Books: Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples

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Agates worked by the hand of man are found in great quantities in the
bone beds of the Godavery. Some javelin heads in sandstone, basalt,
and quartz, with scrapers and knives, most of them flat on one side
and rounded on the other, appear to be even more ancient than the
agate implements. Some of the celts resemble those of European type,
others the flint weapons found in Egypt, and the clumsiest forms may
be compared to those still in use amongst the natives of Australia. We
may also mention a somewhat rare type lately discovered in the island
of Melas, which have been characterized as saw-bladed knives. A
letter from Rivett-Carnac announces the discovery of weapons and
stone implements in Banda, a wild mountain district on the northwest
of India. The scrapers, he says, strangely resemble those of the
Esquimaux, and the arrow-heads those of the most ancient inhabitants
of America.[34]

Many megalithic monuments are met with in places widely removed
from each other in the vast Indian Empire. Captain Congreve, after
describing the cairns with their rows of stones ranged in circles, the
kistvaens or dolmens, the huge rocks placed erect as at Stonehenge,
the barrows hollowed out of the cliffs, declares with undisguised
astonishment that there is not a Druidical monument of which he had
not seen the counterpart in the Neilgherry Mountains.[35]

General Faidherbe divides Africa into two distinct regions -- one
north of the Great Desert, where the inhabitants and the fauna and
flora have all alike certain characteristics in common with those
of Europe; and the other south of the Sahara, which was at one
time separated from that in the north by a vast inland sea. In this
southern region we are in Nigritia, or the Africa of the negroes,
where the inhabitants in their physical characteristics and in their
language, the mammals, and the plants, differ altogether from those
of the north. In one point, however, these two regions resemble each
other: in both we recognize a Stone age, which existed in Algeria
and in Egypt, as well as on the banks of the Senegal and at the
Cape of Good Hope. The valley of the Nile from Cairo to Assouan has
yielded a series of objects in flint, porphyry, and hornblendic rock,
retaining traces of human workmanship, and reminding us of similar
implements of European type. These objects,[36] says M. Arcelin,
are always found either beneath modern deposits or at the surface of
the upper plateaux at the highest point to which the river rises;
nothing has, however, been found in the alluvial deposits of the
Nile, in spite of the most persevering search. At the Prehistoric
Congress held at Stockholm, some worked flints were produced that
had been found in the Libyan Desert. This once inhabited district,
now without water or vegetation, can only be reached at the present
day with the greatest difficulty. Is not this yet another proof of the
great changes which have taken place since the advent of man? Lastly,
the Boulak Museum contains a whole series of stone weapons and
implements, showing in their workmanship a progressive development
similar to that we find in Europe. Many archaeologists are of opinion
that the worked flints found in the plains of Lower Egypt date from
Neolithic times. Those alone are Paleolithic which have been found
in a deposit hard enough for the hollowing out of tombs, which are
certainly earlier than the eighteenth dynasty. We must add, however,
that neither with the Palaeolithic nor with the Neolithic relics have
been found any bones of extinct animals. Some savants go yet further:
they think that these worked stones are but chips split off by the
heat of the sun.[37] A phenomenon of this kind is mentioned by Desor
and Escher de la Linth in the Sahara Desert; Fraas quotes a similar
observation made by Livingstone in the heart of Africa, and one by
Wetzstein, who, not far from Damascus; saw hard basalt rocks split
under the influence of the early morning freshness. I have myself
noticed similar phenomena in the Nile valley, but it must be added
that the fragments of rock broken off by the combined influence of
heat and humidity present very notable differences to those worked
by the hand of man, and cannot really be mistaken for them.

In Algeria have been preserved some most interesting relics of
prehistoric times. If I am not mistaken, Worsaae was the first to
note the worked stones in the French possessions in Africa. They have
been picked up in great numbers, especially near the watercourses at
which the ancient inhabitants of the country slaked their thirst,
as do their descendants at the present day. The exploration of the
Sahara daily yields unexpected discoveries; and already fifteen
different stations formerly inhabited by man have been made out. In
those remote days a large river flowed near Wargla, which was then
an important centre, and a number of tools picked up bear witness to
the former presence of an active and industrious population. At one
place the flint implements, arrow-heads, knives, and scrapers are
all of a very primitive type, and were found sorted into piles. This
was evidently a DEPOT, probably forming the reserve stock of the
tribe. Wargla or perhaps Golea at one time appears to have been the
extreme limit of the Stone age in Algeria, but quite recently traces
of primitive man have been discovered amongst the Tuaregs. These
relics are hatchets made of black rock, and arrow-heads not unlike
those which the Arabs attribute to the Djinn; but as we approach the
south we find the flints picked up more clumsily and unskilfully cut
-- a proof that they were the work of a more barbarous people with
less practical skill. It is the megalithic monuments of Algeria,
of which we shall speak more in detail presently, that are the most
worthy of attention. As in India, we meet with them in thousands,
and in certain parts of the continent they extend for considerable
distances. They consist of long, square, circular, or oval enclosures
-- dolmens similar to those of Western Europe, -- and almost always
surrounded by circles of upright stones. The silence of historians
respecting them need not make us doubt their extreme antiquity, for
did it not take a very long time to induce the scientific men of our
day to turn their attention to Algeria at all?

The exploration of Tunisia has enabled us to study the Stone age
in that district, and a few years ago it was announced that nearly
three thousand objects of different types had been found in thirteen
different localities.[38] My son found near Gabes an immense number
of small worked flints not unlike a human nail, the origin and use of
which no one has been able to determine. The association of weapons
and implements roughly finished off, with chips and stones still in
the natural state, bears witness to the existence at one time of
workshops of some importance. The recent discoveries of Collignon
correspond with those in Algeria, and complete our knowledge of the
basin of the Mediterranean.

In the Cave of Hercules, in Morocco, which Pomponius Mela spoke
of as of great antiquity in his day, have been found a great many
worked flints, such as knives and arrow-heads. We shall refer later
to the important monument of Mzora and the menhirs surrounding it,
the builders of which certainly belonged to a race that lived much
nearer our own day than did the inhabitants of the Cave of Hercules.

The south of Africa is not so well known as the north, and the
difficulty of making explorations is a great obstacle to progress. For
some centuries, however, polished stone hatchets from the extreme
south of the continent have been preserved in the museums of Leyden and
Copenhagen, under the name of THUNDERSTONES, or STONES OF GOD. A great
many are found in British South Africa, especially at Graham's Town
and Table Bay.[39] Gooch, after describing the physical configuration
of the Cape, says that stone implements are found in all the terraces
at whatever level of the Quaternary deposits. With these stone objects
were found a good many fragments of coarse hand-made pottery, that
had been merely baked in the sun, and was strengthened with good-sized
pieces of quartz. Similar peculiarities are noticed in ancient European
pottery. We shall have to refer again to these singular analogies,
one of the chief aims of this book being to bring them into notice.

In the torrid regions between the Vaal and the Zambezi rivers,
we find traces of a race of a civilization different from that of
the savages conquered by the English. At Natal the gradual progress
of these unknown people can be traced step by step. To the earliest
period of all belong nothing but roughly hewn flints, and no traces
of pottery have been found; then follow flint arrow-heads of more
distinct form, and here and there fragments of sun-dried pottery. Of
more recent date still are polished stone weapons and more finely
moulded pottery; whilst to the latest date of all belong weapons of
considerable variety of form, better adapted to the needs of man,
and with these weapons were found huge stone mortars which had been
used for crushing grain, and bear witness to the use of vegetable diet.

We also meet with important ruins in the Transvaal. Some walls are
still standing which are thirty feet high and ten thick, forming
imperishable memorials of the past. They are built of huge blocks of
granite piled up without cement. We know nothing of those who erected
them; their name and history are alike effaced from the memory of man,
and we know nothing either of their ancestors or of their descendants.

In the Antipodes certain curious discoveries point to the existence
of man in those remote and mysterious times, to which, for want
of a better, we give in Europe the name of the Age of the Mammoth
and the Reindeer; and everything points to the conclusion that
man appeared in the different divisions of the earth about the same
time. Probably the first appearance of our race in Australia was prior
to the last convulsions of nature which gave to that continent its
present configuration. "Scientific studies," says M. Blanchard,[40]
"lead us to believe that at one period a vast continent rose from the
Pacific Ocean, which continent was broken up, and to a great extent
submerged, in convulsions of nature. New Zealand and the neighboring
islands are relics of this great land."

In the Corrio Mountains in New Zealand, at a height of nearly 4,921
feet above the sea-level, have been found flints shaped by the hand of
man, associated with a number of bones of the Dinornis, the largest
known bird. Other facts bear witness to an extinct civilization,
which we believe to have been extremely ancient, but to which, in the
present state of our knowledge, it is impossible to assign a date. In
the island of Tonga-Taboo, one of the Friendly group, is a remarkable
megalith, the base of which rests on uprights thirty feet high,
and supports a colossal stone bowl which is no less than thirteen
feet in diameter by one in height. In the same island is a trilithon
consisting of a transverse bar resting on two pillars provided with
mortises for its reception. The pillars weigh sixty-five tons, and a
local tradition affirms that the coralline conglomerate out of which
they were hewn was brought from Wallis Island, more than a thousand
miles off. It is difficult to explain[41] how the makers of this
trilithon managed to transport, to work, and to place such masses
in position. In a neighboring island a circle of uplifted stones,
covering an area of several hundred yards, reminds us of the cromlechs
of Brittany. The so-called Burial-Mound of Oberea at Otaheite, if it
really was constructed with stone tools, is yet more curious. Imagine
a pyramid of which the base is a long square, two hundred and sixty
feet long by eighty-seven wide. It is forty-three feet high. The top
is reached by a flight of steps cut in the coralline rock, all these
steps being of the same size and perfectly squared and polished.[42]

FIGURE 4

Stone statues on Easter Island.

On a rock at the entrance to the port of Sydney a kangaroo is
sculptured. In Easter Island (Rapa-Nui) La Perouse discovered a number
of coarsely executed bust statues (Fig. 4). There are altogether
some four hundred of them, forming groups in different parts of the
island. The excavations conducted by Pinart in 1887 have proved these
figures to be sepulchral monuments. He managed to make a considerable
collection of crania and human bones. Round about the crater of the
Rana-Raraku volcano, forty of these figures have been counted, all
of a similar type, all cut in one piece of solid trachyte rock. In
another place are eighty busts with longer noses and thicker lips,
forming a group by themselves. The largest of them is some thirty-nine
feet high. On the sides of the volcano, scattered about amongst
the statues, have been picked up a considerable number of knives,
scrapers, and pointed pieces of obsidian, which were probably tools
thrown away by the sculptors of the figures.

These monuments and sculptures are certainly the work of a race very
different from the present natives, who are altogether incapable of
producing anything of the kind, and who retain absolutely no traditions
respecting their predecessors. This complete oblivion, which may appear
rather strange, is by no means rare amongst savage races, and Sir John
Lubbock cites a great many very curious examples. "Oral traditions,"
says Broca, "are changed and distorted by each succeeding generation;
and are at last effaced to give place to others as transitory,
and thus the most important events are, sooner or later, relegated
to oblivion."[43]

We have dwelt at considerable length in another volume[44] on the
earliest inhabitants of America. Much still remains unknown in spite of
the considerable and important work done of late years. The very name
of the New World seems to be altogether out of place, America being as
old, if not older, than any continent of the Eastern Hemisphere. Lund
has brought forward weighty reasons for his theory that the central
plateau of Brazil was already a country when the rest of the continent
was still submerged or at least repre. sented merely by a few small
islets. This theory, however, even if it could be absolutely proved,
would not help us to fix the date of the earliest presence of man in
America, still less to say by what route he arrived there.

FIGURE 5

Fort Hill, Ohio.

Certain facts, amongst which I would, in the first place, quote the
discoveries of Dr. Abbott in the alluvial deposits of the Delaware
and those recently announced in Nevada,[45] prove the contemporaneity
of men like ourselves with the great edentate and pachydermatous
mammals, which were the most characteristic creatures of the American
fauna. The prehistoric inhabitants of North America were familiar with
the mastodon, those of South America with the glyptodon, the shell of
which on occasion served as a roof to the dwelling of primeval reran,
which dwelling was often but a den hollowed out of the ground. As in
Europe, the early inhabitants of America had to contend with powerful
mammals and fierce carnivora; and in the West as in the East man made
up in intelligence for his lack of brute force, and however formidable
an animal might be, it was condemned to submit to, or disappear
before, its master. In course of time Sedentary replaced Nomad races;
shell heaps, some of marine, some of riverine and lacustrine species,
but all alike mixed with a great variety of rubbish, were gradually
piled up extending for many miles and covering many acres of ground,
bearing witness to the existence of a population already considerable.

FIGURE 6

Group of sepulchral mounds.

In other parts of America prehistoric races have left behind them huge
earthworks, lofty masses which were probably fortifications (Fig. 5),
temples, and sepulchral monuments (Fig. 6). These earthworks extend
throughout North America from the Alleghany Mountains to the Atlantic,
from the great lakes of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The name of the
people who erected them is lost, and we must be content with that of
Mound Builders, which commemorate their vast undertakings.

FIGURE 7

Ground plan of a pueblo of the Mac-Elmo Valley.

At a period probably nearer our own, Arizona and New Mexico were
occupied by other maces, who built the so-called PUEBLOS, which were
regular phalansteries, or communal dwellings, each member of the
tribe having to be content with one wretched little cell (Fig. 7). At
some distance from the men of the PUEBLOS lived the Cliff Dwellers,
about whom we know next to nothing; a few stone weapons and countless
fragments of pottery being all they have left behind them. These
men established themselves in situations which are now inaccessible,
hewing out a dwelling in the rocks on the mountains (Figs. 8 and 9)
with wonderful perseverance, and closing up the approaches with
adobes or sun-dried bricks, making incredible efforts to obtain
for their families what must have been at the best but a precarious
shelter.[46] These prehistoric races were succeeded in America by
the Toltecs, Aztecs, Chibcas, and Peruvians, all known in history,
though their origin is as much involved in obscurity as that of their
predecessors. Temples, palaces, and magnificent monuments tell of
the wealth which gold gives, a wealth, alas, which also enervated the
vital forces, so that the Spanish and Portuguese met with but little
serious resistance in their rapid conquests.

FIGURE 8

Cliff-house on the Rio Mancos.

FIGURE 9

House in a rock of the Montezuma Canon.

Such are the facts with which we have to deal. In the following
chapters we shall consider more at length the problems they present,
but already we are led to one important conclusion: in every part of
the globe, in every latitude, in every climate, worked flints, whether
but roughly chipped or elaborately polished, present analogies which
must strike the most superficial observer. "We find them," remarks an
American author, "in the tumuli of Siberia, in the tombs of Egypt,
in the soil of Greece, beneath the rude monuments of Scandinavia;
but whether they come front Europe or Asia, from Africa or America,
they are so much alike in form, in material, and in workmanship,
that they might easily be taken for the work of the same men."

At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
in 1871, Sir John Lubbock showed worked flints from Chili and New
Zealand with others found in England, Germany, Spain, Australia, the
Guianas, and on the banks of the Amazon; which one and all belonged
to the same type. More recently the Anthropological Society of Vienna
compared the stone hatchets found near the Canadian lakes and in the
deserts of Uruguay, with others from Catania in Italy, Angermunde in
Brandenburg, and a tomb in Scandinavia, deciding that they were all
exactly alike. Lastly, those who studied at the French Exhibition of
1878 the hatchets, hammers, and scrapers, the bone implements, pottery,
and weapons brought from different places, the inhabitants of which
had no communication with each other, could not fail to notice in
their turn how impossible it was to distinguish between them. "So
evident is this resemblance," says Vogt,[47] "that we may easily
confound together implements brought from such very different sources."

The same observation applies to megalithic monuments. Everywhere
we find these primitive structures assuming similar forms. It is
difficult enough to believe that the wants of man alone, such as
the craving for food, the need of clothing, and the necessity of
defend. ing himself, have led in every case to the same ideas and the
same amount of progress. Even if this be proved by the worked flints,
we cannot accept a similar conclusion with regard to the megalithic
monuments, which imply reflection and a thought of the future far
beyond the material needs of daily life. Is it not more reasonable
to regard a similitude so striking as a proof of the unity of our race?

The human bones discovered are yet more convincing
testimony. Excavations have yielded some which may date from the very
earliest period of the existence of man upon the earth. They have been
found in caves and in the river drift, beneath the mounds of America
and the megalithic monuments of Europe, in the ice-clad districts of
Scandinavia and of Iceland, and in the burning deserts of Africa,
but not one of them owes its existence to men of a type different
from those of historic times or of our own day.[48] MM. Quatrefages
and Hamy in their magnificent work "Crania Ethnica," have been
able to distinguish prehistoric races and indicate the area they
occupied. These races are still represented, and their descendants
of to-day retain the characteristics of their ancestors.

One final conclusion is no less interesting. These absolutely
countless flints, these monuments of imposing size, these stones
of immense weight often brought from afar, these marvellous mounds
and tumuli, bear witness to the presence of a population which was
already considerable at the time of which we are endeavoring to make
out the traces. A long series of centuries must have been needed
for a people to increase to such an extent as to have spread over
entire continents. And time was not wanting. Whatever antiquity may
be attributed to the human race, whatever the initial date to which
its first appearance may be relegated, this antiquity is but slight,
this date is but modern, if we compare it with the truly incalculable
ages of which geology reveals the existence. At every turn we are
arrested by the immensity of time, the immensity of space, and yet
our knowledge is still confined to the mere outer rind of the earth,
and science cannot as yet even guess at the secrets hidden beneath
that rind.

In concluding these introductory remarks, we must add that very
great difficulties await those who devote themselves to prehistoric
studies -- difficulties such as noise but those who have attempted
to conquer them can realize. The rare traces of prehistoric man must
be sought amongst the effects of the cataclysms that have devastated
the earth, and the ruins piled up in the course of ages. We must show
mall wrestling with the ever-recurrent difficulties of his hard life,
and gradually developing in accordance with a law which appears to
be immutable. Such is the aim of this work, and it is with gratitude
that we assert at the beginning that the PIANTA UOMO, the human
plant, as Alfieri calls our race, was endowed by the Creator from
the first with a very vigorous vitality, to enable it to contend with
the dangers besetting its steps in the early days of its existence,
and with a truly marvellous spirit, to be able to make so humble a
beginning the starting-point for a destiny so glorious.

CHAPTER II

Food, Cannibalism, Mammals Fish, Hunting, and Fishing.

The first care of man on his arrival upon the earth was necessarily
to make sure of food. Wild berries, acorns, and ephemeral grasses
only last for a time, whilst land mollusca and insects, forming but
a miserable diet at the best, disappear during the winter. Meat
must certainly have been the chief food of prehistoric man; the
accumulations of bones of all sorts in the caves and other places
inhabited by him leave no doubt on that point. The horse, which in
Europe was hunted, killed, and eaten for many centuries before it was
domesticated, was an important article of diet, and was supplemented
by the aurochs, the stag, the chamois, the wild goat, the boar, the
bare, and failing them, the wolf, the fox, and above all the reindeer,
which multiplied rapidly in districts suitable to it. The elephant
bones picked up on Mount Dol and elsewhere are nearly all those of
young animals; and it is probable that they had been killed for food by
man. In the Sureau Cave in Belgium,[49] in that of Aurignac in France,
and Brixham in England, have been found complete skeletons of the URSUS
SPELAEUS, which bad evidently been dragged in with the flesh still
on them, for all the bones are in their natural position. In other
caves, the thorax and the vertebrae of the skeletons were missing; the
cave-man, having despatched his victim, bad evidently taken only the
more succulent parts into his retreat. Beasts of prey merely gnaw the
comparatively tender and spongy tops of the bones, leaving the hard,
compact parts untouched. In the caves that were inhabited by man,
however, we find the apophyses neglected, whilst the diaphyses are
split open. We cannot, therefore, make any mistake on this point,
or attribute to the beast of prey what is certainly the work of man.

Whilst he evidently preferred to hunt and eat the larger mammals,
man when pressed by hunger did not despise the small rodents, which
were, of course, more easily captured. Amongst piles of the bones of
horses and stags have been found the remains of martens, hedgehogs,
and mice; and from the Thayngen Cave have been taken the bones of more
than five hundred bares. In Belgium the water-rat seems to have been
considered a dainty, and in the Chaleux Cave alone were found more
than twenty pounds' weight of the bones of this creature, nearly all
bearing traces of having been subjected to the action of fire.

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