3 THE DEAD HAND OF THE AGES

... systems into ruin hurl’d. —ALEXANDER POPE

Conflicts and Confusions

The authors are afraid that it may be a little hard for you, dear reader, to shake yourself out of the late Victorianism of your schoolbooks and accept the idea that someone discovered America at least 14,092 years before Columbus. It may be still harder for you to believe that he was not that noble yet very vague red man whom you and your teachers called the American Indian. Certainly you will be shocked to hear that two or three anthropologists of note believe he had more than a touch of Negroid or Australoid blood. Your horror will be no greater, however, than that of a few of our archaeologists; such notions give them what might be called Victorian vapors. Some accept ideas like these; others keep an open mind, for they remember that many a scientific fact of today was sheer nonsense to earlier generations, and vice versa.

As late as 1900, the prehistory of Mexico was accounted for very neatly by three successive words, Toltec, Chichimec, and Aztec. Now we know other words, and we know that other peoples and other cultures—Olmec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Totonac, Tarascan, Teotihuacan—also 30 played an important part. We divided the Maya just as neatly into the Old Empire and the New, one south and the other north. Now we know that there were no empires, and that the Maya culture grew widely and steadily towards fruition and decay. Once we thought that the Itzá were the Maya that founded Chichén-Itzá in Yucatan. Now we give the name Itzá to the Toltec or Toltec-influenced invaders that came hundreds of years later. Once scientists disputed whether culture and agriculture began in the highlands of Mexico or in the highlands of Peru. Now certain of them believe that the American became a farmer in the lowlands east of the Andes, while others think he began to till the soil in many spots at the same time. Only a few years ago, we thought that a fairly recent Indian culture—which is called the Woodland Pattern of the eastern United States—had its roots in Middle America. Now its pottery is being traced back through northwestern Canada and northern Asia to the Baltic and even perhaps to Africa.[1] The Mound Builders were once thought an ancient people. Now some of them seem barely to antedate the discovery of America. Bernal Díaz del Castillo—best of the chroniclers of the conquest of Mexico—may have observed that the Mexicans, along with all the Indians of the New World, were ignorant of the principle of the wheel; certainly this has been repeated over and over again for many years. Yet in 1888 Désiré Charnay reported and pictured a Mexican pottery toy with wheels, and since then more of these toys have been found.[2] Throughout his life Roland B. Dixon denied the possibility of productive transpacific migration from Polynesia to South America; yet at the end he accepted the transfer of the sweet potato from South America to Polynesia. From important matters to trivia, the list is long; we have hardly touched it. Obviously, prehistory is not a field where truth is easily and 31 quickly come upon. The student, quite as much as the scientist, must keep an open mind. He must neither cherish dogma nor refuse speculation. Truth still lies afar off.

Doubts about early man in the Americas seem to have been an occupational disease with archaeologists. Geologists have found it much easier to accept him. Men like Ernst Antevs, M. M. Leighton, Kirk Bryan, and Albrecht Penck, perhaps because they are accustomed to dealing generously with time, seem to have little trouble in embracing early man as a Late Glacial interloper anywhere from 15,000 to 100,000 years ago. Physical anthropologists like Earnest A. Hooton and Sir Arthur Keith, and cultural anthropologists and ethnologists like Roland Dixon and A. C. Haddon are not at all afraid to recognize signs of Australoid or Negroid ancestry in the skulls of New World man. Perhaps it is easier for the geologists and the physical anthropologists to accept such ideas because they do not run counter to their own dogmas. Many archaeologists, at any rate, find it extraordinarily hard to adjust themselves to evidence which does not fit accepted theories. They may defend themselves by pointing out that the evidence is not too clear, or at best is merely suggestive; but the theories they cherish arose from no firmer evidence in many cases, and frequently continue quite as unclear or at best merely suggestive. Certainly such reluctance to accept new evidence held back archaeological research when Aleš Hrdlička, W. H. Holmes, and Daniel G. Brinton were in their heyday.

This reluctance to face facts permeated even so great and productive a man as Baron Erland Nordenskiöld. An example of such a Jovian nod may be salutary. Arguing in The Copper and Bronze Ages in South America against the theory that the craft of metallurgy may have been brought to the New World by migrants, instead of having been invented here, three times he 32 cites facts that contradict his thesis, and three times he offers a kind of self-conscious apology for blinking them. (The italics are ours.)

If we go through all our material of weapons and tools of bronze and copper from South America, we must confess that there is not much that is entirely original, and that to the majority of fundamental types there is something to correspond in the Old World.

It must be confessed that there is considerable similarity between the metal technique of the New World and that of the Old during the Bronze Age.

Bronze is, of course, also a very hard invention, and I must confess to finding it most remarkable that the art of alloying tin and copper should have been hit upon independently both in the Old World and the New.[3]

“Admissions,” said Charles John Darling, “are mostly made by those who do not know their importance.”

Unfortunately there are still a few archaeologists whose attitude resembles Nordenskiöld’s. Hooton writes of one of these:

One of our most brilliant and once progressive archaeologists naïvely expressed to me some years ago his sentiments on this question [evidences of early man in America]. He said it would be a pity to have new evidence come to light which would overthrow all the admirable scientific work of the past indicating the recent arrival in the New World of the American Indian.[4]

Of course early man is not a subject that can hope to be free from error and contradiction—even early man in the Old World. Perhaps an account of some of the errors and misconceptions about him that crept into the study of prehistory may be as good a means as any 33 of preparing your mind for new facts or new heresies in the Americas.

The Problem of the Ages

The first confusion that confronts the student of early man is one of nomenclature. It is a by-product of the human animal’s inveterate and estimable love of system. Give us some new subject, such as prehistoric relics, and we immediately set up a scheme of classification. The scheme works beautifully for a while, but presently new evidence accumulates which doesn’t fit the framework. By that time, unfortunately, it is too late to change the classification. In vulgar parlance, it is our story, and we are stuck with it.

An outstanding example of this tendency to set up a classification system prematurely is the division of the story of man into ages. As far back as A.D. 52 a Chinese with a scientific bent of mind suggested that man had passed through three periods: a stone age, a bronze age, and an iron age. A French magistrate named Goguet wrote a book in 1758 in which he expounded a similar order of ages, inserting copper ahead of bronze. In 1813 a Dutch historian named Vedel-Simonsen argued for stone, bronze, and iron periods in Scandinavian history. A Dane, Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, gave the system permanent and indeed international status in 1836 when he arranged on this basis the exhibits of the institution he directed, the National Museum in Copenhagen.

The scheme is neat but far from scientific. To begin with a small matter, but one that may confuse the layman, the ages overlap. Bronze did not wholly replace stone; neither did iron. The use of chipped flint and polished stone continued into the Iron Age.

The Bronze Age—a Phantasm

“Bronze Age” itself is a misnomer and a phantasm. While “Stone Age” and 34 “Iron Age” do define important culture periods—though not the only periods of man’s early activity—the Bronze Age, says T. A. Rickard, “represents a minor phase in the use of copper.”[5] This alloy is merely an incident in the much longer history of the first metal used by man. At the start copper seemed to him to be merely a soft stone. He beat it into ornaments. When he began to melt and cast the native metal instead of pounding it, he took the first step in the true use of metals; but when he smelted copper ore—turning a hard rock into a soft metal—he made himself the master of metallurgy. Bronze—at first an accidental mixing of copper and tin—was merely an episode along the way. “The superiority of copper or bronze over flint and stone tools is, I think,” says Gordon Childe, “generally overestimated. Not only for tilling the land but also for the execution of monumental carvings and even for shaving, the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom were apparently content with stone.”[6]

The Bronze Age was very limited in area. Because of the rarity of tin, the primitive use of the alloy was confined to southern Europe, Asia Minor, and the Inca empire. Most of the world used iron before bronze. Furthermore, the Bronze Age is as delimited in time as it is in space. The earliest bronze in the Danube region is dated about 2300 B.C., and the earliest iron about 1350 B.C., at Gerar in Judea. “Thus,” said Rickard, “the so-called Bronze Age shrinks, at most, to a mere millennium ... the merest fraction of human existence.”[7]

The Iron Age is not so significant as it sounds. It was many centuries after the first use of iron and bronze that either played a really important part in the economic life of man. Like the domesticated horse, the trained elephant, and the wheeled vehicle, bronze and iron were first used chiefly in the making of war.

Wood, Bone, and Shell Ages

There is another serious 35 weakness in the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age sequence. It takes no account of the probability that man used wood, bone, and shell before he used stone. The ape swings a stick much as the first man must have done. The carcass of some bison or stag, picked clean by vultures, must have seemed to our earliest ancestors “a whole potential tool-shop”—as George R. Stewart writes in Man: An Autobiography—“thigh bones ready-made for clubs, horns or antlers for awls, shoulder-blades for scrapers.”[8] As early as 1864, a British student of anthropology, John Crawfurd, stood out against Thomsen’s Stone Age as the beginning of culture. At a meeting of the Ethnological Society, he said: “On man’s first appearance, the most obvious materials would consist of wood and bone.... This would constitute the wood and bone age, of which, from the perishable nature of the materials, we, of course, possess but slender records.”[9] Because the discovery of the stone artifacts of early man in Europe was then creating a scientific furore, Crawfurd’s sane observations went unnoticed. Today we have part of a wooden spear made, perhaps, far back in the Great Ice Age (see illustration, page 74).

Wood, bone, and shell not only antedated stone; they have continued in use until today. Certain primitive peoples—the Chukchi of Siberia, for example—retained the use of wood and bone after they were given iron.[10] Numerous tribes, when first encountered by explorers and navigators, had not yet begun to use stone; among these were the Aleuts, the Andaman Islanders, Malayans from the hills, and people of the upper Amazon.[11]

Rickard, from whom we have drawn liberally in this discussion, proposes a different scheme of classification for the cultures of man.[12] In the Primordial Age he would include the primary use of wood, bone, and shell. He would accept the Stone Age as the next stage. 36 For the Bronze and Iron ages he would substitute the Metallurgic Age, basing this on the discovery and use of smelting, whatever the metal involved. The dead hand of Thomsen, however, will probably continue to rule. The best we can do will be to take the Stone Age as including all materials except metal, and pay little attention to that illusion the Bronze Age.

Dividing the Stone Age—the Old and the New

Still more conflict and confusion have resulted from attempts to divide the Stone Age into watertight compartments. In 1865 Sir John Lubbock proposed two divisions—the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age—and the Neolithic, or New Stone Age.[13] The Paleolithic included objects found in caves and glacial gravels; the Neolithic, on the surface and in tombs. The first period ran from some vague beginning hundreds of thousands of years ago up to the advent of the Neolithic after the glaciers had melted. By definition, paleolithic man made chipped stone implements and no other kind. Neolithic man was supposed to be distinguished by the making of ground, or—as we usually say—polished, stone axes and of other tools shaped by rubbing instead of chipping; agriculture, pottery, and textiles came in as secondary traits.

After a time, however, archaeologists found some disturbing discrepancies. Before neolithic man grew grain and wove textiles, someone of an earlier age seems to have been making axes from antlers, turning out new artifacts called microliths—tiny chips of flint which were set in a row along a wooden or bone handle to make a kind of saw or a sickle—and also producing a partially polished ax with a ground edge, and making crude pots. This was all very upsetting to the old scheme of dividing prehistory into the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. So science inserted the Mesolithic, or 37 Middle Stone Age, between the two, in order to account for the appearance of the new tools.

The trouble with the system that Lubbock launched is that man’s behavior toward stone is a very poor basis for classifying him in culture or time. For a while it fitted our knowledge of the prehistory of Europe. Now it is out of line on that continent, and completely askew so far as the rest of the world is concerned. The kind of stone available often determines whether a man will chip or grind it. When first discovered, South Sea Islanders were still polishing stone because they had no flint.[14] Some Australian natives make chipped stone tools while their neighbors, who control a supply of diorite, go in for polishing; yet none of these Blackfellows can be considered as anything but paleolithic.

Like the Bronze Age, the Neolithic suffers from having shrunk in length. Rickard figures “that 700 years covers what was meant to be a major division of human chronology.”[15] To reach this figure he puts the end of the Paleolithic at 3000 B.C., which seems much too late, and the beginning of bronze at 2300. Even though we use the date of N. C. Nelson for the beginning of the Neolithic—5500 B.C.[16]—we have a New Stone Age of only 3,200 years.

Gordon Childe goes so far as to declare that “there is no such thing as a neolithic civilization.”[17] Different people, living under different climates and on different soils, have developed different elements of the culture of the New Stone Age and combined them with elements of other cultures.

If we are going to continue using the term Neolithic—as we certainly are—and if we want to limit it in some sensible way that may prove a bit more permanent, let us see what else than polished stone can be used to define it.

Activities of the New Stone Age

Three activities 38 stand out. They are the making of pots, the weaving of textiles, and the planting and harvesting of crops accompanied by the domestication of animals.

There can be no question that pottery is an important factor in neolithic life. It was in the New Stone Age that man fully wrought the miracle of “a sort of magic transubstantiation—the conversion of mud or dust into stone,” as Childe puts it. It was, as he says, “the earliest conscious utilization by man of a chemical change.”[18] But behind this miracle and this science must have lain many years of almost accidental, adventitious experiment. L. S. B. Leakey claims specimens of partially baked pottery sherds in paleolithic Africa.[19] One of these shows marks of basketry, rather thin support for the theory that the women who daubed the inside of the baskets to make them hold water must have discovered, when the baskets stood too near the fire, a little bit about how to bake clay. It was not until the invention of agriculture tied neolithic man more or less to the soil that true pottery could and did flourish widely. We have added many refinements to the craft of the potter—porcelain, cloisonné, and so forth—but basically it remains unchanged. Incidentally, all agriculturists did not have pottery—the Big Bend and Hueco cave dwellers of Texas, and certain people of the Virú valley in Peru, for example.[20]

The craft of textile weaving almost reached perfection at the hands of neolithic man—or, rather, woman. But it stemmed from basketry, and basketry undoubtedly began in the Paleolithic Age.

The first of two interesting facts suggested by the foregoing is that woman was the only true begetter of the Neolithic Age. She did the weaving—first of baskets and then of textiles—and she invented and practiced pottery making. More than that, she must be credited with the planting and harvesting of grain; for, while her lord and master enjoyed himself on the hunt, she 39 gathered fruits, nuts, and edible seeds, and sooner or later this led her to observe that seeds she carelessly dropped on the midden pile produced new and bigger plants. By so doing woman invented work; for early man was only an idler who gave himself intermittently to the pleasures of the chase. Woman also invented leisure—true, creative leisure—for out of agriculture rose a settled community and a surplus of provender which allowed the few to think and plan and build civilization.

Agriculture—Test of the Neolithic

The second fact is that agriculture seems to be the only sound test of the Neolithic. Pottery and weaving preceded agriculture, yet, without agriculture and its fixed communities and its leisure, pottery and weaving could not have reached perfection. As for the polished ax, it was handy enough in in-fighting; but it was of no practical social use until the farmer needed to cut down the trees which began to thrive all over the place when the glaciers disappeared. The Badarians of Egypt were farmers, yet they made no polished axes because there was almost no timber to cut.[21]

Speech was certainly the first great inventive triumph of primitive man. The making of fire ranks second. The third great invention, agriculture, was also the first industrial revolution; without it what we carelessly assume to be the industrial revolution would have been impossible.

Science feels sure that agriculture appeared in the Old World before it did in the New, but is not so certain as to where man first tilled the soil and when. James H. Breasted, Sr., put agriculture back to 18,000 B.C.; later writers push it up to 5000 B.C. There has been quite as much disagreement about the area where agriculture began. At first the valley of the Nile seemed to be the right spot, for every fall the flood 40 waters of the river brought not only automatic irrigation but also fresh, fertile soil to enrich the depleted farm lands. Soon, however, the birthplace of agriculture moved to the “fertile crescent” that stretched from Egypt to Mesopotamia. Later it shifted from the Tigris-Euphrates valley to the valley of the Indus. Now it seems to lie somewhere between these two, perhaps in the dry highlands of Iran and Iraq. In northern Iraq, 400 miles north of Ur, the wild ancestors of certain of our cultivated grains still grow, and excavators have come on evidences of farming communities which may be 8,000 to 11,000 years old.[22] There has always been hot argument between the supporters of denuded river valleys and the supporters of dry uplands as the natural site of early agriculture. Lately students have begun to argue for forested or jungle areas, and above all for mountain valleys; and they have plumped for tubers and melons, rather than grains, as the first crops cultivated by early man. These students see man as a gardener before he was a farmer.

Only the beginnings of agriculture are of any importance in a discussion of early man. Early man may invent agriculture, but thereupon he promptly ceases to be early man. With the food, leisure, and fixed abode that farming provides, he is soon inventing writing. He is then no longer even prehistoric.

First a Food Gatherer, Then a Hunter

It is important to realize and remember that early man ate seed grains, tubers, and fruit before he knew how to cultivate them. Probably he began to eat more and more of these natural products just before he became a farmer. Because archaeologists have found evidences that early man was quite a food gatherer at the end of his career, they have been inclined to set up another classification system which is faulty. They see man first as a hunter, then as a food gatherer who was still a 41 hunter, and then as a food producer. This ignores the very important fact that man began as a food gatherer and not as a hunter.

The first man probably ate the same food as the great ape—fruits, nuts, roots, and berries—and perhaps grubs and insects. Occasionally he may have varied his repast with birds’ eggs and fledglings. With a broken branch for a weapon, he improved his diet a bit. He knocked over small animals, and he may occasionally have got hold of the carcass of a large one, but, for thousands upon thousands of years, he was basically a vegetarian. His first well developed stone tool—the hand ax shaped rather like a flattened and pointed egg—was probably more useful for grubbing roots and tubers out of the ground than for killing animals. As early man learned to make more efficient weapons—first the curved throwing stick, then the spear and the spear-thrower, and finally the bow and arrow—hunting became his chief activity, and meat his chief diet. But his woman went right on gathering berries and nuts, tubers and seeds, and getting ready to invent agriculture. Certainly in the New World—perhaps in the Old World, too—she invented milling stones to grind seeds while her man was still a paleolithic. Perhaps when she watched the wearing away and the smoothing down of mortar and pestle, milling stone and mano, as she ground her seeds into flour between them, the idea may have occurred to her—or to her man who watched her labor—that it was possible to grind and polish stone into axes and other implements.

We feel that the life-story of prehistoric man can best be divided—certainly for the purposes of this book—into a Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, which included the making of artifacts out of wood, bone, shell, and chipped and sometimes polished stone, and a Neolithic, or New Stone Age, which was defined by the invention of agriculture and the perfecting of pottery, 42 of weaving, and of the polishing of stone. This may reduce a little the confusions that are inevitable in the study of early man tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years ago. Conflicts of evidence and opinion will remain, of course. We need not let them deter us from judging early man in the Americas. Indeed, they should free us from paying too much heed to the dogmas of scientific conservatism.

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