It is a mistake to suppose that all the bones of all the men and animals which have lived on the earth’s surface are naturally and as a matter of course permanent enduring things. On the contrary, when they are buried in soil or sand permeated by water, they slowly soften and decay, dissolve and disappear. When washed into streams and rivers or into the sea, they break up and dissolve. No bones were dredged up from the floor of the ocean by the explorers of the Challenger expedition. A bone sunk in the sea gradually dissolves. Only those bones (and the same is true of shells) are permanently preserved which happen to get into certain favourable positions, embedded in clay or hard deposit, which is not disturbed, and becomes slowly raised up and free from soaking water before the bone is dissolved; or, again, those which have been protected in the accumulated deposits of the floor of a cavern covered in by layers of hard calcareous slab or stalagmite, which usually is formed by the water dripping from the limestone roof and walls. The limestone is dissolved like sugar, and is deposited when the water evaporates—“petrifying” the floor of the cave. It is owing to this rarity of the natural preservation of bones that we never find more than a few of those of extinct animals of various degrees of antiquity, and never more than a very few of those of the ancient men who lived in caverns and made “flint implements.”
Fig. 66.—An unpolished but beautifully chipped flint knife, of the Neolithic Age, from Denmark. (This figure and [Fig. 67] are from the guide to the antiquities of the Stone Age in the British Museum).
As a preliminary to dealing below with the story of “the Neander Men”—to which race the newly-found skull and bones from the Corrèze belong—it will help to make the importance of that skeleton obvious if I very briefly and dogmatically state what are the great periods in the prehistoric record of man, and the probable distance in time from us of those periods. It must be remembered that what I have to say applies only to the “prehistoric history” of man in Western Europe and the Mediterranean region, for it is only this part of the world which has been sufficiently carefully examined to yield any definite conclusions. Let us suppose that we can travel back through the ages, and proceed to do so. We find that there are three well-marked successive periods in Europe—which are called the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, and the Stone Age. When we go back to Julius Cæsar conquering Gaul and parts of Germany and Britain, we find that the Romans had steel swords, and freely made use of that metal for a variety of tools and constructive purposes. The Gauls and Belgi and Allemanni and Britons were still in the Bronze Age; they had beautifully made bronze swords and daggers and helmets and shields, which were weaker and softer than those of iron used by the Romans. The use of iron was soon spread by the conquerors, and the rest of Europe entered on the Iron Age. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England they had iron weapons. At what date precisely the Romans themselves took to the use of iron is not known, probably they learnt its use from the peoples of Africa; but at no distant date, a few hundred years before Christ, they, too, and the Greeks were in the Bronze Age. In Western Europe we see the Bronze Age, as we travel back in time, disappearing, and we come to the Stone Age, about 2000 B.C. Copper was used at the later stage of the Stone Age, and then the alloy with tin, which is called “bronze.” At the time that the big stones of Stonehenge were set up (the smaller stones of the outer circle are more ancient) the Stone Age was coming to its end, and the Bronze Age coming in.
Fig. 67.—A polished flint axe-head, of Neolithic Age, from Denmark.
Everywhere, but not always within the same thousand years or so, we see as we go still farther back, the use of metal giving place to the use of stone. In Europe we see a highly-developed material civilisation from three to seven thousand years ago. The people till the land, sow crops, keep herds, build houses (of wood), make pottery, combs for the hair, necklaces of amber and of shells, and other ornaments, but they have no metal weapons or implements. They sometimes use native gold to make decorative ornaments; but their knives, daggers, swords, saws, and hammers are all of stone, either flint or dense greenstone. We reach this purely Stone Age in Europe at 2000 B.C.; in Egypt we do not get back to it so soon, but, about 5000 B.C., we there come upon a pre-Pharaonic population which made use of beautifully-finished stone knives in place of metal. The first people we come upon in Europe as we pass from the Bronze to the Stone Age had a great deal of skill and an elaborate social organisation. Their stone weapons were beautifully chipped and often highly polished (Figs. [66] and [67]). We find the slabs of grit upon which they rubbed the chipped flint adzes in order to make them smooth. But soon we find, as we go back, that polishing is unknown, and that the chipped flint adzes are used in a rough state. On entering the Stone Age we find that we are only on the fringe of an immense period of “stone-weaponed humanity,” extending back for tens of thousands of generations of men, when stone (and in Europe especially, that stone which we call “flint”) was the one great stand-by of the human race—the one hard cutting material which man learnt to shape and apply to his own purposes—so as to make holes with it, saw with it, scrape with it, cut with it, kill with it. On account of its prodigious range in time it is found necessary to divide the Stone Age into two periods—a later, called the “Neolithic” (the new stone period), and an older, stretching back until the traces of it are lost in geologic changes of the earth, which is called the “Palæolithic” (the old stone period).
Thus if we start on a time-journey to explore the earliest traces of man in Europe, we pass along the centuries back, through the Iron and the Bronze Ages of humanity, and arrive at the vast Stone Age, which stretches away into the obscurity of more than a hundred thousand, probably of many hundred thousand, years. The later or newer fringe of the Stone Age is called the “Neolithic,” or newer Stone Age, or Age of Polished Stone, because the men of that period polished their stone implements after chipping them into shape. That which we dimly see beyond is the “Palæolithic,” or older period of “stone-weaponed” humanity, when polishing was unknown.