as an accidental spawl. It consists of a thin segment of a quartzite boulder, made by striking the stone with a smart blow. It is called a teshoa, and is employed as a scraper in dressing buffalo skins.” Subsequently he discovered a precisely similar implement, together with some perforated tusks of the elk, in an ancient Indian grave.

Fig. 53.—Texas Stone Axe, hafted.

No such rude implements are found among the productions of the arctic tool-makers. The necessities of the Esquimaux, in their clothing and hunting, beget systematic habits of industry and matured skill. The elaborate decorations of their skin and fur dresses, the carving of their ivory and bone implements, and the ingenuity lavished upon their children’s toys, all prove how thoroughly the æsthetic, as well as the industrial arts, are developed by the stimulus which man’s necessities create. In Fig. 53, an axe, or war-club, is shown, procured from the Indians of the Rio Frio, in Texas. The blade is a piece of trachyte, so rudely chipped that it could scarcely attract attention as having been subjected to any artificial working, but for the club-like haft into which it is inserted. I am indebted to Mr. Evans for the use of the woodcut. He describes the haft as formed of some indigenous wood, which has evidently been chopped into shape by means of stone tools. Nothing ruder has been brought to light among the earliest disclosures of drift or cave deposits. Another Texas implement in the Smithsonian collection at Washington is a roughly shaped flint blade, which, as shown of the full size in Fig. 54, closely resembles a familiar class of oval implements of the river-drift. It is curious, indeed, to note the undesigned correspondence between the implements of races equally widely separated by time and space. Several examples of stone celts or hatchets attached to their handles have been recovered in British and Irish bogs, and in the submerged lake-dwellings of Switzerland.