The Project Gutenberg eBook, The New Stone Age in Northern Europe, by John M. Tyler

RECONSTRUCTED LAKE-DWELLINGS

THE NEW STONE AGE
IN NORTHERN EUROPE

BY

JOHN M. TYLER

PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF BIOLOGY, AMHERST COLLEGE

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1922

Copyright, 1921, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Printed in the United States of America
Published March, 1921

To
JOSEPH DÉCHELETTE

PATRIOT AND ARCHÆOLOGIST
KILLED IN BATTLE AT VINGRÉ (AISNE)
OCTOBER 3, 1914

PREFACE

The dawn of history came late in Northern Europe and the morning was stormy. We see the Roman Empire struggling in vain to hold back successive swarms of barbarians, pouring from a dim, misty, mysterious northland. Centuries of destruction and confusion follow; then gradually states and institutions emerge, and finally our own civilization, which, though still crude and semibarbarous, has its glories as well as its obvious defects.

The growth, development, and training of these remarkable destroyers and rebuilders was slowly going on through the ages of prehistoric time. Most of the germs, and many of the determinants, of our modern institutions and civilization can be recognized in the habits, customs, and life of the Neolithic period. Hence the importance of its study to the historian and sociologist. It has left us an abundance of records, if we can decipher and interpret them. It opens with savages living on shell-heaps along the Baltic. Later we find the stone monuments of the dead rising in France, England, Scandinavia, and parts of Germany. They begin as small rude shelters and end as temples, like that at Stonehenge. People were thinking and cooperating, and there must have been no mean social organization.

We find agriculture highly developed in the valleys of the Danube and its tributaries. We see villages erected on piles along the shores of the Swiss lakes—probably a later development. We find implements, pottery, and bones of animals; charred grains of wheat and barley and loaves of bread; cloth and ornaments—almost a complete inventory of the food and furnishings of the people of this period. We should call them highly civilized, had they been able to write their own history. What was their past and whence had they come?

Implements and pottery tell us of exchange of patterns and ideas, or may suggest migrations of peoples, and finally map out long trade-routes. Some day the study of the pottery will give us a definite chronology, but not yet.

We can reconstruct, to some extent, these phases of prehistoric life. Our greatest difficulties begin when we attempt to combine these separate parts in one pattern or picture, to trace their chronological succession or the extent of their overlappings and their mutual influence and relations in custom and thought. Here, we admit, our knowledge is still very vague and inadequate. Twenty years ago the problem seemed insoluble; perhaps it still remains so. But during that time explorations, investigations, and study have given us many most important facts and suggestions. Some inferences we can accept with a fair degree of confidence, others have varying degrees of probability, sometimes we can only guess. But guesses do no harm, if acknowledged and recognized as such.

I venture to hope that historian and sociologist may find valuable facts and suggestions in this book. But, while writing it, I have thought more often of the eager young student who may glance over its pages, feel the allurement of some topic and resolve to know more about it. The bibliography is prepared especially for him. It is anything but complete. The literature of the period is almost endless. I have referred to only a few of the best and most suggestive works. They will introduce him to a chain of others. If he studies their facts and arguments he will probably reject some of my opinions or theories, modify others, and form his own. If I can do any young student this service, my work will have been amply repaid. America has sent few laborers into this rich harvest field.

I wish that this little book might play the part of a good host, and introduce many intelligent, thoughtful, and puzzled readers to the company and view-point of the prehistorian.

In prehistory we find man entering upon course after course of hard and rigid discipline and training, usually under the spur of necessity, the best of all teachers. Every course lasts through millennia. Their chief end is to socialize and humanize individual men. Environment, natural or artificial, is a means to this end. It compels men to struggle, each with himself; only as men improve is any marked change of conditions possible or desirable. Men must “pass” in the lower course before they can be promoted to the next higher, to find here a similar field of struggle on a somewhat higher plane. Human evolution, as a process of humanizing and socializing man, is and must be chiefly ethical; for ethics is nothing more nor less than the science and art of living rightly with one’s neighbor. And man is incurably religious, always feeling after the power or powers in or behind nature, whose essential character she is compelling him to express, as her inadequate but only mouthpiece. He will gradually become like what he is feeling after, dimly recognizing, and rudely worshipping. These are the most important departments of the school of prehistoric man.

The story told us by the evolutionist and prehistorian is full of surprises. It tells us of the failure of dominant species of animals and of promising races of men. It shows men plodding wearily through hardship and discouragement, and finding therein the road to success. The apparently dormant peoples and periods often prove in the end to have been those of most rapid advance. “The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong.” But it enables us to plot the line of human progress by points far enough apart to allow us to distinguish between minor and temporary oscillations and fluctuations and the law of the curve. The torch is passed from people to people and from continent to continent, but never falls or goes out. There is always a “saving remnant.” We have grounds for a reasonable hope, not of a millennium, but of success in struggle. The economist, sociologist, and even the historian, are lookouts on the ship; evolution and prehistory must furnish chart and compass, and tell us our port of destination.

Many or most of the best thoughts in this book are borrowed. Some of these borrowings are credited to their owners in the bibliography. Of many others I can no longer remember the source. The recollection of successive classes of students in Amherst College, with whom I have discussed these topics, will always be a source of inspiration and gratitude. I owe many valuable suggestions to my colleagues in the faculty, especially to Professor F. B. Loomis. To the unfailing kindness and ability of Mr. and Miss Erb, of the Library of Columbia University; to Professor H. F. Osborn for his generous hospitality; to the staff of the Boston Public Library; to Doctor L. N. Wilson, of the Library of Clark University; most of all, to Mr. R. L. Fletcher and his assistants, of the Library of Amherst College, my debt is greater than can be expressed in any word of thanks.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE NEW STONE AGE
IN NORTHERN EUROPE

The first of the two numbers and the letter in the footnotes designate the position in the Bibliography at the end of the volume of the title referred to; the second refers to the page of the book or article.

THE NEW STONE AGE IN
NORTHERN EUROPE

CHAPTER I

THE COMING OF MAN

MAN has been described as a “walking museum of paleontology.” He is like a mountain whose foundations were laid in a time so ancient that even the paleontologist hardly finds a record to decipher; whose strata testify to the progress of life through all the succeeding ages; whose surface, deeply ploughed by the glaciers, is clothed with grass and forest, flower and fruit, the harvest of the life of to-day.

Some of his organs are exceedingly old, while others are but of yesterday; yet all are highly developed in due proportion, knit and harmonized in a marvellously tough, vigorous, adaptable body, the instrument of a thinking and willing mind. Most surviving animals have outlived their day of progress; they have “exhausted their lead,” to borrow a miner’s expression, and have settled down in equilibrium with their surroundings. But discontented man is wisely convinced that his golden age lies in the future, and that his best possessions are his hopes and dreams, his castles in Spain. He is chiefly a bundle of vast possibilities, of great expectations, compared with which his achievements and realizations are scarcely larger than the central point of a circle compared with its area.

Physically he belongs to the great branch or phylum of vertebrate animals having a backbone—sometimes only a rod of cartilage—an internal locomotive skeleton, giving the possibility of great strength and swiftness, and of large size. Large size, with its greater heat-producing mass relative to its radiating surface, implies the possibility of warm blood, or constant high temperature, resulting in greater activity of all the organs, especially of the glands and the nervous system. Large size, as a rule, is accompanied by long life—giving opportunities for continuous and wide experience, and hence for intelligence. Yet most vertebrates have remained cold-blooded, and only a “saving remnant” even of men is really intelligent. Man belongs to the highest class of vertebrates, the Mammals, which produce living young and suckle them. Among the highest mammals, the Primates, or apes, the length of the periods of gestation, of suckling the young, and of childhood, with its dependence upon the mother, have become so long that she absolutely requires some sort of help and protection from the male parent. From this necessity have sprung various grades and forms of what we may venture to call family life, with all its advantages. How many mammals have attained genuine family life and how many men have realized its possibilities?[1]

The upward march of our ancestors was neither easy nor rapid. They were anything but precocious. They were always ready to balk at progress, stiff-necked creatures who had to be driven and sternly held in the line of progress by stronger competitors. The ancestors of vertebrates maintained the swimming habit, which resulted in the development of the internal skeleton and finally of a backbone, not because it was easiest or most desirable, but because any who went to the rich feeding-grounds of the sea-bottom were eaten up by the mollusks and crabs. Our earliest air-breathing ancestors were crowded toward, and finally to the land, and into air-breathing by the pressure of stronger marine forms like sharks, or by climatic changes.[2] Reptiles, not mammals, dominated the earth throughout the Mesozoic era, and harried our ancestors into agility and wariness; at a later period the apes remained in the school of arboreal life mainly because the ground was forbidden and policed by the Carnivora. They and their forebears were compelled to forego some present ease and comfort, but always kept open the door to the future.

In spite of all this vigorous policing, malingerers and deserters turned aside from the upward line of march at every unguarded point or fork in the road, escaped from the struggle, and settled down in ease and stagnation or degeneration, like our very distant cousins, the monkeys and lower apes. Long-continued progress is a marked exception, not the rule, in the animal world, and is maintained only by the “saving remnant.” And these continue to progress mainly because Nature is “always a-chivying of them and a-telling them to move on,” as Poor Joe said of Detective Bucket, and her guiding wand is the spur of necessity.

The Primates, or apes, are, as we have seen, the highest order of the great class of mammals. Most of them, like other comparatively defenseless vertebrates, are gregarious or even social.[3] They have a feeling of kind, if not of kindness, toward one another. This sociability, together with the family as a unit of social structure, has contributed incalculably to human intellectual and moral development. Man is a Primate, a distant cousin of the highest apes, though no one of these represents our “furry arboreal ancestor with pointed ears.” Arboreal life was an excellent preparatory training toward human development. Our primate ancestor was probably of fair size. In climbing he set his feet on one branch and grasped with his hands the branch above his head. Foot and leg were used to support the body, hand and arm for pulling. Thus the hand became a true hand and the foot a genuine foot, opening up the possibility of the erect posture on the ground and the adaptation of the hand to higher uses. Meanwhile the climbing and leaping from branch to branch, the measuring with the eye of distances and strength of branches, the power of grasping the right point at the right instant, and all the complicated series of movements combined in this form of locomotion furnished a marvellous set of exercises not only for the muscles but for the higher centres in the cortex of the brain. Very probably gregarious life and rude play, so common among apes, was an extension course along somewhat similar lines.

Our ancestors became at home in and well adapted to arboreal life, but the adaptation was never extreme. It was rather what Jones[4] has called a “successful minimal adaptation.” They used arboreal life without abusing it by over-adaptation, which would have enslaved them, and made life on the ground an impossibility when the time came for their promotion to this new and more advanced stage.

At the close of his arboreal life the ape had inherited or acquired the following assets: His vertebrate and mammalian structure had given him a large, vigorous, compact, athletic, adaptable body. The mammalian care of the young had insured their survival, but only at the expense of great strain and risk of the mother. Something at least approaching family life was already attained. Arboreal life with its gymnastic training had moulded the body, differentiated hand and foot, given the possibility of erect posture, emancipating the hand from the work of locomotion and setting it free to become a tool-fashioning and tool-using organ. The ape has keen sense-organs, an eye for distances, and other conditions; and the use of these powers has given him a brain far superior to that of any of his humbler fellows. These are full of great possibilities and opportunities, if he will only use them.

But why did our ancestor descend from his place of safety in the trees and live on the ground, exposed to the attacks of fierce, swift, and well-armed enemies? Very few of the Primates, except the rock and cliff-inhabiting baboons, ever made this great venture. There must have been some quite compelling argument to induce him to take so great a risk. The change took place probably at some time during the latter half of the Cenozoic or Tertiary period, the last great division of geological time, the Age of mammals.[5] The earliest Tertiary Epoch, the Eocene, was a time of warm and equable climate, when apes lived far north in Europe, and doubtless in Asia also. Some of these apes were of fair or large size, showing that conditions were favorable and food abundant. The next epoch, the Oligocene, was similar but somewhat cooler. The third, the Miocene, was cooler still and dryer. Palms now forsook northern Europe, being gradually driven farther and farther south. Life became more difficult, food scarcer. Apes could not longer survive in northern Europe, but had to seek a warmer, more favorable, environment farther south, for many of the fruit and food trees had been crowded out and famine threatened.[6] But insects and other small and toothsome animals remained on the ground, and were abundant along the shores of rivers and lakes. There, too, were fruits and berries, roots and tubers. There the food supply was still more than sufficient.

Thus far we have glanced at Europe only. But the same changes are taking place in Asia, the cradle and home of most placental mammals, the main area of a huge zoological province of which Europe was but a westward projection, and with which America had direct connection from time to time in the region of Behring’s Straits. Here, during late Miocene and early Pliocene times, in the latter part of the Cenozoic era, a dryer and somewhat harsher climate had been accompanied by the appearance of wide plains fitted for grazing animals, as well as stretches of forest, with all varieties of landscape favoring great diversity as well as abundance of mammalian life. It was, perhaps, the golden age for most mammals, when food was plenty, climate not too severe, and every prospect pleased. This slow and gradual, but fairly steady, lowering of temperature was to culminate in the Great Ice Age of the Pleistocene Epoch, so destructive to mammalian life in the northern hemisphere.

A second climatic change, perhaps even more important than the lowering temperature, was the increase of aridity. Even during the Oligocene Epoch “the flora indicates a lessening humidity and a clearer differentiation of the seasons,”[7] The great trough of the inland sea which had stretched from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean began to rise, the first uplift taking place along the Pyrenees and western Alps. The Miocene was marked by a series of great movements. The old inland sea was displaced, subsidence gave place to uplift, and the greatest mountain system of the globe, including the Alps and the Himalayas, began to grow through vast repeated uplifts in the crust.[8] The continents were elevated and widened. The forest-dwelling types became restricted and largely exterminated, and animals of the plains, in the form of horses, rhinoceroses, and the cloven-hoofed ruminants, expanded in numbers and in species. This profound faunal change implies dryer climate. There was now a lesser area of tropic seas to give moisture to the atmosphere. The mountains were now effective barriers, shutting off the moisture-bearing winds from the interior of the continents.

These changes would have been noticeable in Europe north of the Alps, but were far more so in central Asia along the northern face of the great plateau of Thibet, with its eastern and western buttresses, and its towering rampart of the Himalayas on the south, cutting off the warm moisture of the Indian Ocean. Northward of this vast plateau and westward over the far less elevated Iranian plateau and Afghanistan, forest was fast being replaced by parklands of mingled groves and glades, or by grassy plains, or even by dry steppes. Dessication, aridity of climate, was fast compelling forest and arboreal mammals to migrate or radically change their habits of life.[9]

Almost all the apes found their old environment and continued their arboreal life by migrating far southward through India or into Africa. But at the rear of the retreating host were forms from the cooler northern regions. They were hardy and vigorous, and probably larger than most of their fellows. Possibly some of them were caught in isolated decreasing areas of forest surrounded by steppe or plain. Some of them, at least, began to descend from the trees, to seek the new food supplies of riversides, glades, and thickets, and thus gradually to become accustomed to life on the ground. It was a very hazardous experiment; only the most hardy and wary and the quickest in perception, wit, and movement survived. Among these were our ancestors, driven like all their forebears by the spur of necessity into a new mode of life under trying conditions.

They were still only apes, with long arms and short legs, and probably scrambled mostly on all fours. They had heavy brows, retreating foreheads, projecting jaws, and a brutal physiognomy. Of the mental life of the man who was to be descended from them there were few signs. They were bundles of very slight possibilities.

But let us not “despise the day of small things.” They were still far from the invisible line between apedom and manhood. Physically they resembled man quite closely. They had hand and foot, and a fair-sized brain, though they had scarcely begun to realize the possibilities of these structures.

Arboreal life could teach them little more; continuance in that school would have meant a very comfortable stagnation. They were now promoted to a new school of vastly more difficult problems, greater risks and dangers, and more severe and trying discipline. They had had an excellent course of manual and sensory training; now they must continue this and add to it the use of whatever wits they had, under peril of death. Nature was still compelling them to “move on.”

This descent to the ground probably was accomplished either in India or on the Iranian plateau, or somewhat farther to the northeast, somewhere in the great horseshoe of parkland which curved around the western buttress of the great central Asiatic plateau of Thibet. Can we locate it somewhat more definitely?[10]

At this time, during the Pliocene Epoch, there were being deposited in India the so-called Siwalik strata—vast, ancient flood-plains, stretching for a distance of 1,500 miles along the southern foot-hills of the Himalayas. They are composed of materials washed down from the mountains by a system of rivers, persisting with little change into the present. Says Osborn of the mammals found here: “It is altogether the grandest assemblage of mammals the world has ever seen, distributed through southern and eastern Asia, and probably, if our vision could be extended, ranging westward toward Persia and Arabia into northern Africa. It is the most truly cosmopolitan aggregation because in its Upper Pliocene stage it represents a congress of mammals from four great continents.... The only continents which do not contribute to this assemblage are South America and Australia.”[11] The older, Miocene, portions of this fauna are chiefly browsing forest forms, emphasized by the absence of both horses and Hipparion, as well as of grazing types of cattle and antelopes. Grazing forms, showing the decline of the forest and the spread of open parkland and grassy areas, become abundant during the Pliocene Epoch. “Among the Primates we find the Orang, an ape now confined to Borneo and Sumatra; also the Chimpanzee, another ape, now confined to Africa, the Siwalik species displaying a more human type of dentition than that of the existing African form.”

In the older, Miocene, portion we find Sivapithecus, an ape which Pilgrim considers as more nearly resembling man than any other genus of anthropoids, while Gregory speaks of it as belonging to the anthropoid line.[12] Somewhat later, in late Pliocene or early Pleistocene, there was living not far away, in Java, a far more renowned form, Pithecanthropus erectus, Du Bois, which seems to stand almost exactly midway between higher apes and man. The remains consisted of two molar teeth, a thigh-bone, and the top of a skull. The cranium is low, the forehead exceedingly retreating, giving but very small space for the frontal lobes of the brain. But the brain-cast, made from the cranial cavity, shows, according to Du Bois, that the speech area is about twice as large as in certain apes, though only one-half as large as in man. In size the brain stands somewhat above midway between the highest recent apes and the lowest existing men. The thigh-bone shows that Pithecanthropus could have stood and walked erect quite comfortably. There has been and still is much difference of opinion regarding the position of this most interesting being. Opinion was long divided nearly equally between those who considered it as the highest ape and others who held it to be the very lowest man.

It is worthy of notice that, when Pithecanthropus was alive, “Java was a part of the Asiatic continent; and similar herds of great mammals roamed freely over the plains from the foot-hills of the Himalaya Mountains to the borders of the ancient Trinil River, while similar apes inhabited the forests. At the same time the Orang may have entered the forests of Borneo, which are at present its home.”[13] Where man’s distant cousins, the anthropoid apes, and his still nearer relation, Pithecanthropus, were all living and some, at least, apparently progressing, could hardly have been far from his original home. But the climatic conditions of that time lead us to seek his original cradle somewhat farther northward than India, or even Beluchistan, and nearer to, if not in, the great steppe zone of central Asia. We lose sight of our ape-man as he is advancing toward the threshold of manhood, not far away. Whether we think that Pithecanthropus was approaching or had already passed it depends much upon where we draw the line between ape and man, a line largely artificial and as difficult to fix as the day and hour when the youth becomes of age, and what human characteristics we select to mark it. In his erect posture and some other physical traits he seems already to have attained manhood; mentally he was probably far inferior to even the lowest savage races of to-day. We are not sure whether he was our ancestor or merely a cousin of our ancestor, once or twice removed; we still lack foundations for any hypotheses as to exactly when, where, or how the erect ancestral ape-man emerged into real manhood.

Millennia passed between the days of Pithecanthropus and the first human migrations, and we may imagine primitive man as having become fairly well accustomed to life on the ground, and as having mastered his first lessons in meeting its dangers and difficulties. He had probably taken possession of a much wider area than the home of the ape-man, perhaps of the whole of the parkland zone curving around the western buttresses of the plateau of Thibet. From this region routes of migration radiated in all directions, all the more open because of the elevation of land which lasted through Upper Pliocene and early Pleistocene times.[14] Sumatra and Java then formed an extension of the Malay Peninsula, reaching more than 1,000 miles into the Indian Ocean; while the Orang seems to have been able to reach Borneo somewhat earlier. The way was equally clear westward into Europe, the Dardanelles being then replaced by a land bridge, while a second bridge spanned the Mediterranean over Sicily into Italy, and a third existed at Gibraltar.[15] These routes were evidently followed by herds of great herbivora, and probably by the earliest human emigrants into Europe.

Following Keane,[16] we shall divide mankind into four great groups or races, and then glance at their radiation from southwestern Asia toward all parts of the globe. These great primitive divisions are:

I. Negroids. Color yellowish brown to black, stature large or very small. Hair short, black or reddish brown, frizzly, flattened-elliptical in cross-section. Nose broad and flattened. Cheek-bones small, somewhat retreating. Examples: Negritoes, Negroes.

II. Mongoloids. Color yellowish. Stature below average. Hair coarse, lank, round in cross-section. Nose very small. Cheek-bones prominent. Examples: Malays, Chinese, Japanese, Thibetans, Siberian “Hyperboreans.”

III. Americans. Color reddish or coppery. Stature large. Hair long, lank, coarse, black, round in cross-section. Nose large, bridged, or aquiline. Cheek-bones moderately prominent. (Probably a branch of II.) Examples: Indians of North and South America.

IV. Caucasians. Color pale or florid. Hair long, wavy or straight, elliptical in cross-section. Nose large, straight or arched. Cheek-bones small, unmarked. Examples: Hamitic, Semitic, and European peoples.

We may now imagine quite primitive human beings starting from their early home and seeking their fortunes widely apart. They came under quite different climatic and other physical conditions. Their environment, problems, stimuli, and opportunities were unlike. Thus, having become more or less unlike in the homeland, they gradually became differentiated into the present great groups or races already mentioned. Some started earlier or marched more rapidly than others. Many proved unequal to the dangers and difficulties of the journey or new place of settlement, and disappeared. Many stagnated or degenerated. Only the comparatively successful or fortunate have survived. Hence, our scheme is hardly an adequate expression of prehistoric racial groups and their characteristics, except in very general outline.

We have seen that the apes, retreating before the approach of harsh and dry climatic conditions and diminished forest areas and food supply, migrated southward into India and Africa. The Orang settled in Borneo, Pithecanthropus in Java, the Chimpanzee and Gorilla went into Africa. These routes presented the fewest difficulties and demanded the least readaptation or change of habit. The climate was mild and food generally abundant and easily obtained. Their environment was neither stimulating, trying, nor exacting. Progress was hardly to be expected, but survival was far easier than in more northerly regions.

The Negritos followed almost exactly the same routes. We find them purest and perhaps least modified in the “Pygmies” of the African forests; but also in the Malay Peninsula, the Andaman Islands, and the Philippines. De Morgan believes that he has found proofs of their presence on the Iranian plateau at a comparatively late date.

Behind them Negroid peoples poured into Africa, apparently in successive waves. Some of them went into the Malay Peninsula, probably generally submerging the Negritos, and reached New Guinea and Australia. Inhabiting a series of islands and other more or less isolated areas, mingling often with Negritos, probably later also more or less with the Malays, they became much modified, and their relations to the African Negroes and to one another are still anything but clear.

The Mongoloids pushed eastward. The earliest migrations seem to be those of the Malays, a great, very interesting, and little-known though much-studied group of peoples. They followed the oceanic Negritos along the Malay Peninsula and occupied the great chains of islands stretching through the Indian Ocean and far into the Pacific, through more than ninety degrees of longitude along the equator. But much of this spread is probably of quite recent date.

The Mongoloid peoples seem to have passed along the northern front of the Central Asiatic plateau into Siberia, China, and Japan, and to have sent off the great American branch. Even before the Mongols had started on their eastward journey the Caucasians may have turned westward, following the old Negroid route. There was probably also more or less of an eastern dispersal, but we cannot consider the problem of these Oriental Caucasic remnants and traces. The great body went westward. The Hamitic peoples distributed themselves along the southern shore of the Mediterranean, and many may well have occupied a large part of the Sahara region, then a land of watercourses capable of supporting a large population. Behind them came the Semitic folk. Judging from their languages the Hamitic and Semitic peoples seem to have been in contact over a wide area, and for a long space of time. The Semites found a new and permanent home in Arabia, on whose plateaus and surrounding grasslands they increased and multiplied, and sent off fresh waves of migration and conquest in all directions.

We have already noticed that our classification of races is based upon a study of recent and still surviving peoples. The very earliest inhabitants of Europe would find no place in it. Probably they long antedated the Hamites. African Negroids and Caucasians came from a common home, and journeyed for a time over a common road, though probably at far different times. It would be strange if the earliest inhabitants of Europe showed no traces of this common home and ancestry. Since the remote period which we are considering Negroes and Caucasians have become widely different, and their racial characters have become clear and sharp. This may not have been altogether the case with the first peoples to arrive in Europe. But attempts to relate the Neanderthal crania with those of modern Australians or Tasmanians, or any existing race, have met with no great success. In regard to these questions we are still in the dark.

Beside the African routes into Europe, along the south shore of the Mediterranean and over the Sicilian and Gibraltar land bridges, while they lasted, two others must be noticed. One of these extended through Asia Minor and across the land bridge at the Dardanelles, while the second led westward along the northern border of the Caspian and Black Seas and the Caucasus Mountains. The most southerly of these four routes through Africa were probably the first to be travelled, the most northerly last of all. We shall have to study these routes more closely in a later chapter.

It was at some time during the Glacial period, the Great Ice Age, when a vast ice-cap covered northern Europe with glaciers extending far southward and advancing or retreating according to climatic conditions, that man arrived in Europe. During the first Glacial Epoch the advance of the ice covered the most northern part of Great Britain and the Rhine valley almost as far south as Cologne; Scandinavia was completely buried, like central Greenland to-day, and North Germany probably to the Harz Mountains. Eastward the southern edge of the ice sheet ran nearly along the line of 50° N. lat. across Russia. In Siberia the effects were less marked and the limits were much farther northward. Between the parallel of 50° and the northern edge of the Alpine glaciers a zone was left ice-free, but three-fifths of Germany was overwhelmed. Southern England and France, not yet separated by the English Channel, formed one great habitable province, and but a small part of France was glaciated. The climate was tempered by proximity to the sea.[17] The average yearly temperature of northern Europe was probably not more than 4°-6° Cent. (39°-43° Fahr.), which is colder than at present. But the formation of these enormous masses of ice demanded heavy snowfall and a moist or very damp climate. Hence the edge of the great ice sheet advanced or retreated according to climatic conditions.

There were four periods of advance before the final retreat of the ice, not counting minor oscillations.[18] These are known as the Gunz, Mindel, Riss, and Wurm Glacial Epochs. Alternating with these were the interglacial epochs of ice retreat—the Gunz-Mindel, Mindel-Riss, and Riss-Wurm; while the final retreat is usually termed post-glacial. During the first and second interglacial epochs the climate appears to have been warmer than at present. But at times dryness may have contributed to the retreat of the ice even more than warmth, and then the climate would have been continental, harsh, and extreme.

Even during epochs of glacial advance conditions in France and in the German zone must have been better than we should expect. Some kind of grazing or browsing pasturage must have been rich and abundant to support large animals like the reindeer or even the woolly mammoths characteristic of the second and third glacial epochs, which furnished abundant food for prehistoric hunters. Farther south the glacial epochs may well have been times of heavy rainfall, transforming the Sahara desert and the dryer steppes and plateaus of Asia into veritable gardens.

The retreating ice left behind it a land covered with rocks, clays, gravels, and sands brought by the glaciers and their streams. Here and there basins had been gouged out where lakes or ponds long remained—as in Maine and Minnesota to-day—to be later drained, or, if shallow, to be overgrown with sphagnum and changed into great bogs. Scattered thickets of shrubs and stunted hardy trees, poplars, willows, and others occurred. In sheltered and well-drained valleys and mountainsides the trees grew larger and even forests began to appear. This tundra landscape still characterizes wide areas of northern Canada and Siberia.[19]

The tundra was followed by steppe conditions, where elevation of land to the north and northwest had cut off the tempering oceanic winds. The climate was harsh, dry, continental, with cold winters and hot summers. The winds carried great storms of dust and piled it up in drifts in valleys and on suitably situated mountainsides in the form of loess, so important to the future agricultural development of Europe, though its most massive accumulation is seen in China, which received and held the driftings from the great elevated plains of central Asia. As the climate became moister, if the temperature did not fall too low, steppe finally gave way to the meadow and forest of modern Europe. Tundra, steppe, and forest had each its special types of animal as well as plant life. The characteristic tundra animal is the reindeer, though musk-ox, woolly mammoth, and others were wide-spread at this time. The peculiar steppe animal is the horse. The characteristic forest and meadow animals are the deer and their allies; the wolf and bear; the wild boar and cattle seem to be at home in forest and glade and along the streams.

In France, where there was far less glaciation, the succession of tundra, steppe, and forest is less apparent. Here we find a mingling of varied forms which have come in from very different regions, driven from their original homes by change of climate or drawn by favorable conditions.

The first unmistakable relic of man in Europe is a human lower jaw found in the Mauer sands near Heidelberg, some seventy-nine feet below the surface of the bluff.[20] It seems to belong to the second or Mindel-Riss interglacial epoch, and its age is estimated by Osborn at about 250,000 years. Remains characteristic of the oldest Paleolithic epochs occur between thirty and forty-five feet below the surface. If we are to find an archæological name for this epoch, there seems to be no better one than Eolithic, the dawn of the Stone Age, when European man had hardly more than begun to chip a stone implement, although we must recognize the unreadiness of many or most archæologists to find a place for such rude products.[21]

The third interglacial period (Riss-Wurm) and the fourth period of advance (Wurm) cover what is known as Lower Paleolithic time, which is the earlier four-fifths or more of the Old Stone Age or Paleolithic period, extending approximately from 125,000 B. C., to 25,000 B. C. During the greater part of this period Europe was occupied by the Neanderthaloid people. Neanderthal man had a very large head with heavy, overhanging eyebrows meeting above the nose, and a markedly retreating forehead. The face was high and the large nasal opening indicates a broad, flat nose. The lower jaw was heavy and the chin retreating. The trunk was short, thick, and robust, the shoulders broad; the limbs short and heavy, the arms and lower legs relatively short, and the hands very large. Although the much-discussed Piltdown skull may quite probably be regarded as belonging to the earliest part of this period, the finer form of cranium seems to testify to a higher race of better mental development than the Neanderthaloids, huddling in their caves and shelters. It may easily represent a far more progressive ancestral race, of which they are somewhat degenerate descendants, though Osborn dissents from this view.[22]

Their remains are found in caves and rock-shelters all over Europe. Here we find their hearths; the bones of the animals which they had hunted for their food; their almond-shaped flint axes, “hand-stones” (Coups-de-Poing), the scrapers for dressing skins and shaving wooden tools, and a variety of other forms. Here they buried their dead. During the third warm interglacial epoch they lived in the open, as at the station of Chelles, which has given its name to the earliest Paleolithic epoch.[23] Their origin and route of migration is quite uncertain, but it seems probable that they entered Europe from the southern shore of the Mediterranean.

The post-glacial period is characterized by the final retreat of the ice. The change of climate was not steady but marked by a series of oscillations, repeating on a much smaller scale the glacial and interglacial epochs of the long past. The climatic change is accompanied by the appearance of tundra and steppe, followed by meadows and the forest conditions of modern times. Game was abundant and general conditions severe but healthy and fairly favorable.

A new race has appeared on the scene which replaced the Neanderthal folk, and had practically none of their primitive or degenerate, ape-like characteristics.[24] The Cro-Magnon people have excited the wonder and admiration of all anthropologists. They were of tall stature, had long legs, especially below the knee, giving swiftness in running. The forehead is broad and of good height, the features are rugged but attractive, and the brain is very large. They seem to represent a new race and new immigration, probably from Asia, which spread over Europe.

The Cro-Magnon brain was anything but dull. In this remote time, more than 20,000 years ago, there sprang up an art never since surpassed in its own field except, perhaps, by that of the Greeks. Their bone implements are adorned with the most lifelike carvings or sculptures. On the walls of caves we find paintings as realistic and alive, and often as finely executed in detail and coloring, as the best animal painters of our day could produce. These people must have had a high and keen appreciation of the beauty of form and proportion. All this artistic movement must have had its source in new ideas and conditions, springing from a thinking as well as a feeling and observing mind. They also frequently buried their dead, decorated with strings of perforated shells, and surrounded by flints or sometimes by a layer of red earth or ore. With them were the bones of food animals and the flint weapons needed for the journey into or use in the life beyond.

The life of the Cro-Magnon hunters on their arrival in Europe was anything but unendurable, especially along the Riviera. There were open-air encampments where men passed at least the summer months in tents or huts. The race seems to have culminated during the cold middle Magdalenian epoch, which indicates that they were well adapted to its conditions. Game was abundant and relatively easily captured. They had food and raiment, fair shelter, excellent art, alert brains, and probably a fair degree of social life. They may well have been content, courageous, and full of hope for themselves and their descendants.

HUMAN FIGURES, SPAIN—EARLY NEOLITHIC

DRAWINGS OF ANIMALS (CRO-MAGNON) FROM ALTAMIRA

Upper Paleolithic time, beginning with the arrival of the Cro-Magnons, about 25,000 years ago, is divided into four epochs, or, better, four culture-stages: Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and Azilian-Tardenoisian. Even in late Magdalenian days, after a cold and dry interval accompanied by steppe conditions and a new formation of loess, the air became moister and the temperature gradually moderated until it became much like that of to-day. Tundra and steppe animals became more rare; a forest and meadow fauna took possession of Europe. Instead of the reindeer we find stag and roe-deer, cattle, wild boar, bears and wolves, beaver and otter. These were less easily hunted and probably less abundant than the reindeer and horse had been. As hunting became less profitable, fishing grew more attractive. The streams probably swarmed with fish, and the salmon was probably as abundant throughout northern Europe as in Scandinavia to-day. A change of life is suggested by the implements. The harpoons became ruder. The beautifully flaked lance-heads and the smoothed bone daggers give place to small flints, “microliths,” less fitted for attacking large and dangerous animals. The country seems to have supported a smaller and decreasing population. Cro-Magnon man had always been a reindeer hunter, accustomed and well adapted to the life and conditions of tundra or steppe. The changes were not in his favor or to his liking. Many probably left France and Germany. Those who remained deserted the rock-shelters and cave-mouths, where every spring the water seeping down and dripping through the roof dislodged masses of stone.[25] The shelter was less needed. Men dwelt more in the open, and fewer records of their presence were preserved.

But Europe was not deserted. There was no “hiatus.” Other peoples were coming in, perhaps better suited to the new conditions, probably mostly of Asiatic origin. Broad-heads, as well as new long-heads, appear, less attractive physically and mentally, but apparently of tougher fibre and greater staying power than our more striking and charming Cro-Magnons.[26] A new grand mingling of peoples had already begun or was in its last stages of preparation already advancing from afar in successive waves. In Italy genuine Neolithic culture may already have been introduced. It steals very slowly into northern Europe and overspreads it. The Cro-Magnon race generally migrated or died out, but left its traces in the physical characters of the people of Dordogne and elsewhere.

The Azilian-Tardenoisian epoch leads over to the Neolithic, our chief object of study. Its relative position in prehistoric time is shown in the following scheme:

A. Eolithic Period. Stone implements exceedingly rude, hardly recognizable as artificially chipped; otherwise like B.

B. Paleolithic Period. Stone implements chipped or flaked, never polished. No domesticated plants or animals. No pottery. Man a collector or hunter, more rarely a fisherman.

C. Transition Period, resembling B in most respects.

[A, B, and C make up the Old Stone Age, before the use of metals.]

D. Neolithic Period. Some stone implements polished. No metal except that copper is introduced toward the end of the period. Agriculture with domestic plants and animals. Pottery but no potter’s wheel. Dawn of Civilization.

E. Bronze Period. Bronze implements or utensils. Dawn of History. Begins about 2500 B. C. in northern Europe.

F. Iron Period. Iron introduced. Historic Times. Begins about 1000 B. C. in northern Europe.

CHAPTER II

THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION. SHELL-HEAPS

DURING the last great advance of the ice in the earlier Magdalenian epoch the Scandinavian peninsula had been buried beneath a great mass of ice, and resembled the central portion of Greenland to-day. A great glacier extended southward, obliterating the Baltic Sea and crowding into northern Germany. As the glaciers withdrew, North Germany became a vast tundra, across which we may imagine the reindeer and other Arctic and subarctic mammals retreating northeastward before the milder forest and meadow conditions already prevailing in France and Russia.[27] The low temperature of the water of the emerging Baltic is shown by the presence of an arctic bivalve, Yoldia arctica, which has given its name to the epoch. A few scattered bone implements show the presence of reindeer hunters in Germany at this time.

Before the close of the Yoldia period Germany began to pass from tundra to forest—a transformation which was also now progressing in Denmark. The temperature moderated slowly. The land rose in such a way that it separated the Baltic from the North Sea and the Arctic Ocean, with which it had been connected, and made of it a great fresh-water lake. The characteristic animal of this lake was a small pond animal, ancylus, which has given its name to both lake and epoch.

The next epoch—the Litorina (or Tapes) depression—was characterized by a sinking of the land in which the barrier between the Baltic and the North Seas gave place to a wide communication. The Baltic became more salt than at present, and the oyster-banks became abundant. It was during this epoch that the shell-heaps were accumulated.

The following chart gives a condensed view of the succession of events (in reverse order):[28]

The growth and succession of the forests of Denmark, accompanying changes in conditions of soil and climate, have been clearly traced by Steenstrup.[29] The scene of his investigations was a moraine country broken by low ranges of hills in the island of Zealand, north of Copenhagen. The hills are often strewn with erratic blocks of rock brought by glaciers, with here and there small lakes, ponds, or peat-bogs often giving place to meadow or forest.

Some of these depressions are filled with a poor variety of peat, dug for fuel, and the sides are often abrupt, steep, and deep. These sides furnish a calendar by showing the different layers which have been formed by successive generations of tree-growth falling into the bog. Thus, in the upper layers we find remains of trees which still flourish in Denmark, while the deepest strata contain the remains of reindeer. The thickness of these layers is between five and seven metres. Their formation, according to Steenstrup, occupied 10,000 to 12,000 years.(1)

The following layers are found in these “calendars,” beginning at the surface:

1. Surface layer. Remains of the beech, which furnishes the chief beauty of the forests of Denmark to-day.

2. Oak. The beginning of this layer was contemporary with the Litorina depression.

3. Scotch pine (pinus sylvestris). The earliest pines were dwarfed, the trunks showing as many as seventy rings to the inch. In upper strata their trunks were a metre or so in diameter. In the Lillemose moor, near Rudesdal, the whole eastern side, twenty metres deep, was filled with pines. While no human remains have been found in these moors, a stone axe embedded in a pine trunk, and a stone arrow-head in a bone of the bos primigenius (which, like the auerhahn or pine partridge lived on the young pine shoots) have been discovered. The soil best adapted to the pine is a damp soil, poor in humus, whereas the present rich, fertile soil of Denmark is best suited to the beech. This explains the fact that pine forests no longer grow there.

4. At the bottom, poplars and aspens. The clay underlying the pines and poplars contains leaves of arctic willows and saxifrages.

Through these types of strata we may trace the epochs described at the beginning of the chapter. The pine characterizes the Azilian-Tardenoisian-Ancylus Epoch; at the time of the Litorina depression it was fast giving place to the oak, which remains characteristic of the Neolithic and Bronze periods, yielding to the beech during the Iron Age. But this advance must have been gradual and the boundary of advance irregular.

Blytt has traced a very similar succession of changes in flora and climate in southern Norway, and Geikie in Scotland.[30] These changes are very important in our study of the traces of man’s first appearance in Denmark as furnishing not only their setting but also their chronology.

Shell-heaps are found all over the world in favorable sheltered localities where sea food is abundant, especially near clam flats. Hence they are not characteristic of any one race or time. Some are very ancient, some comparatively or very modern. They merely show the remains of the camping-grounds of people in a low stage of culture. Every one has its own history and its own slight or marked peculiarities.

The Danish shell-heaps or kitchen-middens are mounds generally about fifty metres wide and one hundred metres long, and perhaps one metre in thickness. But, as we should naturally expect, the size varies greatly according to the advantages of the situation, the number of inhabitants, and the length of time that it was inhabited.

The age of these shell-heaps is shown approximately by the presence of the auerhahn, proving the neighborhood of pine forests. The charcoal in the fireplaces came from oak wood, showing that oak forests are overspreading the country. The Baltic was more salt than at present, and the shore line was depressed. These facts indicate a period of transition from the Ancylus to the Litorina Epoch. The stone implements resemble those of western Europe during the late transition epoch, and do not occur in the oldest graves. There are no domestic animals except the dog, and no cultivated plants except some wheat in the later remains. All this seems to prove that genuine Neolithic culture had not yet reached the shores of the Baltic. They are composed mostly of oyster shells with a mingling of those of scallops, mussels, and periwinkles. The oyster has now disappeared from large parts of the coast and in others has decreased in size. Land elevation has narrowed the connection of the Baltic with the North Sea, and the water contains less salt.

Remains of cod and herring show that the fishermen who lived on or near these harbors ventured out to sea in dugouts or on rafts, and that they must have made lines for fishing in fairly deep water. Remains of other fish occur. Bones of birds are often very abundant, especially swamp, shore, and swimming species; wild geese and ducks, swans and gulls, the Alca impennis or wingless auk, now extinct. The blackcock, or “spruce (pine) partridge,” was then common, but has now disappeared from Denmark with the pine whose buds formed a large part of its food.

Bones of stag, deer, and wild boar form, according to Steenstrup, 97 per cent of all those of mammals found at Havelse.[31] Bones of seal, otter, wolf, fox, bear, beaver, and wildcat also occur. There are no traces of reindeer or musk-ox. These animals had already migrated or died out. Steenstrup noticed that the long bones of birds are about twenty times as numerous as others of their skeletons, and that the heads or ends of the long bones of mammals are generally missing. These were exactly the parts which are gnawed by dogs, whose remains also occur. Hence he drew the inference, now universally accepted, that the dog was domesticated in Denmark at this time. It was a small species, apparently akin to the jackal and of southeastern origin. No remains of other domesticated animals have been found, nor of cultivated plants, except a few casts of grains of wheat in the pottery of the upper layers of some of the heaps.

Daggers, awls, and needles were made of bone; also combs apparently used for stretching sinews into long threads. The flint implements are rudely chipped, never polished. We find long flakes used as knives, and numerous scrapers and borers.[32] The axe, if we may call it so, was of peculiar form, approaching the triangular and looking as if made out of a circular disk of flint by breaking away two sides of the periphery, leaving a somewhat flaring cutting edge. The middle was thick, the edge tapered somewhat rapidly, making a rough but quite durable instrument. Longer implements in the form of chisels or picks were also roughly flaked with skilfully retouched edges, often with one end narrowed or bluntly pointed. In all cases the work is very rude compared with the best specimens of Paleolithic time. Arrow-heads are common, usually with a broad edge instead of a point, well suited to killing birds and small mammals. The bone harpoon seems to have gone out of use.

The pottery is thick, heavy, crude, with practically no ornament, except finger-prints around the upper edge. The jars are sometimes of large size; often the base is pointed instead of flat or rounded. Hearths of calcined stones are abundant. Sometimes these are surrounded by circular depressions in the heaps, which may mark the form and position of huts or shelters; or these may have been placed under the lee of the near-by forests. No graves or human remains of this period have been found.

Shell-heaps quite similar to those of Denmark were discovered at Mugem, in Portugal, in the valley of the Tagus, twenty-five to thirty metres above sea-level, and thirty to forty miles from the mouth of the river. The shells are of marine origin, and indicate a considerable elevation of land since their accumulation. The stone implements are very primitive and of Azilian-Tardenoisian type. Large flat stones, perhaps for grinding, perhaps for dressing skins, occur. Pottery occurs only in the upper layers, where the bones of mammals increase in number. There are no polished implements, no traces of domesticated animals, not even of the tame dog. Graves were found here and there; and while the skulls were badly contorted, they seemed to show that the inhabitants were partly long-headed, partly broad-heads. Remains, apparently of the same age, have been found in Great Britain.

Even the Danish shell-heaps are not all of the same age. According to Forrer, Havno is ancient; Ertebolle is also old, but was long inhabited, and some of its uppermost layers may be full Neolithic; Aalborg and others are younger. Mugem strikes us as more ancient than the similar Danish remains. Other remains near the Baltic suggest very strongly quite marked differences in age or in the culture of their inhabitants, or in both these respects. We can notice only two of these.

Maglemose lies on the west coast of Zealand near the harbor of Mullerup. Here a peat-bog has encroached upon a fresh-water lake and has covered a mud bottom strewn with shells of pond-snails and mussels. Pines had grown in the swamp, and their stumps still protrude into or above the moss. The implements were found a little above the old lake bottom between seventy centimetres and one metre below the surface of the peat. The remains of the settlement were distributed over an area about one hundred feet long and broad. The charred or burned wood was very largely (eighty per cent) pine, ten per cent hazel, a little elm and poplar. No oak was found here, but oak-pollen grains were found in the same level as the settlement, or slightly higher and later. Flint cracked by heat and charred fragments of wood were found, but no definite hearths. Bones of fresh-water fish and of swamp turtles occur. The shore could not have been very distant even if it stood considerably higher, but no bones of marine fish have been found. Many birds were hunted. The mammals include boar, deer, stag, and urus. The dog is the only domesticated animal.

Flint chips are abundant at Maglemose; long knife-flakes and axes are rare. Scrapers and nuclei are numerous. The arrow-heads are long and pointed instead of broad and edged, as in the usual Danish shell-heap. Many of these so-called arrow-heads may have been nothing more than microliths used for a great variety of purposes. No flint implements or fragments show any trace of polishing. Bone implements are numerous. We find rude harpoons of a very late Magdalenian type. Also, some of the bone implements are ornamented with various patterns of incised lines, and even one or two rude drawings of animals occur. The culture evidently differs quite markedly from that of the ordinary shell-heaps. It is worthy of notice that the mud of the lake bottom and the overlying peat were continuous over and around the whole area of the settlement; there is no sign of any island at this point and the settlement was some 350 metres from the original shore of the lake. There are abundant traces of fire but no hearths. No traces of piles have been discovered. All this seems to corroborate Sarauw’s view that the people lived on a raft all the year round. Sarauw considers the remains as of the same age as the oldest shell-heaps. But there is a wide-spread tendency to consider Maglemose as considerably older, belonging probably to the close of the Ancylus Epoch.

Virchow has described a heap composed of mussel-shells on the outlet of Burtnecker Lake, east of Riga, called Rinnekalns.[33] Its most interesting feature is its pottery made of clay mixed with powdered mussel-shells, giving it a peculiar glitter. It is ornamented with lines arranged in an angular geometrical pattern encircling the vessel. Similar pottery can be followed far southward into Russia and westward as far as East Prussia, but not farther into Germany. Bored teeth used for ornaments occur. Bone implements are numerous, often ornamented with fine lines in zigzag or network. We find harpoons also. The flint industry was poorly and sparingly developed. Graves were discovered, but their contents proved that they belonged to a much later period.

The culture is peculiar, paralleled to a certain extent but not repeated in western Europe. We still seem to detect the influence of a decadent, late Magdalenian style of ornament. Virchow considered them as very late Paleolithic or very early Neolithic.

The shell-heaps of different regions resemble one another in general features, but differ and show their individuality in details of culture. These peculiarities may be due to difference of age or of culture or population, or to both. We must first attempt to find some place for them in the chronological succession discovered in France. They cannot be much older than the French period of transition, when Scandinavia first became habitable. But good cave-series covering the transition epoch are rare, and usually very incomplete. In 1887 Piette found a remarkable series in a cave or natural tunnel at Mas d’Azil, near Toulouse.[34] The most important strata were the following:

1. A dark layer evidently Magdalenian.

2. A yellow layer deposited by river floods.

3. Dark Magdalenian layer, with reindeer harpoons, engravings, and sculptures. Reindeer becoming rare; stag increasing.

4. Barren yellow layer, like 2.

5. Reddish layer (Azilian). No reindeer. Stag abundant. Flints nearly all of Magdalenian types. Flattened stag-horn harpoons perforated at base. Bone points and smoothers. Pointed flat pebbles. Bones of stag, bear, boar, wildcat, beaver.

6. Bones of wild boar, stag, horse. Flints similar to those in 5. Beginnings of pottery and of polishing; but not of polished axes. Piette’s Arisian. Beginning of Neolithic.

7. Neolithic and Bronze remains.

Layer 5 evidently represents a period posterior to the Magdalenian and anterior to the real Neolithic. Hence Piette considered it as marking a distinct Azilian Epoch, resembling the Magdalenian in most of its flint implements, in the absence of pottery and of polished axes. But the reindeer has here given place to the stag, and the harpoon has changed correspondingly and is less skilfully made. Bone implements are decadent.

Another culture, the Tardenoisian, was of exceedingly wide range. It took its name from Fère-en-Tardenois, Department of Aisne, northeast of Paris, and was characterized by its very small “pygmy” flints of various, usually geometric forms.[35] This microlithic industry was found in France, Belgium, England, Germany, Russia, and along the southern shore of the Mediterranean. The culture was well represented along rivers and inlets, and seemed to characterize a fishing rather than hunting folk.

In 1909 Breuil and Obermaier found in the grotto of Valle, in northern Spain, a classic Azilian deposit, forming the lower levels of a series rich in these microliths or pygmy flints. The Azilian was more nearly a continuation of the Magdalenian culture, while the Tardenoisian, in France, seemed to be an importation from the Mediterranean region. Since the two were so closely related in point of time it seemed safe and wise to combine the two names and call the epoch the Azilian-Tardenoisian, the Azilian representing the older portion.

The station of Campigny, on the lower Seine, seems to be somewhat later than the Azilian-Tardenoisian.[36] Here, in a pit oval in outline, with a long diameter of 4.30 metres, evidently an ancient dwelling, there were found bits of pottery, utensils of older stone epochs, no polished implements, but the tranchet or axe and the pick (pic) characteristic of the Danish shell-heaps. These Campignian remains are hardly widely enough diffused or sufficiently definite to give name to a distinct epoch. They may well be nearly contemporaneous with the (older?) shell-heaps.

The whole transition epoch, which we have hastily surveyed, shows us a series or mixture of disconnected cultures, yet with curious and striking interrelations. This may be partly due to the fact that the population of Europe was diminished and scattered. Little groups of people formed more or less isolated communities, and developed their own special peculiarities according to situation, needs, and opportunities. Connecting links, or intermediate cultures, which may once have existed, have been completely lost or still remain to be discovered. The general desertion of the caves destroyed one of our best sources of continuous records.

But the cause of this diversity lies deeper. New cultures and new waves of migration of peoples were pouring into Europe, especially into the Baltic region now left free of ice, enjoying a mild climate, and offering an abundance of food along the shores of its rivers, lakes, and seas. The Tardenoisian culture had spread northward from the Mediterranean. The broad-headed people of Furfooz, Grenelle, and Ofret had apparently crossed Europe from the east and had settled in a long zone extending northward and southward through Belgium and France and probably southward into Spain, for we remember the broad-heads found at Mugem, in Portugal. But their distribution was far wider than this strip of territory. New Neolithic types of culture had already entered Italy, perhaps as early as Magdalenian times. Series of waves appear to have passed into Poland, Russia, and Siberia, and to have moved northward until they reached the coast in Scandinavia and to the eastward. In all these cases we may probably imagine a gradual and perhaps slow infiltration or “seeping” in of the new population rather than an invasion in crowds or masses, such as we are likely to imagine. Vast stretches of habitable land had been newly opened, and there was plenty of room for all comers. In many regions the old population may have remained comparatively undisturbed until a much later date. But even they slowly came under the influence of the new and improved technique and mode of life. All this collision of culture and conflict of peoples meant stimuli, awakening, the jogging of dull minds, a veritable spur of necessity. A new day was beginning to break. The dawn was dim and cloudy, but there was the possibility and prospect of clear shining.

CHAPTER III

LAND HABITATIONS

OUR history of Paleolithic times is drawn very largely from the successive strata of remains found in rock-shelters and near the mouths of caves, where the succession of epochs is clear and indubitable. We naturally look for similar reliable testimony concerning the chronological succession of Neolithic utensils, pottery and other remains. Here, however, we have been disappointed to a large degree. Paleolithic layers were generally or frequently overlaid by beds of stalagmite or fallen rocks, which have saved them from disturbance. But the Neolithic and Bronze layers are superficial, usually of no great thickness; they have been less solidified and protected, and far more exposed to the disturbing work of burrowing mammals and of men digging for buried treasures. These circumstances, combined with far less continuity of occupation, have greatly diminished the chronological value of their study.

Neolithic cave remains occur in somewhat limited areas scattered all over Europe.[37] They have been studied in England, France, Spain, Austria, and Germany in at least fairly large numbers. In Austria the cave province extends through Galicia, Moravia, and Bohemia. Here we find primitive pottery; rude stone and numerous bone implements; domesticated cattle, goats, and pigs. Game was evidently very abundant. The cave-dwellers, apparently, were pioneers in the less habitable regions, living mostly by hunting and fishing, from the increase and products of their herds, and from agriculture to a far less degree. The pottery and implements remind us somewhat of those of the earliest lake-dwellings. But we often find bits of copper and bronze, suggesting a later date or a series of inhabitants whose relics have become much mixed. It would not be at all surprising if primitive manufactures had remained here longer in use than in less isolated regions. A deposit of quite similar general character has been found at Duino, near Monfalcone, at the head of the Gulf of Trieste.

A second province lies in Bavaria, between Bamberg and Baireuth. Hoernes considers its remains as also of the same age as the oldest lake-dwellings, but with peculiarities due to the different geographical conditions. The cave provinces of other countries are equally interesting. Every one has its own features and problems. We would naturally expect that these cave-dwellers would represent the least progressive and prosperous members of the population of any country. In our general survey we can afford to give them only a hasty glance. We can easily understand that where chalk or other soft rock occurred artificial grottos were often excavated.[38]

Remains of dwellings are common all over Europe, and are likely to be uncovered wherever excavations are made in grading or for the foundations of buildings. They are of two forms: the rectangular house and the round hut. The rectangular form is the rule in the lake-dwellings, though with exceptions; on the land the reverse is true. The pit-dwelling at Campigny was elliptical in form with a longest diameter of 4.30 metres. We remember that the settlement at Campigny is probably little, if at all, younger than the shell-heaps. But by far the commoner form of pit-dwelling is circular, with a diameter rarely exceeding two metres. Such small circular pits are exceedingly common. At the bottom we find ashes, bones of animals, implements, and fragments of clay once forming a part of the superstructure, baked hard when the hut was burned, and still having marks of the twigs and branches over which the clay had been plastered. We picture to ourselves the hut as mostly underground, with a diameter usually not exceeding one and one-half to two metres, excavated to a depth of one or two metres, the pit often surrounded by a rude wall of field stones. In the centre was the hearth. The superstructure was merely a cone composed of a framework of poles interlaced with branches and twigs plastered with clay. In the primitive hut there was no perpendicular side wall above ground, though in some the roof may have been raised somewhat on the earth thrown out from the pit. Such differences of detail are of slight importance. The huts are of all ages. They were probably erected far back in Paleolithic time. They seem to be figured in Magdalenian cave-frescoes.[39] Even the Chellean hunters could hardly have erected more primitive shelters. But equally rude huts are still inhabited in the Balkan Peninsula,[40] and are described by classical writers as inhabited by the Germans.

Says Tacitus (Germania, XLVI) of the Finns of his day: “They lead a vagrant life: their food the common herbage; the skins of beasts their only clothing; and the bare earth their resting-place.... To protect their infants from the fury of wild beasts and the inclemency of the weather, they make a kind of cradle amidst the branches of trees interwoven together, and they know no other expedient. The youth of the country have the same habitation, and amidst the trees old age is rocked to rest. Savage as this way of life may seem, they prefer it to the drudgery of the field, the labor of building, and the painful vicissitudes of hope and fear, which always attend the defense and the acquisition of property. Secure against the passions of men, and fearing nothing from the anger of the gods, they have attained that uncommon state of felicity, in which there is no craving left to form a single wish. The rest of what I have been able to collect is too much involved in fable....”

Let us hope that the reports which Tacitus had been able to collect concerning the dwellings, as well as the ferocity, filth, and poverty of the Finns, were somewhat exaggerated. Evidently conical, largely subterranean huts have been common in Europe down to far later than Neolithic times. The age of any pit-dwelling can be determined only by its contents.

In addition to these circular pits, long or short trenches occur. Forrer found at Stutzheim one cellar more than ten metres long, and varying from one to three metres in width, with several lateral enlargements as pantries and storehouses.[41] Forrer considers this as the home of the chief man, the “manor-house” of the settlement. Around it he found remains of huts such as we have already described. Frequently space for storage as well as dwelling was gained by clustering small huts. This plan would have had the advantage of protection against loss of everything by fires, which must have been frequent. Such cramped dwellings, with the garbage scattered over the bottom of the hut, or in the huts of the most highly cultured deposited in a special hole in one corner, could hardly have been attractive, clean, or sanitary. But they were cool in summer and warm in winter, and afforded protection against wind and weather. People asked and expected no more. Housekeeping was simple, if not easy. But we can imagine that the return of spring, allowing them to emerge from their burrows, must have been hailed with delight.

We have still much to learn concerning these Neolithic dwellings. They have been discovered by chance, and usually studied only hastily and superficially. A pit discovered and examined may have been only one of a large cluster or village, of which the rest remained undiscovered. Wooden houses of logs, or with a strong frame of poles seem to have existed in Bronze, or even late Neolithic times. Sophus Müller[42] describes settlements in Denmark where the abundance of ashes and utensils prove long-continued habitation, and yet no pits seem to have been found—this may be due to insufficient investigation—strongly suggesting, at least, houses entirely above ground built of perishable materials. It is very hard to believe that even a Neolithic family could have lived through the winter in one, mainly subterranean, dwelling only two metres in diameter, with a fireplace in the middle. They would have been compelled to sleep sitting or standing! Probably Stutzheim and other similar settlements which have been discovered, represent the real general average of pit-dwellings, while besides these there were many of far superior style and comfort. The development of the Greek house is still a problem, much more that of a North German dwelling.

As an example of late Neolithic settlement of the better or best class, we may take Grosgartach, near Heilbronn, in the Neckar valley.[43] Here, where now are low meadows, was once a lake connected with the Neckar. The Neolithic village was carefully and skilfully explored by Hofrath Schliz, whose report is a model of careful observation and clear description.

The situation was very favorable, with loess-clad hills sloping to rich meadows, and the lake furnishing fish and a line of communication. The areas occupied by the houses and stalls were clearly marked by the dark “culture-earth” contrasting sharply with the yellow loess. The principal house was rectangular. The outer wall was composed of posts with a wattling of twigs. This was plastered with clay, mixed with chaff and straw. The inner face of the wall was smoothly finished, and then “kalsomined” reddish yellow, and still further decorated with fresco in geometrical designs. The house—5.80 metres by 5.35 metres—was divided into two rooms. The larger part of the house was occupied by the kitchen, with its floor about one metre below the surface of the ground, and entered by an inclined plane or ramp. The other chamber, the sleeping-room, was nearly a metre above the kitchen and separated from it by a partition. Benches cut out of the loess were found in both kitchen and sleeping-room. Stalls for cattle and barns or granaries were also found. Virchow, in his review of Schliz’s monograph, emphasizes the fact that apparently Grosgartach was deserted by its inhabitants and fell into decay without leaving any signs of destruction by fire or violence.

The villages of Butmir, Lengyel, Jablanica, and others in southeastern Europe show us a condition of advanced culture here also.[44] Déchelette, speaking of the culture of this region, notices “the striking analogies between these old walled villages of the Balkans and the Danube valley, and those of the Ægean villages of the Troad and Phrygia.” Primitive idols, painted pottery, frequent use of the spiral in decorative art, all these reappear here and there in the Neolithic stations of southeastern Europe, and in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean in pre-Mycenæan and Mycenæan days. Evidently houses, settlements, modes of life, and stages of culture differ greatly during the same epoch of the Neolithic period in different parts of Europe. Italy was always far in advance of Europe north of the Alps. But even in northern Europe there was great diversity. Shell-heap dwellers still remained long after a much higher culture prevailed throughout most of Denmark. The life and thought of the pioneer hunters of northern Germany, and still more of northern Russia, were very different from those of the agriculturists along the valley of the Danube and in the Balkan Peninsula. In Greece little city-states began to arise early. Even in northern Europe density of population and size of settlements varied greatly. One illustration of these differences can be seen in the occurrence of fortified villages and refuges.[45] The age of these fortifications is as great a problem as that of the remains found in a pit-dwelling. The village may be, probably usually is, much older than the surrounding wall, and an earthen wall may contain Neolithic or even perhaps Paleolithic implements. The custom of fortifying villages evidently spread rapidly during the Bronze and Iron periods. Sophus Müller tells us that all walled settlements north of the Alps are far younger than the Neolithic period.[46] This statement, often disputed or neglected, is probably an exaggeration, but may well be true of the region surrounding the Baltic. The sparse and scattered hunting and pioneer population of Scandinavia and Germany had no need of building permanent walls around their single houses or small villages. They had very little wealth to protect.

But an agricultural population inhabiting a fertile region open to attack might well surround their villages with a wall, or provide a burg, or fortified place or “refuge,” whither they might drive their cattle or transport their grain. Examples of this are Stutzheim and Urmitz, in the Rhine valley, always a great thoroughfare, and in Switzerland and along the maritime Alps villages of this sort seem to have been fairly frequent. Apparently they were still more numerous in the valley of the Danube and in the Balkan Peninsula. It is not at all surprising to find them in Thessaly, so near to the advanced civilization of Greece.

Another class of settlements usually well protected were the workshops (ateliers) and manufacturing villages, especially those where flint was mined, or where flint implements were made in large quantities and distributed by trade over wide areas.[47] During the Neolithic period these settlements would have held much the same place and importance as our centres of coal, iron, manufacturing, and business have with us to-day. Grand Pressigny and Camp de Chassey, in France, and Cissbury, in England, are single examples of a great number of such fortified mining and manufacturing villages. For a further study of these very interesting remains the reader is referred to the manuals of Déchelette and Hoernes.

Even before the close of the Paleolithic period tundra and steppe were giving place to forests, which were advancing even into Scandinavia. The forest looms large and terrible in the works of classical writers and German antiquarians. Says Tacitus: “Who would leave the softer climes of Asia, Africa, or Italy to fix his abode in Germany, where Nature offers nothing but scenes of ugliness, where the inclemency of the seasons never relents?... The face of the country, though in some parts varied, presents a cheerless scene, covered with the gloom of forests, or deformed with wide-extended marshes.” He says that the soil produces grain and is well stocked with cattle, though of small size. But grain does not grow in primeval forests, and herds of cattle need at least open glades for pasturage. It is an extreme picture tinged by the homesickness of a citizen of sunny Italy. Northern Europe was generally heavily forested until long after Tacitus’s time. The Romans began in earnest the work of deforesting France, and the work was carried on all over Europe in mediæval times. The Neolithic immigrants probably made small clearings with the aid of fire, especially where the trees were low and not too thick, as on many light-soiled areas. They could make but little impression on the heavy forest growth, though they could limit its spread. They probably did not need to make wide clearings of dense forest. There were many open stretches of country of greater or less extent awaiting occupants and culture. This was true especially of districts occupied by the loess, whose origin from dust drifted by Paleolithic wind-storms we have already noticed.

Geikie describes loess as typically a “fine-grained, yellowish, calcareous, sandy loam, consisting very largely of minute grains of quartz with some admixture of argillaceous and calcareous matter.”[48] It is for the most part a wind-blown deposit. It is widely developed over low-lying regions, but sweeps up to heights of 200 to 300 feet and more above the bottoms of the great river valleys. Again, in many places we find it heaped up under the lee of hills, the exposed windward slopes of which bear no trace of it. Wherever there is loess we are likely to find the remains of steppe plants and animals. The ancient steppe area which generally covers, and probably extends considerably beyond, the loess district, is the region occupied by most of the primitive settlements. Even to-day it is less wooded than the rest of northern Europe. Such steppe regions in the North German plain are the great diluvial river terraces, especially the terraces of the Saale and Elbe and the eastern edge of the Harz Mountains; in South Germany the lower Alpine “Vorland” from Switzerland to lower Austria, the uplands of Suabia and Franconia, the valleys of the Main and Neckar, and much of northern Bohemia. These steppe regions of Germany, northern Austria, and Switzerland extended southeastward in a zone following the Danube, widening out in the great Hungarian plain into the vast steppe region extending eastward from the Black Sea or Pontus. From this Pontic steppe a band of more or less open country extended northward along the Carpathians until it almost or quite joined the open regions of the Elbe and along the Harz. A farther extension of this same band seems to have opened the way from the Harz region through northwest Germany into Belgium and northern France, and very probably into Brittany. We see at once the importance of these long lines of open or thinly forested country to the immigrations and settlement of Neolithic peoples. Periodical floods or other conditions kept open many river valleys, whose importance we shall estimate in a later chapter. All this land, except the uplands of Suabia and Franconia, and some similar areas, was comparatively fertile, the loess areas particularly so, and suited to a primitive agriculture.

In England the valleys of the Thames and other rivers were heavily wooded and not populated until much later. But the long lines of chalk-downs and oolitic uplands were far less favorable to forest growth. In Norfolk and Suffolk there were apparently open spaces. Yorkshire and Derbyshire had very similar landscapes. The forest was held back wherever the porous chalk formation made a large outcrop. In these places man could settle and find pasturage for his flocks and attempt a poor sort of agriculture, even in Neolithic days. Hence we find these regions dotted with Neolithic settlements. The immigrants who came in during the Bronze period settled in the same regions. Here again clearing of the forest on any large scale was apparently not attempted until Roman times, but along its boundaries, where the forest growth was not too heavy, these primitive agriculturists may well have cut off the lighter growth for fuel and buildings, and thus have gradually appreciably extended the arable area.

CHAPTER IV

LAKE-DWELLINGS

THE winter of 1853-1854 was exceedingly cold and dry. The surface of the Swiss lakes sank lower than at any time during many preceding centuries. The lowering of the water tempted the inhabitants along the shore to erect dikes and thus fill in the newly gained flats. During this process the workmen along the edge of the retreating water came upon the tops of piles, and between those great quantities of horn and stone implements and fragments of pottery. Aeppli, a teacher in Obermeilen, called the attention of the Antiquarian Society in Zurich to these discoveries. The society recognized at once their importance, and under the leadership of its president, Ferdinand Keller, began a series of most careful investigations which have contributed more to our knowledge of life during the Neolithic period than any discoveries before or since.

The number of these lake-dwellings is very large. Lake Neuchatel has furnished over 50; Lake Leman (Geneva) 40; Lake Constance over 40; Lake Zurich 10. The shores of the smaller lakes have also contributed their full quota.[49] In some of the lakes where the shore was favorable, remains of a lake-dwelling have been found before almost every modern village. Sometimes we find the remains of two villages, one somewhat farther out than the other. In these cases the one nearer the shore is the older, usually Neolithic, while the one farther out belongs to the Bronze period.

These settlements are by no means limited to Switzerland. They stretch in a long zone along the Alps from Savoy and southern Germany through Switzerland into Austria.[50] Herodotus mentions them in the Balkan Peninsula. The amount of bronze seems to increase as we pass from east to west. They are found frequently in the Italian lakes, mostly containing relics of the Bronze Age, though here the western settlements contain little or no metal. A second series has been discovered in Britain and northern Germany, and extending into Russia. These are considerably younger. The scheme of the lake-dwelling was used in historic times in Ravenna and Venice. Large numbers are still inhabited in the far east.

A sunny, sheltered shore, protected by hills from storms and action of waves, was always an attractive site.[51] The character of the land, if open and suitable for pasturage and cultivation, was doubtless important. Much depended on the character of the bottom. Where the shore shelved off gradually and was composed of marl or sand, the piles could be easily driven, and could hold their place firmly. Even if the shore was somewhat too hard and the piles could be driven only a little distance, they were strengthened by piles of stones, often brought from a considerable distance. When a suitable location had been discovered and selected the trees were felled partly by the use of stone axes, and partly by fire, and one end of the log was pointed by the same means, according to Avebury. Their diameter was from three to nine inches, and their length from fifteen to thirty feet. During the Bronze period larger trees were felled and split, and larger piles had to be used in the deeper water farther from the shore.[52]

These rudely sharpened piles were driven into the bottom by the use of heavy stone mallets. This must have involved an immense amount of hard labor, for at the settlement of Wangen 50,000 piles were used, though not all probably at the same time. Messikommer calculated that at Robenhausen over 100,000 were used. We find sometimes a different foundation. It consists of a solid mass of mud and stones, with erect and also horizontal logs binding the whole structure firmly together. This is evidently a ruder, simpler, and perhaps more primitive, mode of building. It was less suited to an open situation, exposed to heavy waves, and seems to occur more often in smaller lakes now often filled with peat.[53] Wauwyl and Nieberwyl are good illustrations of such a “Packwerkbau.” Some have considered them as originally floating rafts.

When the piles had been firmly driven, cross-pieces were laid over the top, and on this a “flooring” of smaller poles, or of halved logs or even split boards, whose interstices were probably filled with moss and clay, forming a solid and fairly even surface, on which the dwellings could be erected. The framework of the houses was of small piles, some of which have been found projecting considerably above the platforms.[54] “The size of the house is further marked out by boards forced in between the piles and resting edgeways on the platform, thus forming what at the present day we should call the skirting boards (mop-boards) of the hut or rooms. The walls or sides were made of a wattle or hurdle work of small branches, woven in between the upright piles, and covered with a considerable thickness of loam or clay.” This is proved by numbers of pieces of clay half-burnt, or hardened in the fire, with the impressions of the wattle-work still remaining. These singularly illustrative specimens are found in nearly every settlement which has been destroyed by fire. The houses were rectangular except in a few cases. They were apparently thatched with straw or reeds. The hearths consisted of three or four stone slabs.

These houses were calculated by Messikommer at Robenhausen to have been about 27 by 22 feet, a very respectable size. One was excavated at Schussenried, whose side-walls and floor were fairly well preserved. This was a rectangle about 33 by 23 feet (10 by 7 metres), and was divided into two chambers. The front room, 6-1/2 by 4 metres, opened by a door facing south, and with remains of a hearth in one corner. The rear room, 6-1/2 by 5 metres, was without outer door, and was apparently a bedroom.[55] Beside these houses, or forming a part of them, were stalls for the cattle, granaries, and probably workshops. (The distribution of different remains is well shown in Keller’s Lake Dwellings, I, p. 45.) The stone and bone implements, and the pottery of the lake-dwellers can be more conveniently considered in connection with those of other regions.

We pass now to the remains of animals and plants found here, especially in their relations to the food supply of the people.[56] Altogether about 70 species of animals have been discovered. Of these 10 are fish, 4 reptiles, 26 birds, and 30 mammals, of which 6 were probably domesticated. The largest of these were the great Cervus alces or moose—sometimes called elk—the wild cattle, and the stag (Cervus elaphus). Bones of the stag and ox are very numerous and equal those of all others together. Of the horse very few remains are found until the Bronze period. Wild horses seem to have lived on in certain parts of Europe until a late date, but apparently they had emigrated almost altogether from this region. The horse of the Bronze Age was domesticated. The lion had left this region, but lingered on in the Balkans down to historic times. The brown bear and the wolf still roamed in the forest. In the oldest lake-dwellings the bones of wild animals make up a far larger proportion of the remains than in the latest ones.

We find a somewhat small dog (Canis familiaris palustris) closely resembling that of the Danish shell-heaps. It was apparently of the jackal type, and much like the modern Spitz. This would have been an excellent watch-dog to give warning of the approach of enemies. But at the close of the Neolithic, with the increase of flocks of sheep, a larger dog more closely related to the wolf seems to have spread widely through the country (Canis familiaris matris optimæ Juit). This form was much like, and probably the ancestor of, our present sheep-dogs. A third form (Canis intermedius) also occurs. The origin and relationships of the various forms of this oldest domesticated animal are still anything but clear. That they all go back to the jackal and the wolf rather than to a form like the Australian dingo, still seems to be most generally accepted. (But see Schenk.[57])

Man gained the dog by domesticating the jackal and different species of wolves in different parts of the world and then by crossing, or, by a more or less unconscious selection, bred different varieties, until we have at present a chaos of intermingled forms. Something similar but on a smaller scale was true of the domestic cattle. One kind of domestic cattle appears fully domesticated in the oldest lake-dwellings. It is unlike any wild European form. This is the Bos brachyceros. It was almost certainly imported. Mingled with its forms we find those of the Bos primigenius, a native of Europe and North Asia, but apparently not domesticated. This is the urus, which was common in Europe in Cæsar’s day, and lasted in central Europe until 1000 A. D. and still lingers in Poland.[58] This was a very large and powerful form with long spreading horns, whose domestication appears to have commenced toward the close of the Neolithic period. It is not improbable that it was domesticated, or at least tamed, independently in different countries at quite different times. Raising of cattle was at its height during the Bronze Age; afterward the results seem to decline and the cattle to degenerate.

One of the Vaphio vases of about 1500 B. C. represents the capture of large, long-horned cattle in a net, while the second shows similar animals tamed. Apparently the smaller and lighter brachyceros was first tamed, and this success led to a series of experiments with the larger and more difficult form.[59]

If we draw a line from northwestern Russia diagonally across Europe southwestward to the mouth of the Rhone, it will divide fairly well the distribution of the descendants of those two forms. To the eastward in Russia and Austria, also generally through Germany, and extending also along the shores of the Baltic, we find the large, heavy, usually long-horned descendants of the primigenius stock. The cattle of Spain, and southward into Africa, of France and England, are more of the short-horned, light-built, smaller brachyceros type. Holstein and Jersey are good representatives of the two types, though the Holsteins are, perhaps, a somewhat marked variety. Some regard the cattle of the Scotch highlands as the best representatives of the primigenius type, though reduced in size. This same type, on account of its size and endurance of harsh climate, has furnished the range cattle of our Western plains.

Two fairly distinct forms of swine occur in the lake-dwellings. The first is the so-called turbary pig (Sus scrofa palustris). This is a small form with comparatively long legs. It differs markedly from the wild boar, and was probably imported already domesticated. Being more or less left to feed and shift for itself, it may well have declined in size from its primitive oriental ancestors. Remains of the larger European wild boar (Sus scrofa ferus L.) also occur from the beginning as products of the hunt. But during the Bronze period domesticated descendants of this variety grow numerous, and are crossed with the smaller turbary pig.

“The domestic sheep,” says Brehm, “is a quiet, gentle, patient, simple, will-less, cowardly, wearisome animal. It has no character. It understands and learns nothing; is incapable of helping itself.”[60] It is certainly absolutely dependent upon man for guidance and protection. This lies partly in its inherited nature and original surroundings, but suggests long domestication. Like the goat, it is originally a mountain form, but adapts itself readily to the dry herbage of the steppe. It is not a native of central Europe but introduced. It is much rarer than the goat in the oldest lake-dwellings, but gradually becomes more abundant, especially in the Bronze period.

The turbary sheep (Ovis aries palustris) is very small, with slender legs, long narrow skull, and bones somewhat like those of the goat. It was certainly not developed in Switzerland, and before it arrived there it had apparently been much modified by conditions of life or by crossing. ing. Its anatomical characteristics are made up of at least three wild forms. The first of these is the goat-like maned sheep (Ovis tragelaphus) ranging over the mountains of northern Africa, extending across into Abyssinia. This form seems to have been domesticated in Egypt before the middle of the fourth millennium. At a much later date, in Homeric times, herds of sheep of a similar form were kept in Greece. It was much larger than the turbary form.

The arkal (Ovis arkal) is the steppe sheep of central and western Asia. It is the ancestor of the oriental and African fat-tailed sheep. The western Asiatic forms seem to have developed the fine wool at the expense of the coarse hair, like that of the goat and of many other forms.

A third form is the Moufflon, of the mountains around the Mediterranean and of its larger islands—here probably introduced. Similar forms appear in Europe during the Bronze period.

Other species are found in different parts of Asia. The balance of probabilities seems to incline toward the view that the turbary sheep came into Europe from western and central Asia with other “turbary” forms, that it had been long domesticated, and either here or on its westward migration may have more or less crossed with the descendants of other varieties. The oldest domesticated goats seem to be descended from the Bezoar goat (Capra ægagrus), from the mountains of southwestern Asia.

The presence of oxen, sheep, and goats is enough to prove that the people must have practised agriculture to some extent to have kept these animals alive through the winter. That they were kept on the platform is shown by the presence of manure in the remains underneath. Whether this was used for fertilizer we do not know, nor their method of cultivating the ground. No agricultural implements have come down to us.

“The small-grained, six-rowed barley (Hordeum hexastichum sanctum) and the small lake-dwelling wheat (Triticum vulgare antiquorum) were the most ancient, most important, and most generally cultivated farinaceous seeds of our country. Next to them come the beardless compact wheat (T. vulg. compactum muticum) and the larger six-rowed barley (Hordeum hexastichum densum), with the two kinds of millet, the common millet (Panicum miliaceum) and the Italian millet (Setaria italica). The Egyptian wheat (Triticum turgidum L.), the two-rowed wheat (emmer, Triticum dicoccum Schr.), and the one-grained wheat (Trit. monococcum) were probably, like the two-rowed barley, only cultivated as experiments in a few places; and the spelt (Triticum spelta L.), which at present is one of the most important cereals, and the oat (Avena sativa L.) appeared later, not till the Bronze Age, while rye was entirely unknown among the lake-dwellings of Switzerland.”[61]

Oats occur in the Bronze period in western, middle, and northern Europe, in the Alpine lake-dwellings, and in the Danish islands. The ancient Egyptians and Hebrews, Indians and Chinese, did not cultivate them; they were raised in Asia Minor and America only since historic times. We remember that wheat and barley are mentioned in the oldest records of the Old Testament—as in Gideon’s barley loaf—but rye and oats not at all.

The grains seem to show a gradual improvement in productiveness from the very oldest settlements to those of the Bronze period. They are found charred and perfectly preserved wherever the houses were destroyed by fire. Even the ears and stalks have been saved for us in the same manner. Charred loaves of bread, and cake made of poppy-seeds, were also found. “Bread was made only of wheat and millet, the latter with the addition of some grains of wheat, and, for the sake of flavoring it, with linseed also. Bread made of barley has not yet been found, and it is probable that barley was chiefly eaten boiled, or more probably parched or roasted.”[62] Flint sickles made of a long flake set at a right angle with the wooden handle have been found in Denmark, and others whose blade is formed by a row of small, sharp flints set in the edge of a wooden block occur in Egypt. The hand-mills or mealing-stones are very abundant, as might be expected.

The occurrence of the seeds of the Cretan catchfly (Silene cretica L.) is interesting, as it is not found wild in Germany or in southeastern Europe, but over all the countries of the Mediterranean. Similarly, the corn-bluebottle (Centaura cyanus L.) is found wild in Sicily. This seems to show that these plants came in with the wheat from Italy. But it is still possible that both Switzerland and Italy received them from a source somewhat or considerably farther east or south.

Apples and pears, split and dried, occur abundantly. Some of the apples are so large that they suggest a certain amount of care and cultivation. Sour crabapples, and the stones of cherries, plums, and sloes are found accompanied by the seeds of the wild grape; of elderberries, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries. Acorns, beechnuts, and hazelnuts were stored up. Besides the seeds of the poppy, already mentioned, those of caraway were used apparently to flavor the bread. Altogether some 170 plants have been discovered and determined from these localities.[63]

Basket-making and the weaving of mats from bast-fibres had led up to a highly developed weaver’s art. Few or no remains of wool have come down to us from Neolithic time, though it occurs in graves of the Bronze Age farther north. It would not preserve by charring, as all other lake-dwelling organic remains have been saved for us, and our failure to discover it is not surprising. We can hardly believe that these people did not use the wool of their flocks of sheep, or failed to felt the hair of their goats. But flax has been found in all stages of preparation and manufacture in great quantities. Says Messikommer of Robenhausen: “Every house had its loom.” We find not only threads, cords, and ropes, twine and nets, but cloth of varying pattern and design. Some pieces were so finely woven and well preserved that their discoverers could hardly believe that they were not of modern make. Fringes and embroidery occur.[64]

Linen alone could hardly have furnished sufficient protection against the cold and dampness of the Swiss winter climate. The more primitive inhabitants had an abundance of furs. Garments of sheepskin were doubtless in use. And probably wool and goat’s-hair were woven or felted into outer garments. Dye-stuffs of black, yellow, red, and blue coloring furnished a variety of tints and shades.

Very few human bones have been found among those lake-dwelling remains; and only a few burial-places, or rather tombs, in the neighboring mainland. The discussion of their mode of burial and racial characteristics may well be deferred to a later chapter.

Of their religious cult we know almost nothing.[65] No idols or fetiches have been recognized. Certain “crescents” of clay, supported with the horns turned upward, have been considered by some as head-rests, for which purpose they are still used by certain African tribes. Others have considered them as representatives of the crescent moon; still others as conventionalized ox heads and horns. It seems highly probable that they had some religious significance, but its exact nature is still uncertain. We shall return to them later.

WAVING AND PLAITING FROM LAKE-DWELLINGS

A lake-dwelling of any size is inconceivable without a well-advanced social development. It could hardly be founded, builded, or maintained without close co-operation. Families had to live closely crowded together, almost as in our modern cities. Neighbors had learned to get on with one another and live together in peace, and to submit to a close regulation or discipline by law or custom. They seem to have been a peaceful folk and exposed to no great dangers from outside attack, at least in Neolithic time. When the ice fringed the shores or covered the small lakes, they must have been easily open to attack. A few brands thrown into the thatched roof would have brought sure destruction. Traces of conflagration occur, as at Robenhausen, which was twice destroyed by fire.[66] But these occurrences are rare. Neolithic settlements seem to have been more frequently abandoned because of the growth of peat than by any sudden or violent destruction. Conditions probably changed in this respect during the Bronze period.

Their food was varied and more than fairly abundant. They had their domestic animals to furnish flesh, milk, probably butter and cheese. Agriculture was primitive, but in some cases we find large stores, we might say granaries, of wheat; and wild fruits and vegetable foods were abundant. The forests offered game, and the lakes were well-stocked with fish. There may have been times of hardship and dearth, but famine could hardly have ravaged a people with these three sources of supply.

The lake offered a thoroughfare for their canoes, and communication was easy for long distances. To cite only one illustration: flint was brought from Grand Pressigny, in France, and manufactured in certain Swiss localities. There was much variety and division of labor between different villages. One manufactured flint very largely—so at and around Moosseedorf; while Robenhausen and Wangen have furnished great quantities of cloth. Others were rather centres for the manufacture of pottery. Even in the same village one area is richer in one product, a second in another. There was much variety as well as freedom of intercommunication. The whole region lay a little back from the great Danube thoroughfare, but near enough to it to retain connection with the larger world. Life was not altogether monotonous.

The lake-dwellings have been divided according to their age into three groups or stages, representing three epochs more or less marked.[67]

Stage I. Archaic Epoch.—Axes small and made out of indigenous material. “Hammer-axes” and utensils of horn and bone rude. No decorations on weapons, utensils, nor on the crude pottery. Plaiting and weaving practised. Population in Switzerland at this time seems to have been sparse. Food obtained from hunt more than from domestic animals. Examples: Chavannes (Schafis) Moosseedorf, Wauwyl. People brachycephalic.

Stage II. Middle Neolithic Epoch.—Weapons and utensils more perfect. Stone axes finely polished, often with hole for handle, sometimes very large. Beside the commoner minerals five to eight per cent of implements made of nephritoids (nephrite, jadeite, and chloromelanite). These are almost absent in Epochs I and III. Pottery of far better material and manufacture, with traces of ornament. Remains of domestic and wild animals nearly equal. Domestic animals are turbary pig, goat, sheep, turbary cattle, but primigenius form present though less common. Brachycephalic and dolichocephalic people nearly equal in number. Examples: Robenhausen and Concise.

Stage III. Copper Epoch.—Hammer-axes, beautifully finished. Bone and horn implements. Nephritoid minerals less used. Pottery more artistic. Cord-decoration appears. Certain ornaments, weapons, and implements are made of copper. Domesticated animals improve and form a larger part of the food than game. Cattle especially increase in numbers, and a new race of sheep has arisen. Long-heads more numerous than broad-heads. Examples: Roseax, at Morges. Locraz, Ferril (Vinelz).[68]

It is interesting to notice that remains of domestic cattle are abundant in all ages, that goats are more abundant than sheep in the earliest lake-dwelling, but that the sheep became equally numerous in the second epoch, while they decidedly outnumbered the goats during the Bronze period. This is what we should expect from the advance of culture.

Says Keller:[69] “The shores of the western portion of Lake Constance are probably more thickly studded with settlements than those of any other Swiss lake. In fact, here are found happily united all the requirements necessary for the erection of dwellings of this nature. A deposit of marl stretches along nearly the whole of its shores and of tolerable breadth. A rich tract of country between the shore and the hills which rise quietly behind; forests of pine and oak; pleasant bays with a gravelly bottom; a great abundance of fish in the lake, and a superfluity of game in the surrounding forests, were circumstances highly favorable to the colonization of these shores.”

Could we have sat on one of these village platforms of a summer afternoon and looked out to the wheat-fields on the shore, and seen the canoes come in with fish or game, and the cattle returning from the mainland pasture; could we have watched the men fashioning implements and all manner of woodwork, and the women grinding the grain or moulding pottery, or spinning and weaving; we should have found a great deal to please and interest us. The fruits and berries, the smell of roasting fish and baking bread, of cakes well flavored with the oil from beechnut or flax, or perhaps sifted over with the seeds of poppy or caraway, would have been far from disagreeable. We should have felt that it was a goodly land, and that life was well worth living. We should not have been disturbed by shrieking steamboats, puffing and groaning locomotives, or honking automobiles, or by telegraphs or telephones, by letters which must be answered or books which must be read. There were no stocks and bonds, bills or notes, strikes or lockouts. There was no labor question; all simply had to work. No one went to school, except to nature, and there were no lectures. “The name of that chamber was peace.”

We ought not to forget in our comfort that everybody could not live in a lake-dwelling, that all over Europe there were other settlements or dwellings, more lonely or isolated, where food was never abundant and sometimes very scarce, where labor was unremitting and the reward scanty. But even in those less civilized regions there was probably usually much rude comfort; and if there were times of scarcity and want, there were also times of feasting and abundance. All over Europe there were, even in Neolithic time, children, boys and girls playing around the houses; and young men and women looking out on life with the same inexperience and illusions, courage and hopes, which lure us onward to-day.

CHAPTER V

A GLANCE EASTWARD

THE culture of the oldest lake-dwellings appears suddenly in Europe, and its beginnings are exotic in all their essentials. The turbary cattle were quite different from the wild primigenius race of the surrounding regions; and we find no remains of the intermediate forms which should occur if domestication had taken place here. The same is true of the turbary pig. Wild sheep are unknown in northern Europe, and the moufflon of the Mediterranean islands can hardly have been the ancestor of our Swiss flocks, and is very possibly descended from domesticated ancestors which reverted to wild life. Something very similar may be said of our oldest cereals, wheat and barley.

We must evidently turn eastward or southward to find the cradle of the whole culture. Even if it came partly from Italy, it could hardly have developed there. Egypt may have made contributions, but mostly at a later date. We naturally turn first to Asia, the great centre of mammalian evolution, probably the oldest seat of cattle-raising and agriculture, cradle of man and centre of his earliest development. The true Neolithic cultures in northern Europe can hardly be older than about 6000 B. C.; the lake-dwellings are probably far younger. We must first inquire into the location, age, and character of the oldest agriculture in nearer Asia, where great discoveries have been made during the last twenty years.

We naturally turn first to Babylonia. Under the temple of Bel, at Nippur, was an immense platform constructed of sun-dried bricks, most of them stamped with the name of Sargon or of Naram Sin. The date of Sargon seems still uncertain; many historians place it at 2800 B. C.; others, and apparently most archæologists, like Obermaier, still hold to the old date, 3750 B. C.[70] Without any attempt to decide this question, we will hold in this chapter to the older date; and believers in the latter date can subtract 1,000 from our figures for earlier times, though this does not apply to Pumpelly’s estimates.

Says Delitzsch[71] of this mound: “In the deepest layers of these remains, or what amounts to the same, back many centuries beyond the fifth millennium, everywhere interesting and valuable remains of human civilization come to light, fragments of vessels of copper, bronze, and clay, a quantity of earthenware so beautifully lacquered in red and black that we might consider them of Greek origin, or at least influenced by Greek art, had they not been found eight metres deep under Naram Sin’s pavement.” Here we find the Bronze period, or possibly late Copper, before 5000 B. C. A city with a high and complex culture had already arisen. No one believes that the culture could have originated in the rank, almost untamable, primitive jungle of Mesopotamia. Its beginnings must be sought elsewhere and earlier. But the age and character of Babylonian civilization encourage one to seek further in western Asia.

In 1904 Pumpelly[72] made most thorough and careful investigations at Anau, near Askabad in Turkestan, about 300 miles east of the southeast corner of the Caspian Sea, and 200 miles west of Merv. The remarkable results of his work are described in two large volumes, and have not received the attention which they deserve. He excavated in two large Kurgans or mounds. The north Kurgan is the older and chiefly concerns us. The Neolithic remains occur in thin compact strata aggregating some forty-five feet in thickness. The earliest settle ment was a town covering at least five acres, possibly nearly ten.

At the time of the beginning of the settlement, which Pumpelly estimated as somewhat before 8000 B. C., the inhabitants lived in rectangular houses built of uniform sun-dried bricks. They were skilful potters, though unacquainted with the potter’s wheel, making different grades of coarse and fine vessels. These were unglazed, but often painted with a definite series of geometrical patterns. They had the art of spinning, for whorls are found in all strata from the lowest up. They cultivated cereals, for the casts of the chaff of wheat and barley are found in the clay of the thicker pots. At first they had no domestic animals, only the bones of wild forms being found. When ten feet of culture strata had been accumulated the remains of a tame Bos namadicus, the Asiatic variety of the Bos primigenius, or urus, occurred. That this animal had already been domesticated is inferred from the less compact microscopic structure of the bones modified by artificial conditions. At this time the change of structure, if not complete, was evident. It had been for some time under the new conditions. The turbary pig appears about 7500 B. C.,[73] the turbary sheep about 1500 years later, but preceded by varieties of the great horned mountain sheep. The turbary cattle appear to have been a small variety of the Bos namadicus, somewhat dwarfed by drought and hardship.

The camel appears at Anau somewhat after 6000 B. C., and seems to be a means of intercourse and transport far antedating the horse, in a region already showing signs of dessication.

Spherical mace-heads occur reminding us of those used in Egypt. But no lance-head or arrow-point or other stone weapon was found in the lower levels. We do not know how they killed or captured the larger animals; they may have used the sling or bolero. In the lowest strata we find the bones of young children, but not of adults, buried in a contracted position under the floors of the dwellings. The first objects of copper and lead appear about 6000 B. C., and, open the Æneolithic period. Pumpelly distinguishes a Copper period, here longer and more distinctly marked than in Europe. The turquoise bead found in one of the graves came, in all probability, from the Iranian plateau, as did probably the copper and lead also.

He has shown us that even on the steppe the cultivation of cereals precedes the domestication of sheep and cattle. The nomadic life follows instead of preceding agriculture. The pioneers in this region cultivated the zone of steppe, into which rivers poured from the mountains. When cattle and sheep and goats had multiplied, the herdsmen drove them farther and farther on the rich pasturage of the boundless steppe. Thus nomads gradually appear. There are also different varieties of nomadism. Nomadic tribes were far less active and dangerous neighbors even after the domestication of the camel than when, about 2000 B. C., they had domesticated the horse. The first herdsman may have differed from the latter nomad almost as much as the most pacific sheep-herder of our Western plains differs from the liveliest cowboy.

Pumpelly’s time-estimates have been criticised by Doctor H. Schmidt, of Berlin.[74] He makes the rate of growth far more rapid than Pumpelly thought and shortens the periods. In determining length of periods he relies far more on artifacts and less on probable rate of accumulation. The criticisms seem hardly well founded. Pumpelly’s estimate of rate of increase was based upon a careful and broad comparison of accumulations in the deserted city, Anau, in Merv, and other localities. They seem conservative, but we must recognize that such estimates are always only approximate. His estimates result in a series of dates generally in close agreement with those of most students of oriental archæology.

In the Third Culture Epoch there was found “copper, with sporadic appearance of low percentage of tin.” This describes well the close of the Copper period or the beginning of the Bronze Age, the rest of which is not represented at Anau, the settlement being deserted, probably because of aridity. Pumpelly thinks that the last strata deposited before the desertion comes down to the Bronze Age, and, assuming the latest possible date for the beginning of this period, places it about 2200 B. C. This is almost surely much too late. Obermaier dates the beginning of the Bronze period at 4000 B. C.[75] (If we substitute the later date, 2750 B. C., for Sargon’s region, the Bronze period would begin about 3000 B. C., the date accepted by Montelius.[76]) Pumpelly places the beginning of the Copper Epoch at 5000 B. C., again agreeing with Montelius. His estimates seem generally somewhat too conservative, as he doubtless intended they should be; the earliest remains may be considerably older than he thought. Investigations made during the last twenty years seem generally to lead us to believe that the beginnings of Neolithic culture are far older in western Asia than we had supposed, while in middle and northern Europe they are probably somewhat younger than we had thought. In this connection we may well remember that Evans found eight metres of Neolithic remains under the palace at Cnossus, in Crete, and estimated their age at about 14,000 years.

The culture at Anau is very similar in all its essentials to that of the European lake-dwellers, and is much older. The same cereals and the same kinds of domesticated animals appear in both. The brick houses are better and the very fine painted pottery is new and peculiar. These and the art of spinning and the cultivation of cereals were brought hither by the first settlers; their development to this stage must have taken place elsewhere and occupied a long period of time. Sheep could not have been domesticated here, for they and the goats are natives of the mountains, and could not survive wild on the steppe. Neither is the pig a steppe animal, but lives naturally in forest glades and along watercourses. Pumpelly has evidently discovered a very old and interesting station in the spread of this ancient culture, but not its cradle. This was apparently in some mountainous region. The nearest and most likely place to search for it is somewhere on the Iranian plateau, to which the turquoise bead and the later-introduced copper and lead found at Anau also point.

Here at Susa (Shushan), about one hundred miles from the apex of the Persian Gulf, de Morgan excavated in a mound rising about thirty-four metres above the level of the plain and continuing some six metres below the surface, which has been raised that amount since the first settlement was made.[77] The total thickness of the remains is therefore about forty metres. The lowest strata as yet have been only slightly studied. The uppermost ten to fifteen metres cover a period of about 6,000 years. If the lower strata were accumulated at the same rate, the first settlement was begun about 18,000 years ago at a conservative estimate. Montelius, the best authority on European prehistoric chronology, basing his conclusions on de Morgan’s discoveries, places the date of the beginning of Neolithic culture in this part of Asia at about 18,000 B. C., or somewhat earlier.[78]

Over twenty metres of these remains are purely Neolithic. There was the usual abundance of flint nuclei, flakes, and utensils. There was obsidian, evidently brought from a distance—de Morgan thinks from Armenia, a thousand miles away. This is not impossible; we shall find that trade or barter was far more extensive at this time than has usually been supposed.

Here again we find abundant pottery in the lowest strata. It is of a “dark brown pattern painted on a pale ground, partly imitating basketry and textiles, partly rendering plants and animals with childish simplicity.... It resembles in a striking way a few widely scattered series which are all that have been secured hitherto from a very ill-explored area: from a Neolithic site underlying the Hittite castle at Sakye-Giezi, in North Syria, from the surface of early mounds in Cappadocia, and from low levels of the Hittite capital, at Boghaz-Keui; and, more surprising still, from an important site, also Neolithic, at Anau, on the northern edge of the Persian plateau looking over into Turkestan; and at a number of points scattered over the flat lowland on the north side of the Black Sea, and thence into the Balkan Peninsula as far south as Macedonia and Thessaly. These resemblances are general and their value may be overestimated; there are differences in detail, but the general similarity seems to link the peoples over this wide area at the same time in one region of kindred art and culture, if not of blood.”[79]

The discoveries at Susa and elsewhere in this region seem to prove that compact settlements of fair size had arisen in western Asia long before the founding of Anau.[80] Such settlements could have been formed only by sedentary peoples practising agriculture, not by mere wandering hunters. Our definite knowledge of the domestic animals of Susa is very small. But, as we have just seen, the peculiar, fine, decorated pottery found in the oldest strata of Susa, Anau, and many other localities scattered over a wide area, is certainly a strong argument for believing that an agriculture in general very similar to that of the oldest strata at Anau was wide-spread over the Iranian plateau, Asia Minor, and elsewhere. Where or when it began we do not know. We can only conjecture as to the place and mode of its beginning. It may not be out of place to mention a very general hypothesis of this sort, and this we will now attempt to frame.

The Bühl moraines, in Lake Lucerne, are estimated as having been deposited between 16,000 and 24,000 B. C., during the Early Magdalenian stage of post-glacial time, which would, there fore, be contemporaneous with the earliest settlement at Susa.[81] The climate of Europe was then somewhat colder and much moister than at present. The ice-cap extended much farther south in middle Europe than in Russia or Siberia. Under these circumstances central Asia probably enjoyed a much moister climate than at present, without extreme cold. The Caspian and Aral Seas occupied a much larger area than at present, and were very likely connected. The Tarim basin may well have been a great lake surrounded by a zone of garden instead of the sandy waste which it is to-day. Conditions of increased moisture would have made the now parched regions of the Iranian plateau an exceedingly rich and favored region. Toward the close of the Post-glacial Epoch the mountains were probably well forested, but alternating dryer times would have brought open glades, with lakes interspersed.

When Europe changed from tundra to forest man became largely a fisherman, more or less settled at some favorable spot, and collecting his vegetable food in all directions. The same may well have been true of life at this early date in Persia. The man hunted or fished, the woman and the children gathered all kinds of animals and plant food, berries and other fruits, acorns and other nuts. One of the richest sources of food must have been the roots, tubers, and other underground stems. If there were any patches of richly seeded grasses or grains on the near-by glade or hill, we may be sure that the woman did not fail to beat off the ripe seed with a stick, and carry it home with her. The primitive family was not dainty or particular in its appetite. The women were the first botanists, the first to notice the nutritive, medicinal, or poisonous qualities of plants, and the first physicians.[82]

When she turned homeward with her load of spoil, some berries, seeds, and small bulbs doubtless fell to the ground and escaped her notice. These grew and flourished in the richer soil around the hut or shelter, for all the garbage could not have accumulated in the hut. Some unusually observing woman noticed this, and protected the plants, or even cultivated them a little with her digging-stick, and pulled out some of the largest smothering weeds. She began to plant a few others, and gradually started a garden. The garden is older than the farm, and hoe and digging-stick vastly older than the plough. This woman had discovered, and almost created, a new world of science and culture which was to revolutionize life.

Rice growing wild in large fields under suitable conditions is still gathered by all savages. This grain needed no preparation except boiling, while wheat and barley must be crushed or ground between stones, probably used at first for grinding dry nuts. Peas and beans, many vetches, and other members of this family so characteristic of the dryer uplands, were gathered very early, and may have been cultivated before wheat. Melons and many of the gourds always must have been eaten. We shall notice later that the zone of Persia and Asia Minor lay on the boundary line between two great botanical provinces, a northern and a southern, and furnished a very wide range of plants for this earliest experiment station.[83] A great variety of plants were tested sooner or later, and only a few of the very best and most capable of improvement have been retained to our day. On the steppe at a later date wheat and barley were most profitable, and most widely cultivated. But even here hoe-culture was for a long time the only mode. It still exists in Africa, Asia, and Japan; and was the only mode of culture known in America at the time of its discovery. Hoe-culture was at first, and has generally remained, woman’s work; ploughing with cattle was a man’s job. This had far-reaching results to which we must return in a later chapter.

But we must not think that the Iranian plateau, with its great zone of piedmont steppe stretching eastward and westward along its northern border across the continent of Asia, was the only place where agriculture could start and reach a high degree of development in ancient times. Its possibility lay in the habit of the woman of collecting the vegetable food and smaller animals, while the men hunted and fished. Useful food plants furnishing large amounts of food are to be found in all continents, and differ markedly in different soils and climatic zones. Hence even the beginnings of agriculture were probably not confined to any one region, but were wide-spread, manifold, and independent. The Chinese migrating eastward and southeastward down the great river valleys from eastern Turkestan may have carried with them the cultivation of wheat, or adopted it independently. The rice culture of China may have been borrowed from India or independently evolved. India and the Malay Archipelago and Africa have every one its own agriculture, of whose origin and early development we know nothing.

But western Asia, or more precisely the Iranian plateau, had another piedmont region beside the zone stretching along its northern border. This second piedmont zone of grass-land, or oasis, as Breasted has pointed out, bends in the form of a horseshoe along the western slope of the Iranian plateau, then northward and westward around the headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and southward through Syria.[84] Here it dries out in the great Syrian and Arabian deserts. But these also, as well as the Arabian plateau stretching along the Red Sea, may have been well watered and inhabitable in early post-glacial time. The Arabian plateau and its piedmont zone in those days may well have been an independent centre of agricultural development, which gave place to the nomadism so characteristic of the Semitic peoples only at a later date. Of the early history of Arabia we are still completely ignorant. But in the twilight of history we see those Semites coming into the Mesopotamian valley from the west while the Sumerians entered from the east. Those two streams of migration, mingling, founded the great Babylonian Empire, to which all oriental peoples looked up with an awe and reverence, as well as fear, which we can scarcely appreciate. Evidently, and this is the fact of chief importance to us, parts of the nearer east were highly civilized before anything better than savagery had developed in northern Europe.

But far older than these cities of the Mesopotamian river valleys is the culture of the forests, glades, lakes, and riversides of the plateaus. Evidence seems steadily to accumulate that here we are to seek for the beginnings of agriculture and the domestication of animals which were slowly to change the face of the earth and the life and character of man.

Hoe-tillage of the ground is evidently far older than cattle-raising or nomadic life. It had been brought to Anau before 8000 B. C., and had probably already been practised at Susa and elsewhere thousands of years earlier. But we cannot help asking whether other plants may not have been cultivated long before cereals. Roots and tubers are much more conspicuous than the smaller grains. These underground storehouses of nutriment adapted to give the plant a quick and sure start, during a short spring period of growth and flowering, are abundant everywhere. They still form the staple crop in many parts of the world. We remember the potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, the cassava, and a host of others. In our northern regions we still cultivate beets, turnips, and carrots, though now becoming more and more food for cattle. These plants also are less closely limited to the steppes and plateaus. They occur all through the mountain or shore regions, and for this reason would have been likely to attract the attention of “collectors.”

Primitive woman had no plough, only the digging-stick, the agricultural implement of the Australians. Later they learned to make a hoe, sometimes out of a tine of deer’s horn, sometimes of stone or other material, something half-way between a hoe and a pick. With such an implement a fair amount of soil could be broken up and well stirred. When domestic animals were introduced into Africa the plough followed only in the eastern regions; all through the rest of Africa the old hoe-culture held its own. Europeans introduced the plough into America. As a means of breaking up the ground the plough is infinitely superior; for tillage and cultivation the hoe is far more useful. When wheat has once been sown it cares for itself; further cultivation is unnecessary—it is the lazy man’s crop. Perhaps that, with a touch of the spur of necessity, persuaded the male to undertake ploughing. When the plough was invented many vegetables formerly cultivated probably became less profitable or attractive, and were given up. A revolution took place in agriculture. Probably the plough was at first dragged by women. It is impossible to say just when it was invented. It was used during the Bronze period, for it is represented in rock-carvings of that age. Some stone ploughshares may be Neolithic.

Studying European Neolithic agriculture in the light of the methods of savage and barbarous peoples, or even of our pioneer ancestors, we imagine them living on the border of the forests which furnished food and wood for buildings and implements. The first step was to burn and clear a place where the undergrowth was not too heavy, and to break up the soil with pick or hoe. Here the patch of grain was sowed. The soil fertilized by the ashes gave him a fair crop, but became exhausted after a few years of cultivation, and he was compelled to break up a new field. Some investigators have thought that the lake-dwellers used the manure from their cattle on their fields, but in most parts of Europe cultivation of the soil was probably crude and superficial. On the chalk downs of England, chief places of settlement by Neolithic peoples in this region, we find terraces and narrow strips which may have been prepared at this time, though their age is very uncertain. They often are of a size and form not well adapted to plough-culture. They have a look of permanent occupation. These may well have been fertilized. The evidence is very uncertain. When the loess soil was of fair depth cultivation may have gone on for many years without fertilizers of any sort.

The primitive plough was hardly more than a pointed stout branch or stub of a tree, whose longer fork was fastened to the yoke. It made a furrow triangular in cross-section, broad at the top and narrowing to an edge at the bottom. It did not “turn” a strip, and between two furrows a long ridge was left unbroken. Even in Roman times cross-ploughing was common or usual. Even this rude culture needed the strength of cattle to draw the plough. The plough is associated in our minds with oxen, and the first man who made his cow, instead of his wife, draw the plough was a great benefactor.

Even the domestication of cattle was less easy than it seems at first sight. Wild animals rarely reproduce in captivity. Pumpelly thinks that the way toward the domestication of our larger cattle may have been paved by a long period of drought driving them from the steppe into the better-watered oases, and thus into association with man. But this could hardly have been true of the mountain sheep and goats, on which man may well have experimented before he attempted the more difficult task of domesticating the larger, more powerful, and less manageable Bos namadicus. How did man hit upon the plan of castrating the bull and thus changing this intractable, ugly beast into the docile and patient ox? There seems to be a good amount of plausibility in Hehn’s brilliant suggestion that this may have come about in connection with some ancient systems of religious rites and beliefs.[85] There is nothing impossible or very improbable in this view. But the very brilliancy of the conjecture and the clearness with which it is expressed, and the wealth of learning used to support it, warns us against too ready acceptance. We can only confess our complete ignorance and wait for future discoveries as patiently as we can.

At present nearly all our knowledge of what was going on in this dim and remote past must be gained by a study of savages still holding the customs of the past in a somewhat or greatly modified form and spirit. Certain very general inferences may be made without great danger. But to frame clear and exact conceptions of life in these remote ages from these sources would demand a union of the boldest genius with the most wary caution. All these peoples have changed greatly during past millennia both for better and worse, usually probably in the latter direction. Customs have all been modified by changed conditions, surroundings, and inferences. It is exceedingly difficult to distinguish between what is really primitive and what is degenerate, perhaps of comparatively recent origin. The problem bristles with tantalizing questions, which tempt us to spin fascinating hypotheses all the more dangerous because of their attractiveness and apparent simplicity. Our great need is new facts and discoveries, and a clearer knowledge and understanding of old ones.

We may well connect and condense the chief results of our study in this chapter. It seems to be clear that a culture essentially similar to that of the European lake dwellers existed at Anau, in the piedmont zone, a little north or northeast of the Iranian plateau, with which it had trade relations. The oldest turbary forms of domesticated animals appear here at least 1,500 years before the founding of the Swiss lake dwellings. They were mostly introduced from some mountain region, the nearest probable source being the Iranian plateau, but their first domestication may have taken place equally well elsewhere in western or central Asia, or even in Arabia. Susa shows similar remains extending back into a far more remote past; and the similarity or kinship of the pottery in the oldest strata at Susa and Anau and elsewhere leads us to believe that a culture similar in other respects also was widely distributed at this time. We can hardly doubt that agriculture was practised by the founders of all these settlements.

We can only frame conjectures as to the origin of agriculture. It seems to have been introduced by the women of hunting and fishing tribes. The first agricultural implement was probably the digging-stick, which was followed by the hoe. Hoe-culture is still common in Asia and Africa. Finally, during the first part of the Bronze period, or perhaps somewhat earlier, the plough drawn by cattle and guided by a man superseded the hoe as a means of breaking up the soil for the culture of grain.

CHAPTER VI

MEGALITHS

MEGALITHS, those great stone monuments of prehistoric time, have always excited the wonder and interest of all observers.[86] Under the name of dolmens or stone chambers, cromlechs or stone circles, tumuli or mounds, they form a striking contrast to the insignificant and ephemeral thatched huts of wood and clay which formed the homes of the living. These chambers, especially those of later date, are often accompanied by circles or radiating lines of rude pillars, the Menhirs or standing stones. In the more fertile and densely populated regions the great blocks have been removed and used in the foundations of buildings. They must once have been far more numerous. But Déchelette reports nearly 4,500 as still existing in France;[87] England contains almost or quite as many; and they are very numerous in Denmark and Sweden. We will mainly follow Sophus Müller in his study of these monuments in Denmark.[88]

The simplest, and apparently the oldest, dolmens are the small rectangular chambers consisting of four stones set up on edge with one large one forming the roof. These are usually between 5 and 7 feet in length, 2 to 3-1/2 feet wide, and 3 to 5 feet in height. One of the end stones is shorter, leaving an opening under the roof through which one may reach or even crawl into the chamber. Somewhat larger chambers of the same type and having five or six wall stones are not uncommon.

Even these small chambers were intended for long use, and to contain more than one body; some contain the remains of a dozen. The bones lie in layers covered with flint chips, or in little heaps where they have been collected to give room for new interments. Many of the smaller chambers were too short to allow the body to lie fully extended; in some it was evidently placed in a sitting posture leaning against the wall.

These smaller dolmens were surrounded by a heap of earth reaching nearly to the top of the side stones, but not covering the roof, and hardly deserving to be called a tumulus. The roof was usually composed of one great stone, flat below but arching above and forming a sort of monument. In one chamber this roof-stone is eleven feet long and three feet thick. On each side of the doorway a stone is often set upright to keep back the earth of the tumulus, and a covering stone may be laid across them. Here we have a form intermediate between the small dolmen without entrance-stones and the large chambers, which we shall consider later.

The earthern tumulus may be round in outline or elliptical, forming the long grave—the Hunnenbett of popular German speech. The round tumuli rarely exceed 40 feet in diameter. They were as a rule surrounded by a circle of upright stones, now generally removed. The long tumuli are rarely more than 5 or 6 feet high, and 20 to 30 feet wide. The length varies greatly: usually between 50 and 100 feet, but infrequently from 100 to 200 feet; one is 500 feet long with over 100 of the marginal stones still standing.

The chambers in the round and long tumuli in Denmark are very similar, but in the long tumuli there are usually two or more dolmens, often symmetrically located. In other cases it looks as if a tumulus had been lengthened to cover chambers added later. A large amount of variety in such details is not surprising. More rarely we find two or more small tumuli side by side, each with one or two chambers. That those smaller dolmens or chambers are the oldest is suggested not only by their simplicity but even more by the pottery and implements contained in them, though this is not invariably true, as the small dolmens continued in use throughout the Neolithic period, in some regions far later. The gifts which they contain are usually not numerous and often very scanty.

The wide distribution of these simplest stone monuments is exceedingly interesting. They occur in Denmark and Sweden, in North Germany and Holland, in Great Britain and France, Portugal and Spain, in North Africa, in the Ægean Islands, in Palestine and farther eastward, in Thrace and Crimea, along the eastern shore of the Black Sea. They are very numerous in India.[89] Throughout this wide extent they agree not only in general form and structure, but also in certain interesting details. For instance, the oriental and southern dolmens frequently have a round opening in the upper part of the slab closing the entrance, corresponding to the wide opening above the door of the Scandinavian dolmens. The difference in the form of the opening may be explained by the difficulty of cutting a circular opening in the hard granite rocks of the northern area. There was a general unity of thought in essentials, especially in those oldest forms. There was much diversity in execution or expression in later structures. Some of them took the form of pyramids in Egypt. In Mycenæ we find the “Tomb of Atreus,” a magnificent building in the form of a beehive. The large chambers, “Giant Chambers” or Riesenstuben of northern Europe, especially of France, are connected with the older small dolmens by many intermediate forms. For example, if another pair of stones is added to the sides of a fair-sized dolmen, we have a chamber six to eight feet in length. Such dolmens always have a covered entrance to the doorway of at least two pairs of upright stones extending out through the tumulus. Then the number of stones in the sides of the chamber is increased to seven, eight, or nine; and the entrance passage is at right angles to the main axis of the chamber, giving a rude T-shaped form to the whole structure. The number of stones in the roof of the chamber increases with its length. Chambers fifteen to twenty feet long are not uncommon, a length of twenty to thirty feet is rare, a very few attain forty feet. The height was between five and seven feet.

The inner surface of the great stones forming the sides of the chamber is fairly flat. It could have been no easy matter to find in any region a sufficient number of suitable great blocks of the right form. They evidently had some method of splitting large boulders. In some chambers both halves of the same block have been found. These blocks could have been split by heat or by freezing water in a groove or by wooden wedges. But we do not know the exact method. Near the top the blocks often failed to meet exactly. Large holes were filled with bits of wall of small stones and small chinks were stuffed with clay and moss.

It is surprising to find that these smaller and larger chambers were erected without any deep foundation for the upright stones. Many of them have fallen from the heaving of the frost. The monuments were generally adequately protected against this by the thick tumulus.

The tumulus was enlarged proportionately and usually completely covered the chamber. Its height averages ten to fifteen feet, and its diameter over ninety. The culvert-like entrance had to be lengthened accordingly.

But one large chamber did not suffice for successive generations. It was often extended or additions were made so that quite complicated forms occur. In England we find frequently a row or cluster of small chambers. Here the roof is sometimes made of successive layers of stone approaching as they ascended until one slab covered the “false arch.” In Brittany we find great diversity as well as complexity of form. In some parts of France the entrance continues the main line of the chamber instead of being at right angles to it. The French have well characterized these as “Allées couvertes.”

Some of these “gallery chambers” were very large and contained a large number of bodies; sometimes from 40 to 60, in one case 100. The tumulus at Mont St. Michel measures 115 by 58 metres, and forms a veritable hill. Thirty-five thousand cubic metres of stone were employed in the construction of the chamber. Other chambers are from 30 to 50 feet in length. The celebrated chamber at Bagneux, 25 feet long, is composed of fourteen great blocks, of which three form the roof. The great tumulus at Fontenay-le-Marmion in Normandy covered eleven chambers in two parallel rows. All the material for these great structures could hardly have been found in the same vicinity. In one case it appears to have been brought from a quarry two miles away. Some large stones, weighing thousands of tons, seem to have been transported many miles.

Some of the latest structures show a certain amount of degeneration. Certain galleries were apparently roofed with timber. We find “dry” masonry, of smaller stones laid in courses but without mortar, alternating with or replacing the great blocks, especially in structures of Æneolithic or Bronze Age. The custom was declining and soon after this disappeared.[90]

The age of these stone monuments can generally be fairly closely determined by the contents, unless these have been removed or destroyed by treasure-hunters, as is often the case. In many cases the objects originally deposited seem to have been few and insignificant. Later, secondary interments were often made in tumuli, but these usually betray their later date by their position above the original chamber or near the side of the mound. We must keep in mind that chambers in the north containing only stone implements may be often of the same age as those farther south containing copper or even bronze, for metal made its way northward only gradually. The custom of building dolmens seems to have persisted later in England than in France. The English round tumuli or barrows belong to the Bronze period. It is not surprising that one country should be more conservative than another, especially if it is somewhat remote.

In Brittany we find the Menhirs or “standing stones,” unhewn pillars, regularly accompanying the dolmens. They are by far most abundant in northwestern Europe, but occur elsewhere also. The largest known is the Menhir of Locmariaquer in Morbihan, now fallen and broken. It was almost 21 metres long, and weighed nearly 300,000 kilograms. But specimens are usually much smaller. They seem to characterize the Æneolithic Epoch and the early Bronze Age.

Their meaning is often uncertain. Some of them standing singly were probably erected much later, serving merely to mark boundaries. When associated with dolmens they are probably objects of a religious cult associated with the burial, rather than mere monuments to the dead. They may well be examples of the world-wide pillar-cult. They remained objects or centres of worship until late in historic time. The church had a long and hard battle with their cult. Some of them appear to have been thrown down and churches to have been erected over them. On some of them Christian symbols have been carved. Among the people they are still held in reverence or awe. Whatever may have been their origin, they must have had some religious significance or association.

These pillars may be grouped in circles, cromlechs, or in long radiating rows, alignments. Stone circles occur in the Mediterranean region, in Syria, Upper Egypt, and in India. But circles and alignments belong especially to Brittany, Great Britain, and Scandinavia. The most noteworthy are the three adjacent or connected at Carnac, in Morbihan, extending nearly 4,000 metres, and composed of nearly 3,000 Menhirs. Stonehenge and Avebury in England are almost equally celebrated. They represent the culmination of megalithic development, but are essentially places of worship and assembly rather than of burial, though tumuli may be clustered around them like graves in a churchyard.

The changes in the mode of disposal of the dead are evidently the results of changed views concerning the future life. In early Paleolithic times man buried his dead with the best flint axe in his hand, with his ornaments and a supply of food, and often a quantity of shells brought from a distance and evidently objects of value. The dead man took with him his weapons and all his wealth. For the living to keep back a portion of what belonged to the departed was robbery, which might be avenged by all sorts of evils and plagues; for all this material wealth and ornament was as much needed and as useful there as here. Apparently, though this is anything but certain, the dead were buried at first in Europe, extended at full length, and in the caves not far from the abode of the living.

Soon we find them buried in a crouching position, with knees and hands brought close to the chin. Sometimes we find rows of shells, which may have been attached to cords or bands used to hold the body in this forced position. This mode of burial in a contracted or crouching position (Hockerbestattung) was usual in Europe in Neolithic time, but has been discovered in all continents, even in America and Australia. Very different explanations of this peculiar custom have been offered by different observers, e. g., that it saved the labor of digging a larger grave, an excellent economic argument; that the dead was laid in its Mother Earth in the same position which as a fœtus it had maintained in the maternal body, etc., etc. But the predominant thought appears to have been that the spirit remained in, with, or near the body, and that binding the body prevented the spirit from walking and returning to see the survivors. To the same end the most valuable possessions of the dead had been buried with him. This does not necessarily argue that there was no affection of the living for the departed, or no belief in their possible helpfulness. But the community generally felt that it was a wise precaution, and generally well to be on the safe side. This belief in the possible return of the dead in their bodily form and presence is still deeply imbedded in our modern minds, ready to spring up as a conscious belief; and the departed are still rarely expected to bring good tidings or benefits.