Note 71 — Chapter II · MAN’S FIRST WEAPONS—THE STONE AND THE STICK. THE EARLIEST AGES OF WEAPONS. THE AGES OF WOOD, OF BONE, AND OF HORN.

Leading to the fourth, or Historic, and the fifth, or Gunpowder, age of weapons. In these ‘ages’ we have a fine instance of hasty and indiscriminate generalisation. They originated in Scandinavia, where Stone was used almost exclusively from the beginning of man’s occupation till b.c. 2000–1000. At that time the Bronze began, and ended with the Iron about the Christian era. Thomsen, who classified the Copenhagen Museum in 1836; Nilsson, the Swede, who founded comparative anthropology (1838–43); Forchhammer and Worsäae, the Dane, who illustrated the Bronze Age (1845), fairly established the local sequence. It was accepted by F. Keller, of the Zurich Lake (1853), by Count Gozzadini, of Bologna (1854), by Lyell (1863), and by Professor Max Müller (1863, 1868, and 1873), who seems to have followed the Swiss studies of M. Morlot (Bulletin de la Soc. Vaudoise, tome vi. etc.) Unhappily, the useful order was applied to the whole world, when its deficiency became prominent and palpable. I note that Mr. Joseph Anderson (Scotland in Early Christian Times, p. 19) retains the ‘three stages of progress’—stone, bronze, and iron. Brugsch (History, i. 25) petulantly rejects them, declaring that Egypt ‘throws scorn upon these assumed periods,’ the reverse being the case. Mr. John Evans (The Ancient Stone Implements, &c., of Great Britain, p. 2) adopts the succession-idea, warning us that the classification does not imply any exact chronology. He finds Biblical grounds ‘in favour of such a view of gradual development of material civilisation.’ Adam’s personal equipment in the way of tools or weapons would have been but insufficient, if no artificer was instructed in brass and iron until the days of Tubal Cain, the sixth in descent when a generation covered a hundred years. Mr. Evans divides the Stone Age into four periods. First, the Palæolithic, River-gravel, or Drift, when only chipping was used; second, the Reindeer, or Cavern-epoch of Central France, and an intermediate age, when surface-chipping is found; third, the Neolithic, or surface stone-period of Western Europe, in which grinding was practised; and, lastly, the Metallo-lithic age, which attained the highest degree of manual skill.