Drift Man’s Working Materials
The finds in the French cave districts prove that man was able to develop certain higher refinements of life, even during the Drift in the real flint districts—where a very suitable material was at man’s disposal in the flint that lay about everywhere or was easily dug up; which was worked with comparative ease into much more perfect and efficient weapons and implements than those supplied by the wilder stretches of moor and fen of Germany, with their scarcity of flint.
If we compare the small, often tiny, knives and flint flakes from the German places with the powerful axes and lance-heads of those regions, it is self-evident how much more laborious life must have been for the man who used the former. What labour he must have expended in carving weapons and implements out of bone and horn, while flint supplied the others with much better and more lasting ones with less expenditure of time and trouble! In this light a wealth of flint was a civilising factor of that period which is not to be under-estimated. In the flint districts not only are the stone implements better worked, answering in a higher degree the purpose of the weapon and the tool, but delight in ornament and decoration is also more prominent.
The Life in the Caves
Life in the caves and grottos and under the rock shelters in the neighbourhood of rivers was by no means quite wretched. The remains left in the caves by their former inhabitants give almost as clear an idea of the life of man in those primeval times as the buried cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii do of the manners and customs of the Italians in the first century of the Christian era. The floors of these caves in which men formerly lived appear to consist entirely of broken bones of animals killed in the chase, intermixed with rude implements and weapons of bone and unpolished stone, and also charcoal and large burnt stones, indicating the position of fireplaces. Flints and chips without number, rough masses of stone, awls, lance-heads, hammers, and saws of flint and chert lie in motley confusion beside bone needles, carved reindeer antlers, arrow-heads and harpoons, and pointed pieces of horn and bone; in addition to which are also the broken bones of the animals that served as food, such as reindeer, bison, horse, ibex, saiga antelope, and musk-ox. The reindeer supplied by far the greater part of the food, and must at that time have lived in Central France in large herds and in a wild state, all trace of the dog being absent.
Pictures from the Drift World
Among these abundant remains of culture archæologists were surprised to find real objects of art from the hand of Drift Man, proving that thinking about his surroundings had developed into the ability to reproduce what he saw in drawing and modelling. The first objects of this kind were found in the caves of the Périgord. They are, on the one hand, drawings scratched on stones, reindeer bones, or pieces of horn, mostly very naïve, but sometimes really lifelike, chiefly representing animals, but also men; on the other hand imitations plastically carved out of pieces of reindeer horn, bones, or teeth. Such engravings also occurred on pieces of ivory, and plastic representations in this material have been preserved. On a cylindrical piece of reindeer horn from the cave excavations in the Dordogne is the representation of a fish, and on the shovel-piece of a reindeer’s horn are the head and breast of an animal resembling the ibex. Illustrations of horses give faithful reproductions of the flowing mane, unkempt tail, and disproportionately large head of the large-headed wild horse of the Drift. The most important among these representations are such as endeavour to reproduce an historical event. An illustration of this kind represents a group consisting of two horses’ heads and an apparently naked male figure; the latter bears a long staff or spear in his right hand, and stands beside a tree, which is bent down almost in coils in order to accommodate itself to the limited space, and whose boughs, indicated by parallel lines, show it to be a pine or fir. Connected with the tree is a system of vertical and horizontal lines, apparently representing a kind of hurdlework. On the other side of the same cylindrical piece are two bisons’ heads. Doubtless this picture tells a tale; it is picture-writing in exactly the same sense as that of the North American Indians. Our picture already shows the transition to abbreviated picture-writing, as, instead of the whole animals—horses and bisons—only the heads are given. The message-sticks of the Australians bear certain resemblances; Bastian has rightly described them as the beginnings of writing.
If we have interpreted them aright, the finds that have been made, with the tally from the source of the Schussen and the message-stick from the caves of the Dordogne, place the art of counting, the beginnings of writing, the first artistic impulses, and other elements of primitive culture right back in the Drift period.
The Emerging of the Human Mind