Page:EB1911 - Volume 02.djvu/129

 among them was only succeeded after many centuries by the Iron Age; while in other districts, such as Polynesia and Central and South Africa, and America (except Mexico and Peru), the native tribes were moved directly from the Stone to the Iron Age without passing through the Bronze Age at all. Although the three divisions of savage, barbaric, and civilized man do not correspond at all perfectly with the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, this classification of civilization has proved of extraordinary value in arranging in their proper order of culture the nations of the Old World.

Another great line of progress has been followed by tribes passing from the primitive state of the wild hunter, fisher and fruit-gatherer to that of the settled tiller of the soil, for to this change of habit may be plainly in great part traced the expansion of industrial arts and the creation of higher social and political institutions. These, again, have followed their proper lines along the course of time. Among such is the immense legal development by which the primitive law of personal vengeance passed gradually away, leaving but a few surviving relics in the modern civilized world, and being replaced by the higher doctrine that crime is an offence against society, to be repressed for the public good. Another vast social change has been that from the patriarchal condition, in which the unit is the family under the despotic rule of its head, to the systems in which individuals make up a society whose government is centralized in a chief or king. In the growth of systematic civilization, the art of writing has had an influence so intense, that of all tests to distinguish the barbaric from the civilized state, none is so generally effective as this, whether they have but the failing link with the past which mere memory furnishes, or can have recourse to written records of past history and written constitutions of present order. Lastly, still following the main lines of human culture, the primitive germs of religious institutions have to be traced in the childish faith and rude rites of savage life, and thence followed in their expansion into the vast systems administered by patriarchs and priests, henceforth taking under their charge the precepts of morality, and enforcing them under divine sanction, while also exercising in political life an authority beside or above the civil law.

The state of culture reached by Quaternary man is evidenced by the stone implements in the drift-gravels, and other relics of human art in the cave deposits. His drawings on bone or tusk found in the caves show no mean artistic power, as appears by the three specimens copied in the Plate. That representing two deer (fig. 6) was found so early as 1852 in the breccia of a limestone cave on the Charente, and its importance recognized in a remarkable letter by Prosper Merimée, as at once historically ancient and geologically modern (Congrès d’anthropologie et d’archéologie préhistoriques, Copenhagen (1869), p. 128). The other two are the famous mammoth from the cave of La Madeleine, on which the woolly mane and huge tusks of Elephas primigenius are boldly drawn (fig. 7); and the group of man and horses (fig. 8). There has been found one other contemporary portrait of man, where a hunter is shown stalking an aurochs.

That the men of the Quaternary period knew the savage art of producing fire by friction, and roasted the flesh on which they mainly subsisted, is proved by the fragments of charcoal found in the cave deposits, where also occur bone awls and needles, which indicate the wearing of skin clothing, like that of the modern Australians and Fuegians. Their bone lance-heads and dart-points were comparable to those of northern and southern savages. Particular attention has to be given to the stone implements used by these earliest known of mankind. The division of tribes in the stone implement stage into two classes, the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age, and the Neolithic or New Stone Age, according to their proficiency in this most important art furnishes in some respects the best means of determining their rank in general culture.

In order to put this argument clearly before the reader, a few selected implements are figured in the Plate. The group in fig. 9 contains tools and weapons of the Neolithic period such as are dug up on European soil; they are evident relics of ancient populations who used them till replaced by metal. The stone hatchets are symmetrically shaped and edged by grinding, while the cutting flakes, scrapers, spear and arrow heads are of high finish. Direct knowledge of the tribes who made them is scanty, but implements so similar in make and design having been in use in North and South America until modern times, it may be assumed for purposes of classification that the Neolithic peoples of the New World were at a similar barbarous level in industrial arts, social organization, moral and religious ideas. Such comparison, though needing caution and reserve, at once proved of great value to anthropology. When, however, there came to light from the drift-gravels and limestone caves of Europe the Palaeolithic implements, of which some types are shown in the group (fig. 10), the difficult problem presented itself, what degree of general culture these rude implements belonged to. On mere inspection, their rudeness, their unsuitability for being hafted, and the absence of shaping and edging by the grindstone, mark their inferiority to the Neolithic implements. Their immensely greater antiquity was proved by their geological position and their association with a long extinct fauna, and they were not, like the Neoliths, recognizable as corresponding closely to the implements used by modern tribes. There was at first a tendency to consider the Palaeoliths as the work of men ruder than savages, if, indeed, their makers were to be accounted human at all. Since then, however, the problem has passed into a more manageable state. Stone implements, more or less approaching the European Palaeolithic type, were found in Africa from Egypt southwards, where in such parts as Somaliland and Cape Colony they lie about on the ground, as though they had been the rough tools and weapons of the rude inhabitants of the land at no very distant period. The group in fig. 11 in the Plate shows the usual Somaliland types. These facts tended to remove the mystery from Palaeolithic man, though too little is known of the ruder ancient tribes of Africa to furnish a definition of the state of culture which might have co-existed with the use of Palaeolithic implements. Information to this purpose, however, can now be furnished from a more outlying region. This is Tasmania, where as in the adjacent continent of Australia, the survival of marsupial animals indicates long isolation from the rest of the world. Here, till far on into the 19th century, the Englishmen could watch the natives striking off flakes of stone, trimming them to convenient shape for grasping them in the hand, and edging them by taking off successive chips on one face only. The group in fig. 12 shows ordinary Tasmanian forms, two of them being finer tools for scraping and grooving. (For further details reference may be made to H. Ling Roth, The Tasmanians, (2nd ed., 1899); R. Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria (1878), vol. ii.; Papers and Proceedings of Royal Society of Tasmania; and papers by the present writer in Journal of the Anthropological Institute.) The Tasmanians, when they came in contact with the European explorers and settlers, were not the broken outcasts they afterwards became. They were a savage people, perhaps the lowest in culture of any known, but leading a normal, self-supporting, and not unhappy life, which had probably changed little during untold ages. The accounts, imperfect as they are, which have been preserved of their arts, beliefs and habits, thus present a picture of the arts, beliefs and habits of tribes whose place in the Stone Age was a grade lower than that of Palaeolithic man of the Quaternary period.

The Tasmanian stone implements, figured in the Plate, show their own use when it is noticed that the rude chipping forms a good hand-grip above, and an effective edge for chopping, sawing, and cutting below. But the absence of the long-shaped implements, so characteristic of the Neolithic and Palaeolithic series, and serviceable as picks, hatchets, and chisels, shows remarkable limitation in the mind of these savages, who made a broad, hand-grasped knife their tool of all work to cut, saw, and chop with. Their weapons were the wooden club or waddy notched to the grasp, and spears of sticks, often crooked but well balanced, with points sharpened by tool or fire, and sometimes jagged. No spear thrower or bow and arrow was known. The