The dawn of history: an introduction to pre-historic study
V '^ ' V . •> ° #: $% \> O ' * ■< * & V. \> :- V, /-., Oo. 1 v. > > i d" "• -ft- 4- -:. o 0 .0 xX\ l-fc V- °> G oo <*> 0" ^ ■A F* AxV<J>>. >^ ^ ,0 c> 0°' * I: o0 'WW; $ ^ <& X ' "^ A' fY v° ** ^ 0 o -CJiS' \ si- "* 0 j 4 <P v </*. o^ ^' £<£. ,# ^ c^ <<• ,v ^ >^ u ,0 o, / . . . , % V f ^rt ^^ -* A ^ ■ t o ^ * ;^0. ^. ' < ,0o. C°'o ^ o 0 ■ "^W ^ ^ - \° °^. <-%' 9 ^. '"*& * o^' '* ^ ^ 'O Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from The Library of Congress A* http://www.archive.org/details/dawnofhistoryint03kear a\ ■f, .A* / THE DAWN OF HISTORY: %n ^ntxcfottttian to H«-Ji»tonc Sitttw. /ET)ITED BY C. R KEARY, M.A., H ■ „ * ._ _ OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM. LONDON : MOZLEY AND SMITH, 6, PATEENOSTEE EOW. 1878. \a_X U? -K2.5 LONDON : E. CI.AY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, BREAD STREET HILL, E.C. V el a/™ a PREFACE. The advance of pre-historic study has been during the last ten years exceptionally rapid ; and, considering upon how many subsidiary interests it touches, questions of politics, of social life, of religion almost, the science of pre-historic archaeology might claim to stand in rivalry with geology as the favourite child of this century ; as much a favourite of its declining years as geology was of its prime. But as yet, it will be confessed, we have little popular literature upon the subject, and that for want of it the general reader is left a good deal in arrear of the course of discovery. His ideas of nationalities and kin- dredship among peoples is, it may be guessed, still hazy. We still hear the Eussians described as Tartars : and the notion that we English are descendants of the lost Israel- itish tribes finds innumerable supporters. I am told that a society has been formed in London for collecting proofs of the more than Ovidian metamorphosis. The reason of this public indifference is very plain. Pre-historic science has not yet passed out of that early stage when workers are too busy in the various branches of the subject to IV PREFACE. spare much time for a comparison of the results of their labours ; when, one may say, fresh contributions are pouring in too fast to be placed upon their proper shelves in the storehouse of our knowledge. In such a state of things the reader who is not a specialist is under peculiar disadvantages for a discovery of what has been done. He stands bewildered, like the sleeping partner in a firm, to whom no one — though he is after all the true beneficiary — explains the work which is passing before his eyes. It will not be thought a misplaced object to attempt some such explanation, and that is the task of the following chapters. And as at some great triumph of mechanism and science — a manufactory, an observatory, an ironclad, — a junior clerk or a young engineer is told off to accompany the intelligent visitor and explain the work- ings of the machinery ; or as, if the simile serve better, in those cities which are sought for their treasures of art and antiquity, the lower class of the population become self- constituted into guides to beauties which they certainly neither helped to create nor keep alive ; so this book offers itself to the interested student as a guide over some parts of the ground covered by pre-historic inquiry, without ad- vancing pretensions to stand beside the works of specialists in that field. The peculiar objects kept in view have been, to put the reader in possession of (1) the general results up to this time attained, the chief additions which pre-historic science has made to the sum of our knowledge, even if this knowledge can be given only in rough outline ; (2) the method or mechanism of the science, the way in which it PKEFACE. V pieces together its acquisitions, and argues upon the facts it has ascertained; and (3) to put this information in a form which might be attractive and suitable to the general reader. The various labours of a crowd of specialists are needed to give completeness to our knowledge of primitive man, and it is scarcely necessary to say that there are a hundred questions which in such a short book as this have been left untouched. The intention has been to present those features which can best be combined to form a continuous panorama, and also to avoid, as far as possible, the subjects most under controversy. No apology surely is needed for the joint character of the work : as in every chapter the conclusions of many different and sometimes contradictory writers had to be examined and compared, and as these chapters, few as they are, spread over various special fields of inquiry. It is to be hoped that some readers to whom pre- historic study is a new thing may be sufficiently interested in it to desire to continue their researches. Tor the assist- ance of such, lists are given, at the end, of the chief autho- rities consulted on the subject of each chapter, with some notes upon questions of peculiar interest. The vast extent of the field, the treasures of know- ledge which have been already gathered, and the harvest which is still in the ear, impress the student more and more the deeper he advances into the study. Surely, if from some higher sphere, beings of a purely spiritual nature — nourished, that is, not by material meats and drinks, but by ideas — look down upon the lot of man, they vi PREFACE. must be before everything amazed at the complaints of poverty which rise up from every side. When every stone on which we tread can yield a history, to follow up which is almost the work of a lifetime ; when every word we use is a thread leading back the mind through centuries of man's life on earth ; it must be confessed that, for riches of any but a material sort, for a wealth of ideas, the mind's nourishment, there ought to be no lack. CONTENTS. CHAPTEE I. PACK THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN [EDITOR] 1 CHAPTER II. THE SECOND STONE AGE [EDITOR] - . . . 18 CHAPTER. III. THE GROWTH OF LANGUAGE [EDITOR] '. . 34 CHAPTER IV. FAMILIES OF LANGUAGE [EDITOR] 50 CHAPTER V. THE NATIONS OF THE OLD WORLD [EDITOR] 68 CHAPTER VI. EARLY SOCIAL LIFE [il. M. KEARY] 82 viii CONTENTS. CHAPTER VII. HAGE THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY [H. M. KEARY] 98 CHAPTER VIII. RELIGION [A. KEARY] 1°9 CHAPTER IX. ARYAN RELIGIONS [EDITOR] 12S CHAPTER X. THE OTHER WORLD [EDITOR] 14S CHAPTER XI. MYTHOLOGIES AND FOLK TALES [EDITOR] . . . ' 159 CHAPTER XII. PICTURE WRITING [A. KEARY] I'8 CHAPTER XIII. THONETIC WRITING [A. KEARY] 191 CHAPTER XIV. 202 CONCLUSION [H. KEARY AND EDITOR] NOTES AND AUTHORITIES 213 THE DAWK OF HISTORY. CHAPTER I. THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN. When St. Paulinus canie to preach Christianity to the people of ISforthumbria, King Eadwine (so runs the legend) being minded to hear him, and wishing that his people should do so too, called together a council of his chief men and asked them whether they would attend to hear what the saint had to tell; and one of the king's thegns stood up and said, " Let us certainly hear what this man knows, for it seems to me that the life of man is like the flight of a sparrow through a large room, where you, King, are sitting at supper in winter, while storms of rain and snow rage abroad. The sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and straightway out again at another is, while within, safe from the storm ; but soon it vanishes out of sight into the darkness whence it came. So the life of man appears for a short space ; but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are always ignorant."1 This wise and true saying of the Saxon thegn holds good too for the human race as far as its progress is revealed to us by history. We can watch this progress through a brief interval — for the period over which real, continuous authentic history extends ; and beyond that is a twilight space, wherein, amid many fantastic shapes of mere tradition or mythology, here and there an object or 1 Bseda, ii. 13. i 2 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. an event stands out more clearly, lit up by a gleam from the sources of more certain knowledge which we possess. To draw with as much accuracy as may be the outline of these shapes out of the past is the business of the pre-historic student ; and to assist him in his task, what has he t First, he has the Bible narrative, whei'ein some of the chief events of the world's history are displayed, but at uncertain distances apart ; then we have the traditions preserved in other writings, in books, or on old temple stones — in these the truth has generally to be cleared from a mist of allegory, or at least of mythology. And, lastly, besides these conscious records of times gone by, we have other dumb memorials, old buildings — cities or temples — whose makers are long since forgotten, old tools or weapons, buried for thousands of years, to come to light in our days ; and again, old words, old beliefs, old customs, old arts, old forms of civilization which have been unwittingly handed down to us, can all, if we know the art to interpret their language, be made to tell us histories of the antique world. It is, then, no uninteresting study by which we learn how to make these silent records speak. "Of man's activity and attainment," finely says Carlyle, "the chief results are aeriform, mystic, and preserved in tradition only : such are his Forms of Government, with the Authority they rest on ; his Customs or Fashions both of Cloth -habits and Soul-habits ; much more his collective stock of Handicrafts, the whole Faculty he has acquired of manipulating nature — all these things, as indispensable and priceless as they are, cannot in any way be fixed under lock and key, but must flit, spirit like, on impalpable vehicles from Father to Son ; if you demand sight of them they are nowhere to be met with. Visible Ploughmen and Hammermen there have been, even from Cain and Tubalcain downwards ; but where does your accumulated Agricultural, Metallurgic and other Manufac- turing skill lie warehoused 1 It transmits itself on the atmospheric air, on the sun's rays (by Hearing and by Vision) ; it is a thing aeriform, impalpable, of quite spiritual sort." How many of these intangible spiritual possessions must man have acquired before he has learned the art of writing history, and so of keeping a record of what had gone before ; how much do we know that any individual race of men has learned before it brimrs itself forward with distinctness in THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN. 3 this way. For as a first condition of all man must have learned to "write, and writing, as we shall hereafter see, is a slowly- developing art, which man acquired by ages of gradual experiment. His language, too, must ere this have reached a state of considerable cultivation, and it will be our object in the course of these papers to show through what a long history of its own the language of any nation must go before it becomes fit for the purposes of literature — through how many changes it passes, and what a story it reveals to us by every change. And then, again, before a nation can have a history it must be a nation, must have a national life to record ; that is to say, the people who compose it must have left the simple pastoral state which belongs to the most primitive ages, must have drawn closer the loose bonds which held men together under the conditions of a patriarchal society, and constituted a more permanent system of society. Whether under the pressure of hostile nations, or only from the growth of a higher conception of social life, the nation has to rise from out a mere collection of tribes, until the head of the family becomes the king — the rude tents grow into houses and temples, and the pens of their sheepfolds into walled cities, like Corinth or Athens or Rome. Such changes as these must be completed before history comes to be written, and with such changes as these, and with a thousand others, changes and growths in Art, in Poetry, in Manufactures, in Commerce, and in Laws, the pre-historical student has to deal. On all these subjects we shall have something to say. Before, however, we enter upon any one of these it is right that we remind the reader — and remind him once for all — that our knowledge upon all these points is but partial and uncertain, and never of such a character as will allow us to speak with dogmatic assurance. Our information can necessarily never be direct ; it can only be built upon inferences of a higher or lower degree of probability. As, however, it is a necessity of our minds that from the information which we possess we must form an unbroken panorama, we shall do this freely and without danger of harm, so long as we are ready to modify or enlarge it when more knowledge is forthcoming. As the eye can in a moment supply the deficiencies of some incompleted picture, a landscape of which it gets only a partial glance, or a statue which has lost a feature, so the mind selects from its knowledge those facts which form a continuous story, and B 2 4 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. loses those which are known only as isolated fragments. Set a practised and an unpractised draughtsman to draw a circle, and we may Avitness how differently they go to work. The second never takes his pencil off the paper, and pro- duces his effect by one continuous line, which the eye has no choice but at once to condemn as incomplete. The wiser artist proceeds by a number of short consecutive strokes, splitting up, as it were, his divergence over the whole length of the figure he is drawing, and so allows the eye, or perhaps one should rather say the mind, by that faculty it has, to select the complete figure which it can conceive more easily than express. No one of the artist's strokes is the true fraction of a circle, but the result is infinitely more satis- factory than if he had tried to make his pencil follow un- swervingly the curve he wished to trace. Or again, notice how a skilful draughtsman will patch up by a number of small strokes any imperfect portion of a curve he is drawing, and we have another like instance of this selective faculty of the eye or of the mind. Just in the same way is it with memory ; our ideas must be carried on continuously, we cannot afford to remember spaces and blanks. Thus in the Bible narrative, wherein, as has before been said, certain events of the world's history are related with distinctness, but where as a rule nothing is said of the times which intervened between them, we are wont to make very insufficient allowance for these unmentioned times, and form for ourselves a rather arbitrary picture of the real course of things, fitting two events close on to one another which were really separated by long ages. To correct this view, to enlarge the series of known facts concerning the early history of the human race, comes in pre-historic inquiry ; and again, to correct the picture we now form, doubtless fresh information will continue to pour in. All this is no reason why we should pronounce our picture to be untrue, it is only incomplete. We must be always ready to enlarge it, and to fill in the outlines, but still we can only remember the facts which we have already acquired, if we look at them, not as fragments only, but as a complete whole. In representing, therefore, in the following chapters the advance of the human race in the discovery of all those arts and faculties which go to make up civilization as a continuous progress, it will not be necessary to pause and remind the THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN". 5 reader in every case that these steps of progress which seem to spread themselves out so clearly before us have been made in an uncertain manner, sometimes rapidly, sometimes very slowly and painfully, sometimes by immense strides, some- times by continual baitings and goings backwards and for- wards. On the whole, our history will be a history of events rather than a strictly chronological one, just as the periods of geology are not measured by days and years, but by the mutations through which our solid-seeming earth has passed. First we turn to what must needs be our earliest inquiry ■ — the search after the oldest traces of man which have been found upon the earth. It has been said that one of the first fruits of knowledge is to show us our own ignorance, and certainly in the early history of the world and of man there is nothing which science points out so clearly as the vast silent periods whereof until recently we had no idea. It is difficult for us of the present age to remember how short a time it is since all our certain knowledge, touching the earth on which we live, lay around that brief period of its existence during which it has come under the notice and the care of man. When all we knew of Europe, and especially of our own islands, belonged to the comparatively short time during Avhich they have been known to history, we had in truth much to wonder at in the political changes they have undergone, and our imaginations could be busy with the contrast between the unchanged features of our lands and seas and the ever- varying character of those who dwelt upon or passed over them. It is interesting to think that on such a river bank or on such a shore Caesar or Charlemagne have actually stood, and that perhaps the grass or flowers or shells under their feet looked just the same as they do now, that the waves beat upon the strand in the same cadence, or the water flowed by with the same trickling sound. But when we open the pages of geology, we have unrolled before us a history of the earth itself, extending over periods compared with which the longest epoch of what is commonly called history seems scarcely more than a day, and of mutations in the face of nature so grand and awful that as we reflect upon them, forgetting for an instant the' enormous periods required to bring these changes about, they sound like the fantastic visions of some seer, telling in allegorical language the history of the creation and G THE DAWN OF HISTORY. destruction of the world. Of such changes, not the greatest, but the most interesting to the question we have at present in hand, were those vicissitudes of climate which followed upon the time when the formation of the crust of the earth had been practically completed. We learn of a time when, in- stead of the temperate climate which now favours our country, these islands, with the whole of the north of Europe, were wrapped in one impenetrable sheet of ice. The tops of our mountains, as well as of those of Scandinavia and the north of continental Europe, bear marks of the scraping of this enor- mous glacier, which must have risen to a height of two or three thousand feet. Not a single green thing, therefore, might be seen between our latitudes and the pole, while the ice-sheet, passing along the floor of the North Sea, united these islands with Scandinavia and spread far out into the deep waters of the Atlantic. For thousands of years such a state of things endured, but at last it slowly passed away. As century followed century the glacier began to decrease in size. From being colder than that of any explored portion of our hemisphere, the climate of northern Europe began to amend, until at last a little land became visible, which was covered first with lichens, then with thicker moss, and then with grass ; then shrubs began to grow, and they expanded into trees and the trees into forests, while still the ice-sheet went on decreasing, until now the glaciers remained only in the hills. Animals returned from warmer climates to visit our shores. The birds and beasts and fishes of the land and sea were not much different from those which now inhabit there ; the species were different, but the genera were for the most part the same. Everything seemed to have been preparing for the coming of man, and it is about this time that we find the earliest traces of his presence upon earth. We may try and imagine what was the appearance of the world, and especially of Europe — for it is in Europe that most of these earliest traces of our race have as yet been found, though all tradition and likelihood point out man's first home to have been in Central Asia — when we suppose that man first appeared upon these western shores. At this time the continent of Europe stood at a higher level than it does now. The whole of the North Sea, even between Scot- land and Denmark, is not more than fifty fathoms, or three hundred feet deep, while the Irish Sea is not more than sixty THE EAELIEST TEACES OF MAN. 7 fathoms ; and at this period undoubtedly the British isles, besides being all joined together, formed part of the main- land, not by being united to France only, but by the presence of dry land all the way from Scotland to Denmark, over all that area now called the German Ocean. Our Thames and our other eastern rivers were then but tributaries of one large stream, which bore through this continent, and up into the northern seas, their waters united with those of the Rhine, and perhaps of the Weser and the Elbe. The same upheaval turned into land a portion of the Atlantic Ocean, extending from Spain and Africa out as far as the Azores and the Canaries. The north of Africa was joined on to this continent and to Spain, for the narrow straits of Gibraltar had not yet been formed ; but a great sea stood where we now have the Great Sahara, and joined the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, while a great Mediterranean Sea stood in Central Asia, and has left no more than traces in the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Aral. We have to look at our maps to see the effect of these changes in the appearance of Europe ; and there were no doubt other internal changes in the appearances of the countries themselves. The glaciers were not yet quite gone, and their melting gave rise to enormous rivers which flowed from every bill. Our little river the Ouse, for instance, which flows out through Norfolk into the Wash, was then probably many miles broad. Vast forests grew upon the banks of the rivers, and have left their traces in our peat formations, and in these forests roamed animals unknown to us. Of these the most notable was the mammoth {Elephas primigenius, in the language of the naturalists), a huge, maned elephant, whose skeleton and gigantic tusks are conspicuous in some of our museums, and who has given his name to this the earliest age of man's existence : it is called the Mammoth Age of man. With the mammoth, too, lived other species of animals, which are either now extinct, or have since been driven from our latitudes ; the woolly rhinoceros, the cave lion, the cave bear, the Lithuanian bison, the urus, the reindeer, and the musk- ox. It is with the remains of these animals, in the old beds of these great rivers, that we find the earliest tools and weapons manufactured by human hands. Very simple and rude are these drift implements, as they are called, from their being found buried in the sand and shingle which were formed by river drifts. We who are so 8 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. habituated to the employment of metal, cither in the manu- facture or the composition of every article which meets our eye, can scarcely realize that man lived long ages on the earth before the metals and minerals, its hidden treasures, were revealed to him. This pen I write with is of metal, or, were it a quill, it would still have been shaped by the use of steel ; the rags of which this paper is made up have been first cut by metal knives, then bleached by the mineral chlorine, then torn on a metal cylinder, then thrown into a vat, which was either itself of metal, or had been shaped by metal tools, then drawn on a wire-cloth, &c, and so in everything which is made we trace the paramount influence of man's discoveries beneath the surface of the ground. But primitive man could profit by no such inherited knowledge, and had only begun to acquire some powers which he could transmit to his own descendants. For his tools he need look to the surface of the earth only ; and the hardest substances he could find were stones. Man's first implements, therefore, were stone implements, and conse- quently the earliest epoch of man's life, the epoch during which he was still ignorant of the use of metals, is called the Stone Age. And it may be as well to say at once that this age was of very great duration, and may be divided into two distinct periods — the old stone (Palaeolithic) epoch, which is distinguished by the fact that the stone implements are never polished, and the new stone (Neolithic) period, also called the polished stone age, of which we shall have to speak later on. At present we have got no further than the old-stone age implements, and of these the ones which seem to be the earliest of all are those which are found in the river drifts. These consist only of stones, generally flints, for had there been implements of wood or bone, they would not have en- dured in that position. By the rudeness and uniformity of their shapes, as contrasted even with the stone implements of a later age in the world's history, they testify to the simplicity of those who manufactured them. They have for the most part only two distinctive types ; they are either of a long, pear- shaped make, narrowed almost to a point at the thin end, and adapted, we may suppose, for boring holes, while the broad end of the pear was pressed against the palm of the hand ; and secondly, of a sort of oval form, having one side of the oval flat and fit to press against the hand or fit into a cleft stick, and the other side sharpened to an edge, the whole form THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN". 9 being in fact that of an oval-shaped wedge, and the implement itself used probably for all sorts of cutting or scraping. A variety of this last implement has two cutting edges, and being also of rather a tongue-like shape, was called by the French workmen langue-de-chat. Some have supposed that stones of this last form were used, as similar ones are used by the Esquimaux to this day, in cutting holes in the ice for the purpose of fishing ; we must not forget that during a great part at least of the early stone age the conditions of life were those of arctic countries at the present time. "We cannot determine all the uses to which primitive man must have put his rude and ineffective weapons ; we can only wonder that with such he was able to maintain his existence among the savage beasts by which he was surrounded ; and we long to form to ourselves some picture of the way in which he got the better of their huge strength, as well as of his dwelling-place, his habits, and his appearance. Rude as his weapons are, and showing no trace of improvement, it seems as though man of the drift period must have lived through long ages of the world's history. These implements are found associated with the remains of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, animals naturally belonging to the arctic or semi-arctic climate which succeeded the glacial era ; but like implements are found, associated with the remains of the bones of the lion, the tiger, and the hippopotamus, all of which, and the last especially, are rarely found outside the torrid zone. This would imply that the drift implements lasted through the change from a frigid to a torrid climate, and probably back again to a cold temperate one. Still the age of the drift implements does not seem to comprise the whole period of man's life before what is called the polished- stone age begins. There is a remarkable series of discoveries made in caves in various parts of Europe, which are of a more interesting character than the drift remains, and appear to carry us farther down in the history of man. These caves are natural caverns, generally formed in the limestone rocks, and at present the most remarkable " finds" have been obtained from the caves of Devonshire, of the De- partment of the Dordogne in France, from various caves in Belgium, and from a very remarkable cavern in the Neander- thal, near Diisseldorf, in Germany ; but there is scarcely any country in Europe where some caves containing human bones 10 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. and weapons have not been opened. The rudest drift imple- ments seem older than almost any of those found in caves ; and, on the whole, the cave-remains seem to give vis a picture of man in a more civilized condition. They show us more of his way of life, and a greater variety in his implements, which are made, not of stone only, but of wood and bone as well. We have various worked bone implements — harpoons, with many barbs, whereby, no doubt, man slew the animals which afforded him food and clothing. Some implements of stone and bone which have been found in caves have been called arrow-heads ; but they are in all probability lance-heads, for it seems doubtful whether these primitive men had made tbe great discovery of the use of the bow and arrow. We may imagine that their lance or harpoon was their great weapon ; and a curious and close inquiry has discovered by the marks on some of the animal bones which are found mixed up with the cave implements, that the sinews had been cut from these bones, and used, it may be conjectured, as thongs for the bone harpoons. Other implements of a more domestic character have been found — bone awls, doubtless for piercing the animals' skins that they might be sewn together with sinew-threafl, and bone knives and needles. What is still more interesting "than all these, we here find the rudiments of art. Some of the bone implements, as well as some stones, are engraved, or even rudely sculptured, generally with the representation of an animal. These drawings are singularly faithful, and really give us a picture of the animals which were man's contemporaries upon the earth ; so that we have the most positive proof that man lived the con- temporary of animals long since extinct. The cave of La Madeleine, in the Dordogne, for instance, contained a piece of a mammoth's tusk engraved with an outline of that animal ; and as the mammoth was probably not contemporaneous with man during the latter part even of the old stone age, this gives an immense antiquity to the first dawnings of art. How little did the scratcher of this rough sketch — for it is not equal in skill to drawings which have been found in other caves — dream of the interest his performance would excite thousands of years after his death ! Not the greatest painter of subsequent times, and scarcely the greatest sculptor, can hope for so near an approach to immortality for their works. Had man's bones been only found in juxtaposition with those of the mammoth and his THE EARLIEST TRACES OF MAN. 11 contemporary animals, this might possibly have been attri- buted to chance disturbances of the soil, to the accumulation of river deposits, or to many other accidental occurrences ; or had the mammoth's bone only been found worked by man, there was nothing positive to show that the animal had not been long since extinct, and this a chance bone which had come into the hands of a later inhabitant of the earth, just as it has since come into our hands ; but the actual drawing of this old-world, and as it sometimes almost' seems fabulous, animal, by one who actually saw him in real life, gives a strange picture of the antiquity of our race, and withal a strange feeling of fellowship with this stone-age man who drew so much in the same way as a clever child among us might have drawn to day.1 It is well worth while to pause a moment over these cave- drawings. 12 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. treasures concealed within. Savages in the present day often think that part of them is actually taken away when a drawing of them is made, and exactly a similar feeling gave rise to the superstition so prevalent in the middle ages, that witches and magicians used to make a figure in wax to imitate the one on whom they wished to wreak their vengeance, and that all the pains inflicted upon this waxen antitype were reproduced in the body of the victim. On such confusion of ideas do all idolatries rest ; so may we not, without too bold a flight, imagine that some superstitious notions, touching the efficacy of these drawings, was a spur to the industry of our first forerunners on the earth, and contributed to their wonderfully acquired skill in their art 1 May they not have thought that their representations gave them some power over the animals they represented : that the lance-head carved with a mammoth would be efficient againt the mam- moth's hide ; that the harpoon containing the representation of a deer or a fish wTas the weapon best adapted for transfixing either 1 However this may be, we cannot deny the interest which attaches to the first dawnings of art in the world. Nor is this interest confined altogether to its Aesthetic side — the mere beauty and value of art itself — great though this be. Not only does drawing share that mysterious power of im- parting intense pleasure which belongs to every form of art, but it was likewise, after human speech, the first discovered means of conveying an idea from one man to another. As we shall come to see in a later chapter, the invention of drawing bore with it the seeds of the invention of writing, the greatest step forward, in material things at any rate, that man has ever made. There is one other fact to mention, and then the information which our cave discoveries can give us concerning the life of man in those days is pretty nearly exhausted. Traces of fires have been discovered in several caves, so that there can be no doubt that man had made this important discovery also. • It seems to us impossible to imagine a time when men could have lived upon the earth without this all-useful element, when they ,must have devoured their food uncooked, and only sheltered themselves from the cold by the thickness of their clothing, or at night by huddling together in close underground houses. We have certainly no proof that man's existence was ever of such a sort as this ; but yet it is clear that the art of making fires THE EARLIEST TKACES OF MAN. lo is one not discoverable at first sight. How long man took to find out that method of ignition by friction of two sticks — the method employed in different forms by all the less culti- vated nations spread over the globe, and one which we may therefore fairly take to be the most primitive and natural — Ave shall never know. We have only the negative evidence that he had discovered it at that primaeval time when he began to leave his remains within the caves. Thus have we completed the catalogue of facts upon which we may build up for ourselves some representation of the life of man in the earliest ages of his existence upon earth. It must be confessed that they are meagre enough. We should like some further information which would help us to picture the man himself, his size, his appearance, what race he most resembled of any of those which now inhabit our globe. Unfortunately we have little that can assist us here. Human remains have been found ; on one or two occasions, a skeleton in tolerably complete preservation, but not yet in sufficient numbers to allow lis to draw any certain conclusions, or even to hazard any very probable conjecture. Among these discoveries of human skeletons, none excited more interest at the time it was made than the Neanderthal skeleton, so-called from the place in which it was found. The discovery was made in 1857 by Dr. Fuhlrott of Elberfelcl ; and when the skull and other parts of the skeleton were exhibited at a scientific meeting at Bonn, in the same year, doubts were expressed as to the human character of the remains. These doubts, which were soon dissipated, arose from the very low type of the head, which was pronounced by many to be the most apedike skull that they had ever seen. The bones them- selves indicated a person of much the same stature as a European of the present day, but with such an unusual thickness in some of them as betokened a being of very extraordinary strength. This discovery, had it been supported by others, might have seemed to indicate a race of men of a type in every way inferior even to the savage nations of our present globe. But it has not been so supported. On the contrary, another skull found at Engis, near Liege, not more than seventy miles from the cave of the Neanderthal, was proved after careful measurements not to differ materially from the skulls of individuals of the European race ; a fact which prevents us from making any assertions respecting 14 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. the primitive character in race or physical conformation of these cave-dwellers. In fact, in a very careful and elaborate paper upon the Engis and Neanderthal skulls, Professor Huxley places an average skull of a modern native of Australia about half- way between those of the Neanderthal and Engis caves, but he also says that after going through a large collection of Australian skulls, he "found it possible to select from among these crania two (connected by all sorts of intermediate gradations), the one of which should very nearly resemble the Engis skull, while the other should somewhat less closely approximate to the Neanderthal skull in form, size, and proportions." And yet as regards blood, customs, or language, the natives of Southern and Western Australia are probably as pure as any race of savages in existence. This shows us how difficult would be any reasoning founded upon the insufficient data we possess. In fact, it would no doubt be possible to find in Europe among persons of abnormal under- development, such as idiots, skulls of a formation which would match that of the Neanderthal. This class of evidence is therefore merely negative. We certainly cannot pronounce that man of the old stone age was of a lower type than low types of savages of the present day ; we cannot even say he was so undeveloped as the Lapps of modern Europe ; but in this negative evidence there is a cer- tain amount of satisfaction. We might be not unwilling to place on the level of the Esquimaux or the Lapp the fashioners of the rudest of the stone implements, but the artists of the caves we may well imagine to have attained a higher deve- lopment. And there is nothing at all unreasonable or opposed to our experience of nature in supposing a race of human beings to have flourished in Europe in these old times, to have been possessed of a certain amount of civilization, but not to have advanced from that towards any very great improvement before they were at last extinguished by some other race with greater faculty of progress. As we shall come to see later on, there is some reason for connecting man of the later stone age as regards race with the Esquimaux or Lapp of to-day. Yet even if this be admitted, we must look upon the latter rather as the dregs of the races they represent. It is not always the best part of any particular race, whether of men, of animals, or of plants, which lives the longest. Species which were once flourishing are often only represented by stunted and inferior THE EARLIEST TEACES OF MAN. 15 descendants, just as the animals of the lizard class had their time of greatest development long before the coming of man upon the earth. So we may imagine man spreading out at various times from his first home in Central Asia. The earlier races to leave this nursing-place did not, we may suppose, contain sufficient force to carry them beyond a low level of culture, and gradually got pushed on one side by more energetic people who came like a second wave from the common source. Taking then this race as we find it, without speculating upon its immediate origin or future, we may endeavour to gather some notion of man's way of life in these primitive times. It was of the simplest. We may well suppose, for some proofs to the contrary would otherwise most likely have been discovered, that his life was that of the hunter, the earliest phase of human society, and that he had not yet learned to till the ground, or keep domestic animals for his use. ISTo bones of animals like the sheep or dog are found, and therefore it seems probable he had not entered upon the higher or shepherd phase of society. He had probably no fixed home, no idea of national life, scarcely of any obli- gations beyond the circle of his own family, in that larger sense in which the word " family " is generally understood by savages. Some sort of family or tribe no doubt held together, were it only for the sake of protecting themselves against the attacks of their neighbours. For the rest, their time was spent, as the time of oth^r savages is spent, in fighting and hunting out of doors ; within in preserving their food and their skins, in elaborately manufacturing their im- plements of stone and bone. In the inclement seasons they were crowded together in their caves, perhaps for months together, as the Esquimaux are in winter, almost without moving. As appears from the remains in the caves, they 16 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 