Part 10

When first placed on this Earth he must have been but little superior to the animals in his outward life, though he had very different powers within him. He could gather the fruits of the Earth like them, and perhaps used some of the smaller creatures as food, but he could do little more. He scarcely knew that he possessed the faculties which would in time make him lord of the Earth and the creatures inhabiting it. By slow and painful experience he was to gather those stores of knowledge that were to enable him to overcome difficulties, to provide him with shelter from the weather and protection from dangerous animals, give increasing comfort and power, and set him so far above all other created things. He found plants and animals for his use, and the dwellings in caves and holes ready made by Nature. He could neither build houses nor make weapons. The first weapon he ever used probably was a stone, which he could throw at small animals. Then he would find out that long, sharp-pointed sticks could be thrown like spears, and he also found that a long pliant piece of wood when bent would fly back, and in this he would see a means of throwing smaller pointed sticks like arrows, and I dare say the discovery of the way of making a bow with a string of twisted animal skin was a great invention, and it certainly would be a very valuable one. Many generations must have passed away before he got even as far as this. It is very easy for us, who see bows and arrows from our childhood, to understand their use at once: but the first human inhabitants of the world had to find them out for themselves. They began with no knowledge at all. The beasts of the field and the fruits of the Earth were given them, but they could MAKE nothing. They had not even the natural covering of hair, or wool, or feathers, which animals and birds have, and they must first have clothed themselves with skins of these. The wants of their daily life were so great that they had no time to think of anything else, but when it became easier to satisfy these bodily wants their minds turned to other things. They must have seen that when the seeds and fruits of plants fall upon the ground they grow and produce the same kind of plant, but they did not at first think of gathering a great number of these seeds and sowing them in one place and making a garden. They could wander about and gather all they needed as they became ripe, for there were few people then. Their life was like that of the lilies of the field, they “toiled not neither did they spin,” as Christ says of the flowers, but when they began to increase in number something more was wanted. People began to feel something within them which we call “intellect,” and this must be satisfied. It was not enough to live as if they were no nobler than the animals. Something stirred in their minds which told them they must not stand still.

The Creator has made both us and the wood and stone and metals, and has given to us the power to make other things out of them. Thus we are nearer to Him in power than any of the animals who cannot change the rough materials into other forms. We admire the simple and really beautiful nest of the bird, but we feel that our power is greater when we consider our splendid buildings and steam-engines, our ships, and our many conquests over difficulties. But if we did not use these greater powers of mind and hand well, we should find them grow weaker and weaker until we might almost lose them.

You may easily suppose that there was a time when men could not write, and there were no books of any kind, nor any other means of exchanging thoughts except through spoken language. The earliest histories about the human race always speak of men who lived before those histories were written. We have nothing about the earliest men written by themselves. It is always someone else who writes of them, referring to their deeds, and to events which happened long before.

The art of writing has grown up gradually and very slowly, for when the inhabitants of the Earth became numerous they felt the need of some way of expressing themselves to those at a distance from them, and for making a record of things that happened and might be forgotten. Some of the earliest means of writing were by pictures, like the picture writings of Mexico found by the Spanish conquerors, and something of the same kind is even now used by the Chinese and Japanese. Their writing is made up partly of pictures and partly of queer signs which stand for the names of things, as you know if you have ever seen one of their books. One of the oldest forms of writing known is the hieroglyphic, which is said to have been first used by the Egyptians about 2,100 years before Christ, and another is the arrow-shaped writing of the Assyrians. These were cut on stone and metal tablets, and most of them are the histories of their kings. But there are some writings on stone in India which are thought to be older still. The Egyptians made great progress in writing afterwards when papyrus was invented. This is a kind of paper made from a reed which grows abundantly in the river Nile, and many of these papyrus writings are preserved in the British Museum, as well as the writings on stone of the Egyptians and Assyrians, and learned men have spelled out a great deal of the history of these nations from them, though the language is quite different from any spoken or written now.

Picture writing was most likely one of the earliest inventions in this way: but it was so troublesome that signs were used to express the same things as the picture. For instance, suppose a history of a king was to be written. The word “king” would be shown by something he always wore, such as his crown, and this sign would become more simple until at last it might not be anything like a crown; but it would be remembered that the sign stood for a king all the same. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, means an ox, and the letter is something like the shape of the head of that animal with its horns; and another letter, called shin, which in Hebrew means a tooth, is actually very like a tooth with three points. In many languages these signs have become so altered that they do not now resemble the things they at first stood for; but the first steps in the invention of written language were certainly made by signs representing the thing of which the person wished to give an idea. But you will learn all about these ancient writings from other books.

The men whose lives I am going to describe lived long before any of these writings were invented. They spoke a language of course, though there is nothing left to show that they knew of any kind of writing, and they are called Pre-historic men because they lived before there were any histories either written by themselves or about them. But they could draw a little, as we know from the pictures of animals, birds, and fishes scratched upon pieces of slate, and bone, and stone found in their graves. Perhaps these pictures were memorials of their great or wise men, or showed that they were clever hunters, or fishermen.

They knew the use of fire. Half burnt bones and wood and ashes are plentiful in the caves where they lived. They had none of the means we possess for kindling fire, and there are only two ways by which they could have got it. They might have rubbed two pieces of very dry wood together until the heat lighted them, as many savages do at the present time; or they might have struck sparks from flint upon rotten wood and blown the spark into a flame. We may be sure that when once a fire was lighted they would take care it did not go out, and if they wanted to travel they would carry with them a piece of smouldering wood to light the fire again. I do not suppose that these pre-historic men were any more civilized than the savages of Australia and other countries, and I have often thought when looking at these savages that they live in almost exactly the same way as the earliest inhabitants of Europe did. They have the same shaped weapons and tools made of stone, and these are fixed to the handles in the same way. They have the same kinds of needles and fish-hooks made of bone, and they sew skins together with threads made from the sinews of animals. Thus we see men living now in many parts of the world who are quite as uncivilized as the old inhabitants of Europe, who lived perhaps thousands of years before the Egyptians and Assyrians.

These very ancient men knew nothing about metals. All their tools were made of flint, or bone, or stone, and they were of the rough shape you see in the pictures on the next page, and it is for this reason that this has been called the Stone Age. These were chipped out with great trouble and labour, and most of them were not even polished. With these they had to kill animals for food, to cut down trees, and fight against their enemies. The skeleton of a mastodon was found in the state of Missouri in America about thirty-five years ago with numbers of these flint arrow-heads underneath and near it. Perhaps it had been shot at with arrows, and when it died the flint points fell out of its decaying flesh. But it is not likely that these pre-historic men could have killed many such large animals, unless they caught them in pits covered over with branches of trees and earth, into which they might fall, as elephants are sometimes caught in Africa.

1. Flint Arrow-head. 2. Stone Axe in handle. 3. Flint Knife. 4. Bone Harpoon. 5. Bone Needles. 6. Sceptre made of Horn. 7. Marrow Spoon.]

Nothing shows us so well the immense time which must have passed since the men of the stone age lived as that these flint weapons and tools are found nearly all over the world, in Northern Europe, including our own country, in Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Palestine, Africa, Japan, America, &c.; and yet none of the present inhabitants of these countries have any history or tradition of the time when they were used. Metals are now used instead, and there is no record of the time when flint only was known. We are quite certain however that the stone age men lived at the same period as the great animals of the Tertiary age, the mammoth, the mastodon, the woolly rhinoceros, the Irish stag, the cave bear, and others you have read of in former chapters, because flint and stone weapons are found in the same beds of earth with these animals.

Suppose one of the present Indian or African elephants with his rider were to fall into a river and they were to sink to the bottom and be covered with mud, and suppose his rider had in his pocket some of our sovereigns. If that elephant should be accidentally dug up thousands of years to come, when most likely all elephants will have died off the earth, people would know for certain, from the date and figure of the Queen on the money, that elephants were used by the English in this reign, even if all our books and monuments had perished, and a new people inhabited the Earth. Something of the same kind has happened to prove to us that the stone-age men saw the mammoth alive. In one of their graves there is a slice of a mammoth’s great back tooth with a beautiful picture of the animal, with his bristly hair, scratched on the ivory, and there are also many of the flint and stone weapons which show that the skeleton in the grave was that of a primeval man. This little picture tells its tale more faithfully than any history. It is all the more certain to tell it truly because it was never meant to tell one. When that man was buried with this sign that he was a mighty hunter of the mammoth, or an artist, no one could imagine that he would ever be dug up to show us, who come so long afterwards, that he saw the mammoth roaming through the forests of the far away past. There can be no doubt that it is a very good drawing of the mammoth with its long turned-up tusks, like those in the picture at the beginning of the book.

In another place a picture of a fight between some reindeer scratched upon a piece of slate has been found. This was in a cave in France, and it, as well as the numbers of bones of these animals in the caves, shows that the reindeer, which now only inhabits the Arctic regions, must have been common then in France. You will see drawings of both these on page 135.

These primeval people built no houses. They lived in natural caves, and scattered the remains of their food about the floor, so that we know what they ate. Among the animals they used for food were the horse, the reindeer, the ox, the cave-lion and bear, the wolf, the hyena, the goat, the hare and several others, besides salmon and other fish. They were very fond of the marrow of the bones, which they cracked with stone hammers, and had little spoons made of bone with which to pick it out.

They had places for making flint weapons too. At Cissbury Camp, near Worthing, there is one of their old workshops. There are galleries dug into the chalk where they got the flints, and there are thousands of chips of flint lying about, with half finished arrow-heads, and some of the tools they dug with. They had no spades or pickaxes; but they used the broad, flat, shoulder-blade bone of the ox as a spade, and the sharp brow antler of a deer’s horn for a pickaxe, to get these flints out with. It must have been very hard work for them, because bone spades and horn pickaxes would soon wear out, and would not be nearly so useful as ours made of iron.

Picture of Mammoth Scratched on Ivory.

Fight between Reindeer Scratched on Slate.]

It is difficult to be certain how these stone-age people cooked their food. Of course they could have roasted it, and the half-burnt bones in some caves show that they did so; but in some caves in France there is not a single burnt bone to be found. In these French cave dwellings, too, there are no pieces of earthenware, as there are in some others; so that the people could not have boiled it, unless they had wooden pots and dropped red-hot stones into the water in them until the meat got boiled, as some savages do now. Or they might have cooked it under the hot ashes.

The people who used earthenware must have made more progress. It is easy to understand how they made this useful discovery. Suppose they had lighted a fire upon a damp clay soil, the earth would get baked hard and crack off in pieces, and they would see that this soil could be worked in the hands while soft into the shape of pans and dishes, which could be dried quite hard in the sun or baked in hot ashes, just as boys make clay marbles now. They could live much more comfortably even with these rough earthenware things, and cook their food more conveniently; but they still used the stone and flint tools and weapons, and iron was still unknown to them.

The people of whom I have been speaking are principally the men of the First Stone Age, when the art of polishing tools and weapons had not been found out. They simply chipped these things out of the flints and left them very rough; but the men of the next, or Second Stone Age, made great improvements. They ground their flint knives and axes with other stones, and rubbed them down to sharp edges and points, so that they must have been much more useful for killing and cutting up the animals they hunted. All their bone and horn tools are much better made, and sometimes ornamented prettily with marks cut upon them. The Second Stone Age men evidently wore clothing, most probably made of the skins of animals—for the long strips of bone with a hole at one end which you see in the picture could not have been used for any other purpose, except to draw threads through something. The threads were very likely either the sinews of animals pulled out of the flesh, or thin strips of their skins, or perhaps the inner bark of a tree twisted into a kind of string. In the colder parts of Europe and America these ancient people would need some protection from the weather. How then did the people of the First Stone Age manage, if they had no bone needles, as I think they had not, with which to make clothing? They must have wrapped themselves in the skins just as they came from the backs of the animals.

It is not easy to be always sure, when we find a cave and all these relics of pre-historic man, whether the inhabitants belonged to the First or the Second Stone Age. Sometimes there are signs of polishing and grinding on the tools, and then we may suppose that men were gradually getting more skilful, until they finished off all their weapons beautifully. But there is such a very great difference in the perfection of these useful articles found in some places and those found in others that we have no doubt men made slow progress, from the rough or First Stone Age, to the polished or Second Stone Age.

In neither the first nor second stone period had men yet learned to build any kind of habitations. They lived in caves simply, like wild animals. On the banks of the river Vezère in France, which has cut its way deeply through the rock, there are some celebrated caves once inhabited by pre-historic men, and some of them are very large. They were most likely hollowed out in the cliff by water, and many generations of men lived here. In one of them four human skeletons were found, with plenty of stone and flint tools, besides the bones of the mammoth and lion, reindeer and other animals. The mammoth then as well as the reindeer lived at that time in the valley of the Vezère. There is no doubt that these caves were inhabited at separate times by people who used only the roughest and simplest stone tools, and by others who had made some progress and could polish their tools and make them of bone and could scratch pictures of animals upon slips of bone and slate. It is curious that all these drawings are side-view drawings, and they are only outlines, just like the drawings of children now, and the Esquimaux of the Arctic regions; because these people, although they were grown up, had not discovered the art of drawing in perspective and shading the figures. Still the pictures are wonderfully true to nature, and must have been copied from living animals. There is no earthenware in any of these caves, so that the useful art of making pottery had not been discovered, neither is there any in the caves in Switzerland, where the bones of the mammoth, lion, and rhinoceros are also found, and the tools and weapons are much the same as those in the French caverns. It is impossible to say whether the cave-dwellers of France and Switzerland lived at the same time exactly, but they were in about the same condition of civilization, and they must both have been quite familiar with the appearance of the mammoth and lion, and other animals, which are not mentioned in any history, however old it may be, as inhabitants of these countries.

A discovery has lately been made in France of a large cavern near Belfort, in the limestone rock, which has been covered up for ages. The quarrymen while cutting out the stone came upon a small opening leading into a very large cave, in which there was a great quantity of human skeletons and bones and some beautifully ornamented vases, polished stone bracelets, and a mat of plaited rushes. To these people, then, the arts of pottery and weaving were known, and this was probably one of their burying-places. They were evidently much more civilized than the ancient people of the valley of the Vezère; but this cave must also be of a great age, and its inhabitants have left no record of their history in any kind of writing.

Quite lately, too, we have learned something of the early races of man in Colorado. Many of the caves in that country have been altered and made more like regular houses, and some appear even to have been cut out of the rock entirely by human hands; and in the plains there are ruins of large cities.

Though still in the stone age, for all the weapons yet found among these ruins are of stone, the Colorado people were more civilized than the stone-age people of the Vezère caverns, because they had begun to build and knew how to make pottery. It is strange, too, that the present natives of Colorado are not so civilized as the early people, and if they have descended from them they have not improved, but rather the contrary. There are other caverns in various parts of the world containing these curious relics of races long since passed away, but some of the principal have been mentioned, enough perhaps to interest you and show you that men were living in Europe together with the large animals of the Tertiary period, and that they had made very little progress in the arts and manufactures, and had not even begun to build the roughest houses.

In many parts of the world even now there are savages nearly as uncivilized as the cave-dwellers of Europe were then. When Captain Cook visited New Zealand, more than a hundred years ago, the natives there had nothing but stone and bone tools, very like those found in the European caverns, and the inhabitants of some of the islands in the Pacific Ocean still use stone axes and hammers and bone needles. Captain Moresby, too, who made a voyage to the south-east coast of New Guinea a few years ago, tells us that the natives have beautiful stone axes, but they were so ignorant of the use of iron that they refused to give him one of their stone axes for a new iron hatchet which he offered them. No doubt the stone weapon cost a great deal of labour and patience to make, and perhaps the iron one was made by machinery in a few minutes, and was really more useful, but the native had proved his own axe and knew nothing of the iron one, so that it is no wonder that he refused it. But what a history these two axes tell—the stone and the iron! The stone shows us man in his childhood, and the iron man in his manhood, and what an immensely long time there is between the two. How much thought, and trial and failure, and patience and industry, were spent by mankind before the stone axe grew into the iron!

In Europe man has long since grown out of his childhood, but in many parts of the world he is no more civilized than the men who saw the mammoth crashing through the forests of England and France, and heard the lion roar at night on the banks of the Thames, and watched the hippopotamus swimming across the river at Westminster. It is most likely, then, that Europe and parts of Asia and America were inhabited long before those places where men are even now in the stone age—such as the islands in the Pacific Ocean, New Guinea, Australia, &c.

What a life the pre-historic men of Europe must have lived! Here they were surrounded by huge dangerous animals, and had no means of protecting themselves against them but with these rough stone weapons. Where London now stands with its miles of streets and busy life there was a mighty forest, and the mammoth and rhinoceros tramped through it by day, and the lion and hyena hunted the deer at night. When the pre-historic men came down to the banks of the Thames in the day-time to spear salmon, they saw the hippopotamus plunging about in the water among the rushes, sweeping the long grass into their wide mouths, and swimming from side to side with their young ones perched upon their necks. It must have been a grand sight, but a fearful one too, and it is no wonder that men thought the caves the only safe places to live in.

Sometimes in India the elephants come into the villages at night and throw down wooden houses and kill people, and they are very much feared, so that we can suppose how much more terrible the mammoth might have been to the uncivilized cave-dwellers. If they shot at him with the flint-pointed arrows they could scarcely hurt him, and it is more likely that they got out of his way as quickly as possible whenever they met him, and took good care never to interfere with the lion and rhinoceros.