Part 7

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.[25] 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.

THE LAKE-DWELLERS.

Among the earliest inhabitants of Europe, there were some who did not live in caves; but I think they must have lived a long time after the cave-dwellers, when they built their houses out in the middle of the lakes. These houses were built in a very curious way, and the remains of them have been discovered in Ireland and Scotland, Switzerland and other countries. The people carried quantities of stones, and earth, and sticks out into the lake and let them sink to the bottom. Then when they had piled up enough to make an island, they laid wood across and set up their huts, and lived there surrounded by water. These were very poor houses of course; but when men had begun to build for themselves, they would find how much more comfortable they were than in damp and dark caves. They must have had some kind of boats or canoes, or they could not have passed between their lake-dwellings and the land unless they swam to them; but I do not think that any of these boats have been found. Perhaps they were made of the dried skins of animals stretched over wooden frames, as I have seen savages make boats.

[Illustration: XII.

_Lake-Dwellings._]

There was another way of building these lake-dwellings, and a better way too. Long poles were driven into the earth at the bottom of the water, and when the builders had got enough of these together they laid other poles across them, and built their huts on this floor above the water. People are living now in much the same way near the Orinoco river in South America, in New Guinea, and in Central Africa.[26] The land all round is covered with water from the overflowing of the rivers, which are very large, and the huts are built up on these poles out of the way of it. The lake-dwellers of Europe would thus be safer in their houses from dangerous animals than if they were on land. They were more civilized than the cave-dwellers, but still a great many of their tools and weapons were of stone and bone; yet we know that they had made wonderful progress, because they had learned to make pottery, and even to weave cloths out of hemp or flax. They had most likely begun to plant and cultivate the land, too, for corn is found about these dwellings, and the bones of domestic animals are very numerous. They had left the cave-dwellers a long way behind in many things, in wearing artificial clothing, in cultivating the land, and in keeping domestic animals; but their implements—that is, their weapons and tools—were not much improved, and were very much like those of the cave-dwellers, though better finished and more polished than some of theirs.

But not all the articles used by the lake people were of stone and bone. Some of those who lived in the Swiss lakes had ornaments, such as bracelets and hair-pins, made of the metal called bronze, and no doubt they made spear-heads of the metal, because they would look to usefulness before ornament.

Now you see how these people seem to have lived: first the old stone age men, then those of the newer or polished stone age, and lastly the lake-dwellers. The people of both the first and second stone ages certainly saw the mammoth, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, lion, and reindeer alive in France, Switzerland, and England; but when the lake-dwellings were built, all these animals, except perhaps the reindeer, had died, and most of the animals were the same as they are now. None of these people have left us any kind of history whatever, except that which their simple works tell us, their flint and bone weapons, and their dwellings. They have set up no gigantic monuments like the Egyptians or the Druids. They thought of no men to come after them who would take an interest in their ways; but it is fortunate that what they did make was of such lasting materials as stone and flint, or we should have known next to nothing about their lives.

It is impossible to say how many thousands of years may have passed before the rough stone weapons were replaced by the polished stone, or the cave was exchanged for an artificial house in a lake; but you must feel in your minds that the time was immense, and the more we study the ways and works of pre-historic man, the more certain we become that it is longer than the whole time that has passed since men first began to use any kind of writing.

KITCHEN-MIDDENS.

I dare say you have seen untidy people in country places, and even in towns, throw oyster-shells and broken dishes and dirt outside their doors until quite a heap is formed. This is called a “midden,” and the habit of doing this is a very old one. We learn just a little more of the history of man from great middens made by ancient people in several countries. They were first discovered in Denmark, and since then they have been found in Scotland, Brazil, and New Zealand. They are sometimes very large, and must have been used by the whole village as places to throw the refuse of their cookery in. When these heaps have been dug into all sorts of things have been found in them—the shells of oysters and mussels, bones of fishes, birds, and animals, pieces of broken earthenware, little ornaments, stone axes, arrow-heads, wood ashes, burnt bones, and other odds and ends. In Brazil many of these kitchen-middens are on the sea shore, and it seems as if the people who made them came there to live on the shell-fish, for the shells are the same as those living in the sea close by now. In New Zealand the middens contain many of the bones of the Moa, which was described in “The Animal Part,” and has now perished, and these are cracked in such a manner that the people evidently wanted to get at the marrow in them, and it shows too that this gigantic bird was common in New Zealand then. The midden makers seemed to have lived in the open air, and wherever food was most plentiful. Perhaps they built huts of the bark and small branches of trees like the Australian savages, but such houses would not last. We only know of the life of the midden makers from these heaps. Their weapons are of the same kind and pattern as those of the Second Stone Age, but they had learned to make rough earthenware dishes and basins, and some pieces of a woven material have been found, and pieces of wood and bone worked with a little skill. Whether they lived after or before the lake-dwellers I cannot say, but I should think about the same time.

These pre-historic people, nevertheless, were not always thinking of making things which were useful. They thought too of making ornaments, many of which are found in their dwellings and graves. Like ourselves, they had an idea that little trinkets improved their appearance. In one grave a skeleton was found with a small pile of shells under its neck, which no doubt had been strung together as a necklace, and when the string rotted the shells parted and fell in a heap under the head, to be a memorial of that ancient man or woman’s possession of the same feelings as our own. Various little articles, too, found about the lake-dwellings show that people liked to decorate themselves.

We shall never know what language they spoke, but they must have been able to tell their thoughts to one another. It was most likely a simple language with few words as names for things and a simple grammar, like the language of savages, because they had not so many things to talk about as we have. The names of animals would perhaps be imitated from their cries and the noises they made. These cries would be among the most familiar sounds to them, and when they wished to speak of some animal the simplest way would be to imitate the noise it generally makes. If we think of our own language, we shall see how very likely this was. We have many such words. We teach our children the names of animals by the sounds they make. The dog we call “bow-wow,” the cow “moo-moo,” the duck “quack-quack,” and many other names of the same kind which you will think of yourselves. At the present time even the name by which the Egyptians call the donkey has almost exactly the same sound as our “hee-haw.” This trick of doubling or repeating the sound, too, is very common among savages, who are as far behind us as the pre-historic men were. The natives of Australia give these double names to a great many animals and things, and sometimes do the same with English words. They call fish “ningy-ningy,” and a certain tree the “bunya-bunya,” and their language is full of such words. But it is not only the names of things which have been made in this way. Verbs as well as nouns have grown up thus. When we whisper to one another, that word imitates the low sound we make.

I shall leave you to trace the natural origin of the following words, and think how much of man’s spoken language is taken from common sounds. Thus we have roar, shriek, whistle, hiss, sigh, sing, ring, thump, bump, clash, clang, bang, twang, clap, smack, slap, smash, swish, swirl, gong, thong, boom, bellow, batter, chatter, clatter, snap, snip, whip, gurgle, shiver, quiver, rumble, roll, rattle, prattle, and a hundred more. Words thus derived from familiar sounds abound in all languages, and they, no doubt, are the easy steps by which men climbed to a more complicated speech. The earliest men must have been obliged to pay great attention to animals and birds, which have voices of their own; for to hunt and catch them was the principal occupation of their lives; therefore, when speaking of them to one another, they would naturally call them by names resembling the sounds they made. Our verbs “to squeak” and “to squeal” are certainly taken from the cries of animals when in pain; but I have said enough to show you how language grew up among pre-historic people.

We do not know for certain that they had any musical instruments, but they would hear the sighing of the wind among the trees, and it would almost certainly be found out that blowing down a hollow stick or reed, open at one end and closed at the other, would make a whistle; but if they used any of these things they would not last like the stone tools, and have decayed away; and we do know that they had begun to draw upon such imperishable materials as bone and slate.

There is a very interesting specimen of a human fossil in the British Museum, which you ought to go and see, if you can; but in case you are not able there is a drawing of it on page 159.[27] This specimen was brought to England about the year 1814. Others like it have since been found imbedded in the hard breccia limestone rock at the same place on the shore of the island of Guadaloupe. The skeleton most likely was that of a woman, from the shape of some of the bones, and most probably was of the race of Caribs, of whom there are none living now. Perhaps this was originally a burying place of the ancient inhabitants of the island, and when the sea washed the small broken pieces of shells and corals over it (all of which contain lime) they hardened into breccia rock, and the skeleton became completely imbedded in it. This must have taken a very long time, at all events; but I do not think the Guadaloupe fossils are as old as the people who lived in the caves in France. Some little ornaments and articles of human workmanship are found with these skeletons, which show that the people to whom they belonged were still in the Stone Age. There is very little to judge from when we wish to get some idea of the time these fossils have been in this breccia: but at this particular place the rock is formed pretty quickly, as we can see; and it is quite likely that these skeletons were buried there long after the mammoth, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus died out of Europe. However, they are the most complete specimens we have of any fossil human beings. In looking at the drawing you will see the leg bones and hips, part of the backbone, the ribs of one side, and an arm bone; but you see no skull, because the bones of the skull are very thin, and have become crushed down into the limestone. In one of these fossils, which they have in Paris, taken from near the same place, the bones are much more distinct, and part of the lower jaw with some teeth in it can be seen. These fossil men no doubt lived before the period of written human history began; but they are not considered to be at all the oldest of pre-historic men.

[Illustration: XIII.

_The Guadaloupe Human Fossil._]

Two periods in the life of mankind followed all these long-lost and forgotten people, and they are called the Bronze Age and the Iron Age; but now _history_ comes in, and there are plenty of old records and books to tell you about these. Bronze is a mixed metal of copper and tin, and it was used by the oldest nations who have left any histories—the Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. It was better than stone because it could be made sharper and would not chip, and swords and armour, vases, axes, hammers, needles, &c., were made of it.[28]

The Stone Age is beyond all history, the Bronze begins with it, and the Iron Age began at some distant time before the dawn of authentic history. Thus we are told, in Genesis iv. 22, that Tubal Cain taught people to make it. It was used also by the Egyptians for perhaps 2,000 years before the Christian era; but the real Iron Age is that in which we are living now. We can, indeed, make all metals much better than any of the older nations.

But there is a wide gap between the time when people left off using stone and discovered bronze and iron; and if one of the Druids could come to life he might help us to fill it up, because those old British priests had many secrets, which they told to one another from generation to generation.

If the Spanish conquerors had not destroyed the civilization of Mexico and Peru, we might know something of the discovery of the metals there, and the people of India and China must have used them long ago; but the first use of metal in any country where it was found out would most likely be before the people had begun to put their language into any kind of writing, so that the time would be forgotten among the many scraps of lost knowledge which we have tried to collect from the remains of the industry of pre-historic man.