In process of time, another change occurred. The conditions favourable to the growth of the oak ceased to exist, and in place of the defunct emblems of strength and durability, came a growth of fine beech-trees, which has continued, as we have seen, to beautify the country down to the present time. The people, too, improved in their knowledge of the arts, and were now able to manufacture their various articles out of the more refractory iron.
We have thus evidence of what, for the sake of clearness, we may term three distinct ages, though there is no real distinction, because one period glided into another as imperceptibly as our old year is followed by the new. First was a time when the land was covered with beech-trees, and the people worked their implements out of iron. This period, viewed broadly, joins the historic and the prehistoric into one. Second was an age when, in place of the present beeches, stalwart oaks grew in large numbers, and the inhabitants of the country separated the softer metals from their ores, and, by mixing them, produced bronze, of which material they then made their tools. Third was a time reaching still further into the uncertainty of the prehistoric era, when the graceful form of the Pinus silvestris grew about the sites of the present peat-mosses, and man, with rude uncultured notions on everything, and devoid of the broader lights that have cheered and helped him on in later days, with a kind of superior cunning instinct, shaped his early implements rudely out of the flints that came readily to his hand. It is easy to understand that a vast amount of time is necessary to bring about so great a variation in the conditions that govern the growth of vegetation as to cause three great changes in the kinds of trees that have grown in the land to occur in a given locality. Yet, long time as this requires, man has, in Denmark and in several other countries, been coexistent with the history of these changes.
In peats of the Bronze age, scarcely any human bones have been discovered, though they occur in peats of the Iron and Stone ages, and the other relics of man are about equal in all the three epochs. Scientists seem to agree in referring this to the probability that the people of this epoch always burned their dead. It is certain that cremation is a very ancient custom, and this theory, it is to be presumed, accounts for us not finding human remains in the deposits of this period.
The Kjökken-möddings, or Kitchen-middens, found on the shores of some of the Baltic islands, tell of the Stone age, and give evidence of the existence of man at a very remote period. The kitchen-middens are large refuse-heaps left by the former inhabitants of these islands, and consist chiefly of the castaway shells of the oyster, cockle, periwinkle, and other eatable mollusks. Sir Charles Lyell says of these remains: ‘No implements of metal have ever been detected. All the knives, hatchets, and other tools are of stone, horn, bone, or wood. With them are often intermixed fragments of rude pottery, charcoal, and cinders, and the bones of quadrupeds on which the rude people fed. These bones belong to wild species still living in Europe, though some of them, like the beaver, have long since been extirpated in Denmark. The only animal which they seem to have domesticated was the dog.’ There is geological evidence that at the time this people were thus feasting on local mollusks, Denmark was more intersected by fjords than it is now. In some places, the land has encroached on the sea; in others, the waves have eaten their way into the old coast-line. This is further evidence of the antiquity of the race that first lived in this district. It may also be mentioned that the bones of the Great Auk, which is now considered quite extinct, occur in these möddings in very large numbers; also that some of the testacea that occur in the refuse-heaps have since that time partially removed from these shores, while others have diminished in size.
The Stone age is the oldest prehistoric era we have any evidence of; but it is subdivided into two periods—the Palæolithic (ancient-stone) and the Neolithic (new-stone). The flint weapons of the Neolithic period, manufactured when man had made some little progress in the art of tool-making, are better finished than those of the Palæolithic period. Those of the earlier period (the Palæolithic) are so crude and ill finished that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them and pieces of flint worn and chipped by the forces of nature. The relics of the Danish peats are referable only to the Neolithic period. Before the earliest immigrants of the rude tribes of the Neolithic age had made their homes among the prehistoric firs of Denmark, there had roamed over vast tracts of country, not very far removed from that locality, a race of men, if possible more simple in their modes of life and workmanship—the men of the Palæolithic age. But, between this age and the Neolithic of the Danish peats a subdivision has been defined. In the caves in the south of France occur ‘vast quantities of the bones and horns of the reindeer. In some cases, separate plates of molars of the mammoth, and several teeth of the great Irish deer (Cervus magaceros) and of the cave-lion (Felis spelæa), and an extinct variety of Felis leo, have been found mixed up with cut and carved antlers of the reindeer.’
This period has been named by French geologists the Reindeer age, because the remains of that animal occur in very great profusion in these French caves. As a proof of the existence of man at a time when the reindeer and several other animals, now confined to far higher latitudes, roamed as far towards the equator as the south of France, perhaps farther, it is to be noticed that not only are his implements found side by side with the remains of the reindeer in such a manner as to show that they were deposited at the same time, but many of the antlers of that animal are cut and rudely carved, bearing ample evidence of the work of a more or less intelligent race of men. On one of the bones found in a cave of the Reindeer age, the outlines of the great mammoth have been rudely carved by some ingenious hand, long since laid to rest; and the long curved tusks and shaggy coat of wool are easily recognisable. M. Laret thinks that this places beyond all doubt that the early inhabitants of these caves must have seen, at least, a few specimens of this species of elephant roaming through these regions. The presence of the mammoth, one of the mammals of the Tertiary epoch, long ages ago quite extinct, known to have been clothed with a warm coat of shaggy hair and wool, is evidence at once of the great antiquity of the age in whose broken monuments we are able to read fragments of a witching history, and of the prevalence of a far more severe climate at that period than that which the southern countries of Europe enjoy now. It is evident that in this period we approach a time when the winters of the whole of Europe were much longer and more severe, and accompanied by a short, almost imperceptible summer; in fact, that we are in the midst of lingering evidences of a severe climate that the great Glacier age left behind it for a long time after our valleys were emptied of their snow and our waters cleared of ice.
But beyond the Neolithic and the Reindeer ages lies the Palæolithic epoch, reaching back still further into prehistoric times. The tools and implements of man referable to this epoch are found chiefly in the high-level gravels of our valleys, and are of the rudest type. They occur mixed with bones of the horse, bear, tiger, deer, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and extinct species of the hyena, in such a manner as to leave no doubt of their coexistence with these animals. They are ‘always unground, having evidently been brought to their present form simply by the chopping off of fragments by repeated blows, such as could be given by a stone hammer.’ The gravels in which these relics are found flank the modern rivers, but occupy a much higher level, sometimes being as high as a hundred feet above the bed of the present river, although there is no doubt they were formed by it. In some instances there may be three series of these ancient gravels in one valley, one above the other, forming well-defined terraces, and marking former levels of the river that now flows at the bottom of the valley. In such a case, the relics found in the uppermost two terraces, which would, of course, be the oldest, would probably be of the Palæolithic age—rudely formed, unpolished, and without any ornamentation. The remaining gravels of more recent date would probably contain Neolithic and bronze weapons, the flints being ground, polished, and rudely ornamented.
It is difficult to form any approximate idea of the vast antiquity of these Palæolithic gravels. Since they were laid down, and these early prehistoric men lived in these localities, the rivers over vast tracts of country have slowly cut their way through, in some instances, over a hundred feet of hard rock, and spread the sediment around their mouths or over the bottom of the sea. What a vast amount of time it must have required to scoop out the valleys of a country to a depth of a hundred feet! And it is to be remembered that all through the historic period, to a very large extent, no change has taken place in the relative position of these rivers and valleys. We quote Sir Charles Lyell again, who says: ‘Nearly all the known Pleistocene quadrupeds have now been found accompanying flint knives or hatchets in such a way as to imply their coexistence with man; and we have thus the concurrent testimony of several classes of geological facts to the vast antiquity of the human race. The disappearance of a large variety of species of wild animals from every part of a wide continent must have required a vast period of time for its accomplishment; yet this took place while man existed on the earth, and was completed before that early period when the Danish shell-mounds were formed. The deepening and widening of valleys implies an amount of change of which that which has occurred during the historical period forms scarcely a perceptible part. Ages must have been required to change the climate of wide regions to such an extent as completely to alter the geographical distribution of many mammalia, as well as land and fresh-water shells. The three or four thousand years of the historical period do not furnish us with any appreciable measure for calculating the number of centuries which would suffice for such a series of changes, which are by no means of a local character, but have operated over a considerable part of Europe.’
In these gravels we gather all that is at present known of that earliest period on which history sheds no light. This period probably reaches back into the closing acts of the physical drama of the great Glacial age, when the valleys and plains of the northern hemisphere, down to the fortieth parallel of latitude, were groaning beneath the burden of grinding glaciers and untold depths of snow; while the rivers were mostly covered with thick ice, and the seas were full of icebergs floating, with infinite collisions, to the southward, or covered with hummocked, snow-covered icefloe, as the arctic seas are to-day. Amid scenes like these, these earliest pioneers of the races of men struggled through their first experiences of the rough world. Could these scenes, through the touch of some magic wand, be reconstructed, and made to pass in dioramic form before our eyes, how interesting they would be! How closely we should listen to their stories of that far-gone age, could the men who lived while these gravels were being formed, spring to life again and tell us what they saw, and knew, and felt! What problems might thus be satisfactorily solved! But such cannot be: the past has successfully buried its dead, and what we know of its history must be through the tortuous course of induction.
But these men were most probably hunters; their business was to live. And no trapper of modern American fame could want higher or, to us, more interesting game. Across the snow-clad plains roamed herds of the gigantic mammoth in search of food; wild savage boars kept cover under the brushwood of the forests; and packs of hungry wolves, on the scent of prey, filled the clear frosty air with their dismal cry, as their modern representatives in Russia and other countries do to-day. The magnificent Irish deer—not then extinct, and than which no deer of modern age has antlers half so large, or has half so noble an appearance—galloped with bounding, graceful step across the plains of Ireland. Bears hibernated through the greater part of the severe, almost endless winter; and when the climate became suitable, cunning beavers followed their life’s work by the side of broad shallow rivers that drained continents, part of which are now no more. As the climate became warmer when the age of boulder-drift was past, ferocious tigers prowled around man’s rude hut in search of sweet morsels—veritable ancestors of modern ‘man-eaters’—and in the vicinity of the rivers, the huge hippopotamus and scale-covered crocodile sought their livelihood. Among this variety of animal life, and in the excitement of a hunter’s existence, during the latter part of the great Glacial age, lived these Palæolithic men, clothing themselves from the bitter cold with the warm furs of the animals their superior intelligence enabled them to trap, or that came within reach of their curiously flint-barbed arrows, and living almost entirely on the game they were able to ‘bag.’