The Neolithic civilisation comprised the Swiss and Glastonbury lake-dwellers, who built houses on piles in the water: also the makers of the kitchen-middens of Denmark, and the builders of the great stone avenues, circles, and cromlechs, and the elevators of the solitary big stones called “menhirs”—most of them rougher and probably two thousand or three thousand years older than the big stones of Stonehenge. Our journey has now brought us into the full darkness of prehistoric times. We cannot tell how far back this “Neolithic” period reaches, but there are things found which make it certain that it reaches to 7000 B.C., and probably a good deal farther. We are now far in time behind the most ancient Greeks and the more ancient Egyptians. Europe is a rich, moist pasture-land, peat bogs are abundant and luxuriant woodlands; the climate is mild; the wild animals are those which to-day inhabit Central Europe, but more abundant. The domesticated animals kept by the men are those which we have to-day, and many of the crops and cultivated plants are those of our own time, such as wheat, barley, oats, and rye. We know also by their remains that the Neolithic men fed on chestnuts, hazel nuts, walnuts, plums, apples, pears, and strawberries, and cultivated the vine, the pale opium-poppy, and the narrow-leaved flax. Hemp was not known to them.
As we push back still farther into the night of antiquity—we cannot say at how many thousand years from to-day, whether ten, twenty, or fifty thousand—the climate becomes very cold, the glaciers extend far down the valleys, and we note that the level of sea and land has changed. Great Britain and Ireland are part of the Continent of Europe. There are strange animals in the south of what was England, and there, as well as in France, reindeer abound, wild horses, the bison, the Siberian saiga antelope, the great ox, bears, gluttons, and wolves; and there are men living in caves—the natural caverns which form in limestone rock. These men are chipping flints (but do not polish them) and carving bones, but now have no herds, nor cultivated fields, nor pottery (some very rough fragments have been found), nor buildings, nor earthworks. They are like some modern savages, Nature’s gentlemen, “who toil not, neither do they spin,” but they hunt and fish. They live entirely on the produce of the chase and on fish, wild fruits, and roots.
They wear undressed skins and furs, and paint or tattoo their faces. They make twisted ropes (probably of skin) which they fix as a halter round the head and jaw of the wild horse, as shown by their own carvings (Figs. [8] and [9]). Probably they ride him. They certainly eat him. At Solutré, near Mâcon, the bones of no less than a hundred thousand horses were found piled up as a sort of kitchen-midden round a camp of Palæolithic men! They have the art of making fire, and have a wonderful artistic skill in carving and drawing on bone and ivory and on stones, and in painting on the walls of their caves, the animals which surround them and are hunted by them ([Fig. 71]). They make great numbers of carved harpoons or toothed spear-heads ([Fig. 68]) from bone, and also needles for sewing skins; whilst from flint they chip spear-heads, knives, hand-hatchets, and saws. They decorate their carvings with spirals, lozenges, and circles cut in low relief ([Fig. 69]). But their truly astonishing skill and mental development is shown in their carvings and engravings of animals and fish ([Fig. 70]), which are executed either on bones or stones, or on pieces of the ivory of the mammoth. Besides the reindeer, horses, goats, saiga antelope, rhinoceros, mammoth, and seal, their carvings include statuettes and drawings of men and women ([Fig. 7]).
Fig. 68.—A. Perforated harpoon of the transition period (Azilian or Red Deer period), between Palæolithic and Neolithic, made from antler of red deer, found in quantity in the upper layers of deposit in the cavern of the Mas d’Azil (Ariège). B and C. Imperforate harpoons or lance heads made from reindeer antler of the Magdalenian period (Reindeer epoch). B from Bruniquel Cave (Tarn-et-Garonne). C from a cavern in the Hautes Pyrenées. Same size as the objects.
[Transcriber’s Note: The original image is approximately 2¾ inches (7cm) high and 1½ inches (4cm) wide in total.]
At the best period some of these carvings show a mastery of the material, a directness and a simplicity and beauty of essential line, together with true observation of characteristic form, which separate these works from those of the ordinary savage of modern times, and have caused living artists of authority to declare that these craftsmen had those definite gifts which entitle them to be recognised as brother artists—an assurance which confirms my own impression based on a long study of large series of the actual specimens. The best works of their later period (for their skill took time to develop, and follows the laws of growth of all art) represent animals, such as deer, in movement and often turning round or foreshortened ([Fig. 70]); some of their carvings of horses’ heads are worthy of the Parthenon ([Fig. 9]). On the other hand, as is often observed in primitive art, their representations of the human face and figure are very inferior, and tend to caricature.
