THE LIFE OF MAN IN THE STONE AGE
Man a Witness of the Flood
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THE oldest remains affording us knowledge of man are not parts of his body—not the skeleton from which, in the case of primeval animals, we have learned to reconstruct their frame—but evidences of the human mind. Until the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes turned the scale, search had been made in vain among the bones of the fossil fauna for remains of the skeleton of fossil man of undoubtedly the same age; it was not bones, but tools, by which the Abbeville antiquary proved that man had been a “witness of the Flood” in Europe; tools which taught irrefutably that the mental powers of fossil man of the Drift were similar in kind to, if possibly less in degree than, those of living members of mankind. The Drift tools prove that, even in that early epoch to which we have learned from Boucher to trace him back, man was distinctively man.
Boucher de Perthes was an expert archæologist, and he knew that in Europe, in a very early period of civilisation, men had made their tools and weapons of stone, as many tribes and races in a backward state of civilisation—for example in South America, the South Sea Islands, and many other places—do at the present day. These stone implements are practically indestructible, and from ancient times manifold superstitions have attached to the curious articles that the peasant turns up out of the earth in ploughing. Such stone weapons were called lightning-stones by the Romans, as they are by country-folk at the present day. Scientific archæology occupied itself with them at an early date. In 1778 Buffon declared the so-called lightning-stones, or thunder-stones, to be the oldest art-productions of primeval man, and as early as 1734, Mahudel and Mercati had pronounced them to be the weapons of antediluvian man. Such views determined the line of thought in Boucher’s researches. From the very beginning he sought, in the undisturbed Drift beds of his home, not so much for the bones of Drift Man as for his tools, which he suspected to be of the form of the lightning-stones, although he knew that, so far as was hitherto known, these belonged to a very much later epoch—that is, specially to the Alluvial or “Recent” Period.
His expectations were crowned with success. Deep below the mass of overlying loam and sand, right in the strata of gravel and coarse sand, he found stone tools, which without the slightest doubt had been worked by the hand of man for definite and easily recognisable purposes as implements and weapons. Although to a certain extent ruder, they are practically the same forms as the tools, weapons, and implements of stone that we see in use among so-called “savages” of the present day. It is the tool artificially prepared for a certain purpose that raises man above the animal world to-day, as it did in the time of the Drift.
Drift Man’s Three Kinds of Tools
Upon his first visit to the relic-beds near Abbeville in the spring of 1859, Lyell had obtained seventy specimens of these stone tools from the chief of them. The tools were all of flint, which occurs in abundance in the chalk of the district, and is still obtained and worked for technical purposes at the present day. The worked stones that Boucher found were termed flint or silex tools, according to the material of which they were made. They occurred in the particular beds, as Lyell expressed it, in wonderful quantities. The famous geologist distinguished three chief forms. The first is the spear-head form, and varies in length from six to eight inches. The second is the oval form, not unlike many stone implements and weapons that are still used as axes and tomahawks at the present day—for instance, by the aborigines of Australia. The only difference is that the edge of the Australian stone axes, like that of the European implements of later periods of civilisation known as thunderbolts or lightning-stones, is mostly produced by grinding, whereas on the stone axes from the drift of the Somme valley it has always been obtained by simply chipping the stone, and by repeated, skilfully directed blows. According to Tylor the stone implements of the old Tasmanians were entirely of Drift form and make, all without traces of grinding, being simply angular stones whose cutting-edge had been sharpened by being worked with a second stone. Some of these stone implements of Drift Man may have been simply used in the hand when the natural form of the stone offered a convenient end, but the majority were certainly fastened in a handle in some way or other, to serve as weapons—spear-heads or daggers—both for war and the chase. Lyell’s second chief form would have been used as an axe for such purposes as digging up roots, felling trees, and hollowing out canoes, or to cut holes in the ice for fishing and for getting drinking water in the winter. In the hand of the hunter and warrior the stone axe also became a weapon. As the third form of stone implements Lyell distinguished knife-shaped flakes, some pointed, others of oval form or trimmed evenly at one end, obviously intended partly as knives and arrow-heads, and partly as scrapers for technical purposes.
