FROM DAWSON’S FOSSIL MEN.
A front view of a Hochelagan skull, surrounded by the outline, on a larger scale, of the Cro-magnon skull.
This cave race is represented by the Cro-magnon skull, and, as Dawkins holds, is perpetuated to-day by the Eskimo, and was very likely also represented in the Guanches of the Canary Islands. Quatrefages calls it the race of Cro-magnon; and the vanishing of it into the Neolithic people is obscure. It is claimed by some, but the evidence is questionable, that the development of the muscles of speech make this race the first to speak, and that thus man, as a speaking being, is probably not ten thousand years old.
The interval before the shaped and polished stone implements were used may have been long in some places, and the gradation may have been confused in others; and it is indeed sometimes said that the one and the other condition exist in savage regions at the present day, as many archæologists hold that they have always existed, side by side, though this proposition is also denied. Indeed, it is a question if the terms of the archæologist, signifying ages or epochs, have any time value, being rather characteristics of stages of development than of passing time. Those who find the ruder implements to stand for a people living with the cave-bear find, as they contend, a shorter-headed race producing these finer stone implements, and call it the Reindeer epoch. One of Lubbock’s terms, the Neolithic age, has gained larger acceptance as a designation for this period since 1865, when he introduced it. With these polished stones we first find signs of domestic animals and of the practice of agriculture. Any considerable collection of these stone implements and ornaments will present to the observer great varieties, but with steady types, of such implements as axes, celts, hammers, knives, drills, scrapers, mortars and pestles, pitted stones, plummets, sinkers, spear-points, arrow-heads, daggers, pipes, gorgets,—not to name others.
On the American stone age, see Nadaillac, Les premiers hommes, p. 37; L. P. Gratacap in Amer. Antiquarian, iv.; and W. J. McGee, in Pop. Sci. Monthly, Nov., 1888, for condensed views; but the student will prefer the more enlarged views of Rau, Abbott and others.
[1611] Cambridge, Eng., 1862; revised, 1865; and largely rewritten, London, 1876. Cf. his “Pre-Aryan American Man,” in the Roy. Soc. Canada Trans., i., 2d sect., 35, and his “Unwritten History” in Smithsonian Rept. (1862).
[1612] London, 1865, 1870; N. Y., 1878.
[1613] Tylor speaks of Klemm’s Allgemeine Culturgeschichte der Menschheit and his Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft as containing “invaluable collections of facts bearing on the history of civilization.”
[1614] Royal Inst. of Gt. Brit. Proc., reprinted in Smithsonian Rept., 1867.