II. NEOLITHIC CULTURE
The Kitchen-Middens—The Lake-Dwellers—The coming of agriculture—The taming of animals—Technology—Neolithic weaving—pottery—building—transport—religion—science—Summary of the prehistoric preparation for civilization
At various times in the last one hundred years great heaps of seemingly prehistoric refuse have been found, in France, Sardinia, Portugal, Brazil, Japan and Manchuria, but above all in Denmark, where they received that queer name of Kitchen-Middens (Kjokken-möddinger) by which such ancient messes are now generally known. These rubbish heaps are composed of shells, especially of oysters, mussels and periwinkles; of the bones of various land and marine animals; of tools and weapons of horn, bone and unpolished stone; and of mineral remains like charcoal, ashes and broken pottery. These unprepossessing relics are apparently signs of a culture formed about the eighth millennium before Christ—later than the true paleolithic, and yet not properly neolithic, because not yet arrived at the use of polished stone. We know hardly anything of the men who left these remains, except that they had a certain catholic taste. Along with the slightly older culture of the Masd’Azil, in France, the Middens represent a “mesolithic” (middle-stone) or transition period between the paleolithic and the neolithic age.
In the year 1854, the winter being unusually dry, the level of the Swiss lakes sank, and revealed another epoch in prehistory. At some two hundred localities on these lakes piles were found which had stood in place under the water for from thirty to seventy centuries. The piles were so arranged as to indicate that small villages had been built upon them, perhaps for isolation or defense; each was connected with the land only by a narrow bridge, whose foundations, in some cases, were still in place; here and there even the framework of the houses had survived the patient play of the waters.* Amid these ruins were tools of bone and polished stone which became for archeologists the distinguishing mark of the New Stone Age that flourished some 10,000 B.C. in Asia, and some 5000 B.C. in Europe.28 Akin to these remains are the gigantic tumuli left in the valleys of the Mississippi and its tributaries by the strange race that we call the Mound-Builders, and of which we know nothing except that in these mounds, shaped in the form of altars, geometric figures, or totem animals, are found objects of stone, shell, bone and beaten metal which place these mysterious men at the end of the neolithic period.
If from such remains we attempt to patch together some picture of the New Stone Age, we find at once a startling innovation—agriculture. In one sense all human history hinges upon two revolutions: the neolithic passage from hunting to agriculture, and the modern passage from agriculture to industry; no other revolutions have been quite as real or basic as these. The remains show that the Lake-Dwellers ate wheat, millet, rye, barley and oats, besides one hundred and twenty kinds of fruit and many varieties of nut.29 No ploughs have been found in these ruins, probably because the first ploughshares were of wood—some strong tree-trunk and branch fitted with a flint edge; but a neolithic rock-carving unmistakably shows a peasant guiding a plough drawn by two oxen.30 This marks the appearance of one of the epochal inventions of history. Before agriculture the earth could have supported (in the rash estimate of Sir Arthur Keith) only some twenty million men, and the lives of these were shortened by the mortality of the chase and war;31 now began that multiplication of mankind which definitely confirmed man’s mastery of the planet.
Meanwhile the men of the New Stone Age were establishing another of the foundations of civilization: the domestication and breeding of animals. Doubtless this was a long process, probably antedating the neolithic period. A certain natural sociability may have contributed to the association of man and animal, as we may still see in the delight that primitive people take in taming wild beasts, and in filling their huts with monkeys, parrots and similar companions.32 The oldest bones in the neolithic remains (ca. 8000 B.C.) are those of the dog—the most ancient and honorable companion of the human race. A little later (ca. 6000 B.C.) came the goat, the sheep, the pig and the ox.33 Finally the horse, which to paleolithic man had been, if we may judge from the cave drawings, merely a beast of prey, was taken into camp, tamed, and turned into a beloved slave;34 in a hundred ways he was now put to work to increase the leisure, the wealth, and the power of man. The new lord of the earth began to replenish his food-supply by breeding as well as hunting; and perhaps he learned, in this same neolithic age, to use cow’s milk as food.
Neolithic inventors slowly improved and extended the tool-chest and armory of man. Here among the remains are pulleys, levers, grindstones, awls, pincers, axes, hoes, ladders, chisels, spindles, looms, sickles, saws, fish-hooks, skates, needles, brooches and pins.35 Here, above all, is the wheel, another fundamental invention of mankind, one of the modest essentials of industry and civilization; already in this New Stone Age it was developed into disc and spoked varieties. Stones of every sort—even obdurate diorite and obsidian—were ground, bored, and finished into a polished form. Flints were mined on a large scale. In the ruins of a neolithic mine at Brandon, England, eight worn picks of deerhorn were found, on whose dusty surfaces were the finger-prints of the workmen who had laid down those tools ten thousand years ago. In Belgium the skeleton of such a New Stone Age miner, who had been crushed by falling rock, was discovered with his deerhorn pick still clasped in his hands;36 across a hundred centuries we feel him as one of us, and share in weak imagination his terror and agony. Through how many bitter millenniums men have been tearing out of the bowels of the earth the mineral bases of civilization!
Having made needles and pins man began to weave; or, beginning to weave, he was moved to make needles and pins. No longer content to clothe himself with the furs and hides of beasts, he wove the wool of his sheep and the fibres found in the plants into garments from which came the robe of the Hindu, the toga of the Greek, the skirt of the Egyptian, and all the fascinating gamut of human dress. Dyes were mixed from the juices of plants or the minerals of the earth, and garments were stained with colors into luxuries for kings. At first men seem to have plaited textiles as they plaited straw, by interlacing one fibre with another; then they pierced holes into animal skins, and bound the skins with coarse fibres passing through the holes, as with the corsets of yesterday and the shoes of today; gradually the fibres were refined into thread, and sewing became one of the major arts of womankind. The stone distaffs and spindles among the neolithic ruins reveal one of the great origins of human industry. Even mirrors are found in these remains;37 everything was ready for civilization.
No pottery has been discovered in the earlier paleolithic graves; fragments of it appear in the remains of the Magdalenian culture in Belgium,38 but it is only in the mesolithic Age of the Kitchen-Middens that we find any developed use of earthenware. The origin of the art, of course, is unknown. Perhaps some observant primitive noticed that the trough made by his foot in clay held water with little seepage;39 perhaps some accidental baking of a piece of wet clay by an adjoining fire gave him the hint that fertilized invention, and revealed to him the possibilities of a material so abounding in quantity, so pliable to the hand, and so easy to harden with fire or the sun. Doubtless he had for thousands of years carried his food and drink in such natural containers as gourds and coconuts and the shells of the sea; then he had made himself cups and ladles of wood or stone, and baskets and hampers of rushes or straw; now he made lasting vessels of baked clay, and created another of the major industries of mankind. So far as the remains indicate, neolithic man did not know the potter’s wheel; but with his own hands he fashioned clay into forms of beauty as well as use, decorated it with simple designs,40 and made pottery, almost at the outset, not only an industry but an art.
Here, too, we find the first evidences of another major industry—building. Paleolithic man left no known trace of any other home than the cave. But in the neolithic remains we find such building devices as the ladder, the pulley, the lever, and the hinge.41 The Lake-Dwellers were skilful carpenters, fastening beam to pile with sturdy wooden pins, or mortising them head to head, or strengthening them with crossbeams notched into their sides. The floors were of clay, the walls of wattle-work coated with clay, the roofs of bark, straw, rushes or reeds. With the aid of the pulley and the wheel, building materials were carried from place to place, and great stone foundations were laid for villages. Transport, too, became an industry: canoes were built, and must have made the lakes live with traffic; trade was carried on over mountains and between distant continents.42Amber, diorite, jadeite and obsidian were imported into Europe from afar.43 Similar words, letters, myths, pottery and designs betray the cultural contacts of diverse groups of prehistoric men.44
Outside of pottery the New Stone Age has left us no art, nothing to compare with the painting and statuary of paleolithic man. Here and there among the scenes of neolithic life from England to China we find circular heaps of stone called dolmens, upright monoliths called menhirs, and gigantic cromlechs—stone structures of unknown purpose—like those at Stonehenge or in Morbihan. Probably we shall never know the meaning or function of these megaliths; presumably they are the remains of altars and temples.45 For neolithic man doubtless had religions, myths with which to dramatize the daily tragedy and victory of the sun, the death and resurrection of the soil, and the strange earthly influences of the moon; we cannot understand the historic faiths unless we postulate such prehistoric origins.46 Perhaps the arrangement of the stones was determined by astronomic considerations, and suggests, as Schneider thinks, an acquaintance with the calendar.47 Some scientific knowledge was present, for certain neolithic skulls give evidence of trephining; and a few skeletons reveal limbs apparently broken and reset.48
We cannot properly estimate the achievements of prehistoric men, for we must guard against describing their life with imagination that transcends the evidence, while on the other hand we suspect that time has destroyed remains that would have narrowed the gap between primeval and modern man. Even so, the surviving record of Stone Age advances is impressive enough: paleolithic tools, fire, and art; neolithic agriculture, animal breeding, weaving, pottery, building, transport, and medicine, and the definite domination and wider peopling of the earth by the human race. All the bases had been laid; everything had been prepared for the historic civilizations except (perhaps) metals, writing and the state. Let men find a way to record their thoughts and achievements, and thereby transmit them more securely across the generations, and civilization would begin.