EVIDENCES OF MAN’S ADVANCEMENT
IN PREHISTORIC AGES
From human remains, weapons, tools and other vestiges of human activity, found in the more recent deposits on the earth’s surface, the presence of man in these far off ages is made increasingly certain. The Pleistocene or Quaternary epoch, as represented by these objects of primitive culture, ranged over a vast period of time which has been conveniently divided into two great epochs, the Paleolithic or Old Stone, and the Neolithic or New Stone Age, these being so named from the material chiefly used by primitive peoples in the manufacture of their weapons and other implements. The distinction between the two periods, which are not to be taken as chronological, since they overlap in many places, is based essentially on the different treatment of the material, which during the immeasurably longer Old Stone Age was at first merely chipped, flaked, or otherwise rudely fashioned, but in the New more carefully worked and polished.
MAN IN THE OLD
STONE AGE
Evidence is, however, that it is not always possible to draw any clear line between the Old and New Stone Ages. In one respect the former was towards its close even in advance of the latter, and quite a “Paleolithic School of Art” was developed during a long period of steady progress in the sheltered Vézère valley, of South France. Here were produced some of those remarkable stone, horn, and even ivory scrapers, gravers, harpoons, ornaments and statuettes with carvings on the round, and skilful etchings of seals, fishes, reindeer, harnessed horses, mammoths, snakes, and man himself, which also occur in other districts.
In Tunisia many implements lie under a thick bed of Pleistocene limestone deposited by a river which has since disappeared. The now absolutely lifeless Libyan plateau is strewn with innumerable worked flints, showing that early man inhabited this formerly fertile region before it was reduced by the slowly changing climate to a waste of sands. The same story of man’s great age is told by discoveries in Burma, India, North and especially South America, and now also in Great Britain.
MAN IN THE NEW
STONE AGE
Outstanding features of the New Stone Age are the Swiss and other lake-dwellings, the Danish peat-beds with their varied contents, the shell-mounds occurring on the seaboard in many parts of the world.
In the more civilized regions, such as Egypt, Babylonia, parts of Asia Minor, and the Ægean lands, the Stone Ages were at an early date followed by a period vaguely designated as “prehistoric,” during which stone as the material of human implements was gradually replaced by the metals, first copper, then various copper alloys (arsenic, sulphur, nickel, cobalt, zinc, and especially tin) generally called bronze, lastly iron.
1 to 29.—Implements of the Stone Age. 30 to 48.—Implements of the Bronze and Early Iron Ages. 49 to 60.— Implements of the Late Iron Age.