It must, I fear, be acknowledged that the caches of the New Stone Age fail to give us the help expected towards settling what was the first implement employed. It is true that they yield hooks, nets, net-sinkers, which may have been merely developments of Troglodyte tackle, but, judging from the absence of any surviving Palæolithic example, were more probably new inventions.
But neither these nor the implements of succeeding Ages furnish us with evidence sufficient to decide the tackle first employed by the earliest fisherman, or even by the Old Stone Man, for, as Cartailhac truly warns us, “Ce n’est pas, comme on l’a dit à tort, le début de l’art que nous découvrons. L’art de l’âge du renne est beaucoup trop ancien.”[14]
And here it may well be objected, if the New Stone Age does not disclose any priority of implement, why further pursue what thus must be the insoluble? Why, indeed, especially if it be true that their tackle with some additional devices merely shows up as a development and improvement of that of their predecessors, to whom in point of time they surely stand nearer than any other known race?
The objection is pertinent. But, startling as the statement may seem, there now exist, or have within the last century existed, races, who in the actual material, and in the mode of fashioning, of their weapons are, in the opinion of experts, nearer akin to and resemble more closely Palæolithic than did Neolithic man.
Speaking of the Eskimos, Cartailhac simply summarises the evidence of many authorities, when he writes “the likenesses in the above points are so striking that one sees in them the true descendants of the Troglodytes of Perigord.”
Professor Boyd-Dawkins goes farther. He finds the Eskimos so intimately connected with the Cave Men in their manners and customs, in their art, especially in their method of representing animals, and in their implements and weapons, that “the only possible explanation is that they belong to the same race: that they are representatives of the Troglodytes, protected within the Arctic circle from those causes by which their forbears had been driven from Europe and Asia. They stand at the present day wholly apart from other living races, and are cut off from all by the philologer and the craniologist.”[15]
Food supply probably effected the migration of the Eskimos, or rather of their ancestors from Europe.[16] At the close of the last ice age, as the ice cap retreated Northwards, the reindeer followed the ice, and the Eskimo followed the reindeer.
Of the aborigines of Tasmania Professor E. B. Tylor testifies: “If there have remained anywhere up to modern times men, whose condition has changed little since the early Stone Age, the Tasmanians seem such a people. Many tribes of the late Stone Age have lasted on into modern times, but it appears that the Tasmanians by the workmanship of their stone implements represent rather the condition of Palæolithic man.”[17]
Sollas goes even farther: “The Tasmanians, however, though recent were at the same time a Palæolithic or even, it has been suggested, an Eolithic race: they thus afford us an opportunity of interpreting the past by the present—a saving procedure in a subject where fantasy is only too likely to play a leading part.”[18] But their usual technique is against Eolithicism.
If these authoritative statements be accurate, can we not hazard a shrewd conjecture from examination of the implements and of the methods prevalent amongst the backward or uncivilised tribes closely resembling our Cave Dwellers, as to which was probably the first implement or method employed for catching fish? Can we, in fact, from the data available from the Eskimos, Tasmanians, and other similar races so reconstruct our men of Dordogne and elsewhere as to adjudge approximately whether first in their hands at any rate was the Spear, the Hook, or the Net?