The drawings of those contemporaries of the mammoth and other extinct fauna of Europe have naturally excited attention on various grounds. They furnish no uncertain evidence of the intellectual status of the men of that remote age who constituted the population of Southern France, and of neighbouring regions, under climatic conditions contrasting as strangely with those of the sunny land of the vine and the olive, as did the contemporary fauna and flora with those of Guyenne or Gascony at the present day. Any evidence therefore of their mode of working derived from their carvings and drawings has a special bearing on an inquiry into the antiquity and assumed universality of an instinctive habit.
The examples of primitive art are of varying degrees of merit. Some of them may be compared to the first efforts of an untutored youth; while others, such as the La Madelaine mammoth and the grazing reindeer from Thayngen, show the practised hand of a skilled draftsman. Among the fanciful illustrations introduced by M. Louis Figuier in his L’Homme Primitif is a picture showing the arts of drawing and sculpture as practised during the reindeer epoch. Three men of fine physique, slightly clad in skins, stand or recline in easy attitudes, sketching or carving as a modern artist might do in the lighter hours of his practice. One stands and sketches a deer, with free hand, on a piece of slate, which rests against a ledge of rock as his easel. Another, seated at his ease, traces a miniature device with, it may be, a pointed flint, on a slab of bone or ivory. The third is apparently carving or modelling a deer or other quadruped. All are, as a matter of course, represented with the stylus, graver, or modelling tool in the right hand, the question of possible left-handedness not having occurred to the modern draftsman.
All experience points to the conclusion that the primitive artificer habitually used one hand, whether the right or the left. Even when the naturally left-handed have acquired such facility in the use of the right hand, by persevering compliance with the usage of the majority in many customary practices of daily life, as to be practically ambidextrous, each hand is still employed by instinctive preference in certain definite acts; as with all, the knife is habitually used in one hand and the fork in the other. The result never leads to an indiscriminate employment of either hand. The necessity for promptness of action in the constantly recurring operations of daily life is sufficient to superinduce the habitual employment of one or the other hand with no more conscious selection than in the choice of foot, when not under command of a drill sergeant. Indeed, the experience of many readers, whose training as volunteers has included that important branch of education styled “the goose step,” must have convinced them that few questions are more perplexing to the novice than, “Which is the right foot, and which is the left?” In football no player is in doubt as to the foot he shall use. In cricket there is no uncertainty as to the choice of hand for the bat. In digging the action is so certain, though unpremeditated, that in Ireland, and probably elsewhere, “the spade-foot” is a term in general use. It is not necessarily the right foot, but it is always the same. The unpremeditated action of hand or foot is uniform, as the reader will find by clasping his hands with the fingers interlaced, or inviting another to do so. It is no matter of chance which thumb shall be uppermost. But combined operations involving close unity of action are rare in savage life; and man in the hunter stage is little affected in his habits by social usage. Hence spontaneous left-handedness may be looked for more frequently in such a stage, and even in peasant life, than in cultured society; though the occasions for its manifestation are more rare.
Attention has already been directed to the test of the diverse direction in which a profile is most readily, and therefore most naturally, drawn if executed by the right or the left hand. In so far as the drawings or etchings of the palæolithic age are available for the application of this test, the following data may be adduced:—
The mammoth drawing from La Madelaine Cave; the bison, imperfect, showing only the hind-quarters; and the ibex, on reindeer-antler, from Laugerie Basse; the group of reindeers from the Dordogne, two walking and one lying on its back; the cave-bear of the Pyrenees, from the cave of Massat, in the department of Ariége; and another sketch representing a hunter stalking the Urus: may all be regarded as right-hand drawings. But the horses from La Madelaine, engraved on reindeer-antler, specially noticeable for their large heads; the horse, from Creswell Crags; and, above all, the remarkably spirited drawing of the reindeer grazing, from Thayngen in the Kesserloch—a sketch, marked by incident, both in the action of the animal and its surroundings, suggestive of an actual study from nature,—all appear to be left-hand drawings.
The number of examples thus far adduced is obviously too small to admit of any general conclusions as to the relative use of the right or left hand being based on their evidence; but so far as it goes, while it presents one striking example of a left-handed drawing, it confirms the idea of the predominance of right-handedness at that remote stage in the history of European man. It confirms, moreover, the correctness of the distinction already made between the preferential use of either hand by the cultured and skilled workman, or the artist, and its employment among rude, unskilled labourers engaged in such toil as may be readily accomplished by either hand. That the use of the left hand is transmitted from parent to child, and so, like other peculiarities, is to some extent hereditary, is undoubted. This has, therefore, to be kept in view in drawing any comprehensive deductions from a few examples confined to two or three localities. It may be that the skilled draftsman of the Vézère, or the gifted artist to whom we owe the Kesserloch drawing, belonged to a family, or possibly a tribe, among whom left-handedness prevailed to an unusual extent; and so might be developed not only hereditarily but by imitation. But on the other hand, even among those palæolithic draftsmen, there is a distinct preference for the right hand in the majority of cases; and this is just what was to be expected. The more the subject is studied it becomes manifest that education, with the stimulus furnished by the necessities arising from all combined action, has much to do with a full development of right-handedness. The bias is unquestionably in that direction; but with many it is not so active as to be beyond the reach of education, such as the habit and usage of companions would supply, to overcome it. But with a considerable number the preferential use of the right hand is prompted by a strong, if not unconquerable instinctive impulse. A smaller number are no less strongly impelled to the use of the left hand. In the ruder conditions of society each man is free to follow the natural bias; and in the absence or rare occurrence of the need for combined action, either habit attracts little attention. But so soon as co-operation begins to exercise its restraining and constraining influences, a very slight bias, due probably to individual organic structure, will suffice to determine the preference for one hand over the other, and so to originate the prevalent law of dexterity. The results shown by the ancient drawings of Europe’s cave-men perfectly accord with this. In that remote dawn every man did that which was right in his own eyes. Some handled their tools and drew with the left hand; a larger number used the right hand; but as yet no rule prevailed. In this, as in certain other respects, the arts and habits of that period belong to a chapter in the infancy of the race, when the law of dexterity, as well as other laws begot by habit, convenience, or mere prescriptive conventionality, had not yet found their place in that unwritten code to which a prompter obedience is rendered than to the most absolute of royal or imperial decrees.
But we are not limited to the comparatively rare and exceptional examples of primitive dexterity which the works of the palæolithic carver and etcher supply for illustrations of the special habit now under consideration. The graceful proportions and delicate manipulation of many of the chipped implements of flint have, not unnaturally, excited both admiration and wonder, in view of the very limited resources of the worker in flint.
But the process of the ancient arrow-maker is no lost art. It has been found in use among many barbarous races; and is still practised by some of the American Indian tribes, to whom the art has doubtless been transmitted through successive generations from remotest times. The modes of manufacture vary somewhat among different tribes; but they have been repeatedly witnessed and described by explorers who have watched the native arrow-maker at work; and his operations no longer present the difficulties which were long supposed to beset this “lost art” of prehistoric times. Among the rarer primitive implements are hammer-stones, oblong or rounded in shape, generally with cavities worked in two faces, so as to admit of their being conveniently held between the finger and thumb. Implements of this class have been repeatedly recovered from the French caves. An interesting example occurred among the objects embedded in the red cave-earth of Kents’s Hole, Devonshire; and others of different periods, usually quartzite pebbles or nodules of flint, have been found in many localities. Some of them were probably used in breaking the larger bones to extract the marrow, but the battered edges of others show their contact with harder material. Similar hammer-stones occur in the Danish peat-mosses, in the Swiss lake-dwellings, in sepulchral deposits, and are also included among the implements of modern savage art. They vary also in size, and were, no doubt, applied to diverse purposes.
The mode of fashioning the large, tongue-shaped implements and rude stone hatchets, which are among the most characteristic drift implements, it can scarcely be doubted, was by blows of a stone or flint hammer; as was obviously the case with large unfinished flint or horn-stone implements recovered by me from some of the numerous pits of the Flint Ridge, a siliceous deposit of the Carboniferous Age which extends through the State of Ohio, from Newark to New Lexington. At various points along the ridge funnel-shaped pits occur, varying from four or five to fifteen feet deep; and similar traces of ancient mining may be seen in other localities, as at Leavenworth, about three hundred miles below Cincinnati, where the gray flint or chert abounds, of which large implements are chiefly made. The sloping sides of the pits are in many cases covered with the fractured flints, some of them partially shaped as if for manufacture. The work in the quarry was, no doubt, the mere rough fashioning of the flint by the tool-makers, with a view to facility of transport, in many cases, to distant localities. But the finer manipulation, by means of which the carefully-finished arrow-heads, knives, lances, hoes, drills, scrapers, etc., were manufactured, was reserved for leisurely and patient skill. Longfellow, in his Indian epic, represents the Dacotah arrow-maker busy plying his craft. It was no doubt pursued by specially skilled workmen; for considerable dexterity is needed in striking the flakes from the flint core, and fashioning them into the nicely-finished edged tools and weapons to be seen in many museums. The choice of material is by no means limited to flint.
At the doorway of his wigwam