But through it all the suggestion insinuates itself that the latest, or youngest, of the three main European stocks, the blond, has more rather than less of the pugnacious and predatory temper than the other two, and that this stock made its way to the front in spite of, if not by force of these traits. The advantage of the blond as a fighter seems to have been due in part to an adventurous and pugnacious temper, but also in part to a superior physique,—superior for the purpose of fighting hand to hand or with the implements chiefly used in warfare and piracy down to a date within the nineteenth century. The same physical traits of mass, stature and katabolism will likewise have been of great advantage in the quest of a livelihood under the conditions that prevailed in the North-sea region, the habitat of the dolicho-blond, in the stone age. Something to the same effect is true of the spiritual traits which are said to characterise the blond,—a certain canny temerity and unrest.[73] So that the point is left somewhat in doubt; the traits which presently made the northern blond the most formidable disturber of the peace of Europe and kept him so for many centuries may at the outset have been chiefly conducive to the survival of the type by their serviceability for industrial purposes under the peculiar circumstances of climate and topography in which the race first came up and made good its survival.
In modern speculations on the origins of culture and the early history of mankind it has until recently been usual to assume, uncritically, that human communities have from the outset of the race been entangled in an inextricable web of mutual hostilities and beset with an all-pervading sentiment of fear; that the “state of nature” was a state of blood and wounds, expressing itself in universal malevolence and suspicion. Latterly, students of primitive culture, and more especially those engaged at first hand in field work, who come in contact with peoples of the lower culture, have been coming to realise that the facts do not greatly support such a presumption, and that a community which has to make its own living by the help of a rudimentary technological equipment can not afford to be habitually occupied with annoying its neighbours, particularly so long as its neighbours have not accumulated a store of portable wealth which will make raiding worth while. No doubt, many savage and barbarian peoples live in a state of conventional feud or habitual, even if intermittent, war and predation, without substantial inducement in the way of booty. But such communities commonly are either so placed that an easy livelihood affords them a material basis for following after these higher things out of mere fancy;[74] or they are peoples living precariously hand-to-mouth and fighting for their lives, in great part from a fancied impossibility of coming to terms with their alien and unnaturally cruel neighbours.[75] Communities of the latter class are often living in a state of squalor and discomfort, with a population far short of what their environment would best support even with their inefficient industrial organisation and equipment, and their technology is usually ill-suited to a settled life and unpromising for any possible advance to a higher culture. There is no urgent reason for assuming that the races which have made their way to a greater technological efficiency, with settled life and a large population, must have come up from this particular phase of civilisation as their starting point, or that such a culture should have been favourable to the survival and increase of the leading racial stocks of Europe, since it does not appear to be especially favourable to the success of the communities known to be now living after that fashion.[76]
The preconception that early culture must have been warlike has not yet disappeared even among students of these phenomena, though it is losing their respect; but a derivative of it still has much currency, to the effect that all savage peoples, as also the peoples of the lower barbarism, live in a state of universal and unremitting fear, particularly fear of the unknown. This chronic fear is presumed to show itself chiefly in religion and other superstitious practices, where it is held to explain many things that are otherwise obscure. There is not a little evidence from extant savage communities looking in this direction, and more from the lower barbarian cultures that are characteristically warlike.[77] Wherever this animus is found its effect is to waste effort and divert it to religious and magical practices and so to hinder the free unfolding of workmanship by enjoining a cumbersome routine of ritual and by warning the technologist off forbidden ground. But it is doubtless a hasty generalisation to carry all this over uncritically and make it apply to all peoples of the lower culture, past and present. It is known not to be true of many existing communities,[78] and the evidence of it in some ancient cultures is very dubious. Such a characterisation of the neolithic culture of Europe, whether north-European or Ægean, finds no appreciable support in the archæological evidence. These two regions are the most significant for the neolithic period in Europe, and the material from both is relatively very poor in weapons, as contrasted with tools, on the one hand, and there is at the same time little or nothing to indicate the prevalence of superstitious practices based on fear. Indeed, the material is surprisingly poor in elements of any kind that can safely be set down to the account of religion or magic, whether as inspired by fear or by more genial sentiments. It is one of the puzzles that beset any student who insists on finding everywhere a certain normal course of cultural sequence, which should in the early times include, among other things, a fearsome religion, a wide fabric of magical practices, and an irrepressible craving for manslaughter. And when, presently, something of a symbolism and apparatus of superstition comes into view, in the late neolithic and bronze ages, the common run of it is by no means suggestive of superstitious fear and religious atrocities. The most common and characteristic objects of this class are certain figurines and certain symbolical elements suggestive of fecundity, such as might be looked for in a peaceable, sedentary, agricultural culture on a small scale.[79] A culture virtually without weapons, whose gods are mothers and whose religious observances are a ritual of fecundity, can scarcely be a culture of dread and of derring-do. With the fighting barbarians, on the other hand, male deities commonly take the first rank, and their ritual symbolises the mastery of the god and the servitude of the worshipper.
It is true, of course, that both of weapons and of cult objects far the greater number that were once in use will have disappeared, since most of the implements and utensils of stone-age cultures are, notoriously, made of wood or similar perishable materials.[80] So that the finds give no complete series of the appliances in use in their time; whole series of objects that were of first-rate importance in that culture having probably disappeared without leaving a trace. But what is true in this respect of weapons and cult objects should be equally true of tools, or nearly so. So that the inference to be drawn from the available material would be that the early neolithic culture of north Europe, the Ægean, and other explored localities presumed to belong in the same racial and cultural complex, must have been of a prevailingly peaceable complexion. With the advance in technology and in the elaboration and abundance of objects that comes into sight progressively through the later neolithic period, down to its close, this disproportion between tools and weapons (and cult objects) grows more impressive and more surprising. Hitherto this disproportion has been more in evidence in the Scandinavian finds than in the other related fields of stone-age culture, unless an exception should be made in favour of the late neolithic sites explored at Anau.[81] But this archæological outcome, setting off the Baltic stone age as peculiarly scant of weapons and peculiarly rich in tools, may be provisional only, and may be due to the more exhaustive exploration of the Scandinavian countries and the uncommonly abundant material from that region. In the later (mainly Scandinavian) neolithic material, where the weapons are to be counted by dozens the tools are to be counted by hundreds, according to a scheme of classification in which everything that can be construed as a weapon is so classed, and there are many more hundreds of the one class than there are dozens of the other.[82] As near as can be made out, cult objects are similarly infrequent among these materials even after some appreciable work in pottery comes in evidence.
What has just been said is after all of a negative character. It says that nothing like a warlike, predatory, or fearsome origin can be proven from the archæological material for the neolithic culture of those racial stocks that have counted for most in the early periods of Europe. The presumption raised by this evidence, however, is fairly strong. And considerations of the material circumstances in which this early culture was placed, as well as of the spiritual traits characteristically required by these circumstances and shown by the races in question, point to a similar conclusion. The proclivity to unreasoning fear that is visible in the superstitious practices of so many savage communities and counts for so much in the routine of their daily life,[83] is to all appearance not so considerable an element in the make-up of the chief European stocks. Perhaps it enters in a less degree in the spiritual nature of the European blond than in that of any other race; that race—or its hybrid offspring—has at any rate proved less amenable to religious control than any other, and has also shown less hesitation in the face of unknown contingencies. And the circumstances of the presumed initial phase of the life-history of this race would appear not to have favoured a spiritual (instinctive) type largely biassed by an alert and powerful sentiment of unreasoning fear. So also an aggressive humanitarian sentiment is as well at home in the habits of thought of the north-European peoples as in any other, such as sorts ill with a native predatory animus. If it be assumed, as seems probable, that the situation which selectively tested the fitness of this stock to survive was that of the early post-glacial time, when its habitat in Europe was slowly being cleared of the ice-sheet, it would appear antecedently probable that the new (mutant) type, which made good its survival in following up the retreating fringe of the ice-sheet and populating the land so made available, will not have been a people peculiarly given to fear or to predation. A great facility of this kind, with its concomitants of caution, conservatism, suspicion and cruelty, would not be serviceable for a race so placed.[84]
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Even if it were a possible undertaking it would not be much to the present purpose to trace out in detail the many slow and fumbling moves by which any given race or people, in Europe or elsewhere, have worked out the technological particulars that have led from the beginnings down through the primitive and later growth of culture. Such a work belongs to the ethnologists and archæologists; and it is summed up in the proposition that men have applied common sense, more or less hesitatingly and with more or less refractory limitations, to the facts with which they have had to deal; that they have accumulated a knowledge of technological expedients and processes from generation to generation, always going on what had already been achieved in ways and means, and gradually discarding or losing such elements of the growing technological scheme as seemed no longer to be worth while,[85] and carrying along a good many elements that were of no material effect but were imposed by the logic of the scheme or of its underlying principles (habits of thought).
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Of the early technological development in Europe, so far as it is genetically connected with the later Western civilisation, the culture of the Baltic region affords as good and illustrative an object lesson as may be had; its course is relatively well known, simple and unbroken. Palæolithic times do not count in this development, as the neolithic culture begins with a new break in Europe.
It is known, then, that by early neolithic times on the narrow Scandinavian waters men had learned to make and use certain rude stone and bone implements found in the kitchen-middens (refuse heaps, shell-mounds of Denmark), that they had ways and appliances (the nature of which is not known) for collecting certain shellfish and for catching such game and fish as their habitat afforded, and that they presently, if not from the outset, had acquired the use of certain crop plants and had learned to make pottery of a crude kind. From this as a point of departure in the period of the kitchen-middens the stone implements were presently improved and multiplied, the methods of working the material (flint) and of using the products of the flint industry were gradually improved and extended, until in the long course of time the utmost that has anywhere been achieved in that class of industry was reached. Domestic animals began to be added to the equipment relatively early,[86] though at a long interval from the neolithic beginnings as counted in absolute time. Improvement and extension in all lines of stone-working and wood-working industry went forward: except that stone-dressing and masonry are typically absent, owing, no doubt, to the extensive use of woodwork instead.[87] Along with this advance in the mechanic arts goes a growing density of population and a wide extension of tillage; until, at the coming of bronze, the evidence shows that these communities were populous, prosperous, and highly skilled in those industrial arts that lay within their technological range.