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Table of Contents

The age of

polished stone.

Between the earlier and the later stone age, between man of the drift period and man of the neolithic era, occurs a vast blank which we cannot fill in. We bid adieu to the primitive inhabitants of our earth while they are still the contemporaries of the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, or of the cave lion and the cave bear, and while the very surface of the earth wears a different aspect from what it now wears. With a changed condition of things, with a race of animals which differed not essentially from those known to us, and with a settled conformation of our lands and seas not again to be departed from, comes before us the second race of man—man of the polished stone age. We cannot account for the sudden break; or, what is in truth the same thing, many different suggestions to account for it have been made. Some have supposed that the palæolithic men lived at a time anterior to the last glacial era, for there were many glacial periods in Europe, and were either exterminated altogether or driven thence to more southern countries by the change in climate. Others have imagined that a new and more cultivated race migrated into these countries, and at once introduced the improved weapons of the later stone age; and lastly, others have looked upon the first stone age as having existed before the Deluge, and hold that the second race of man, the descendants of Noah, began at once with a higher sort of civilization. Two of these four theories, it will be seen, must suppose that man somewhere went through the stages of improvement necessary to the introduction of the newer sort of weapons, and they therefore take it for granted that the graduated series of stone implements, indicating a gradual progress from the old time to the newer, though they have not yet been found, are to be discovered somewhere. The first and last theories would seem to be more independent of this supposition, and therefore, as far as our knowledge yet goes, to be more in accordance with the facts which we possess. It is, however, by no means safe to affirm that the graduated series of implements required to support the other suppositions will never be found.

The

kitchen-middens.

Be this as it may, with the second era begins something like a continuous history of our race. However scanty the marks of his tracks, we may feel sure that from this time forward man passed on one unbroken journey of development and change through the forgotten eras of the world’s life down to the dawn of history. We take the rudest condition in which we find man to be the most primitive, and we start with him in this new stone age as still a fisher or a hunter only. He first appears before us as depending for his nourishment chiefly upon the shell-fish on certain coasts of northern Europe. In the north of Europe—that is to say, upon the shores of the Baltic—are found numbers of mounds, some five or ten feet high, and in length as much, sometimes, as a thousand feet, by one or two hundred feet in breadth. The mounds consist for the most part of myriads of cast-away shells of oysters, mussels, cockles, and other shell-fish; mixed up with these are not a few bones of birds and quadrupeds, showing that these also served for food to the primitive dwellers by the shell mounds. The mounds are called in the present day kjökken-möddings, kitchen-middens. They have been chiefly found in Denmark. They are, in truth, the refuse heaps of the earliest kitchens which have smoked in these northern regions;[6] for they are the remains of some of the earliest among the polished-stone age inhabitants of Europe. So primitive are the weapons of the Danish kitchen-middens, that they have sometimes been classed with the old stone age implements. But I believe some traces of grinding if not of polishing have been found on them. And at any rate the mammalia contemporary with the kitchen-midden men are very different from those of the drift or of the caves.

The raisers of these refuse mounds were, we may judge, pre-eminently fishers; and not generally fishers of that adventurous kind who seek their treasure in the depths of the ocean. They lived chiefly upon those smaller fish and shell-fish which could be caught without much difficulty or danger. Yet not only on these; for the bones of some deep-sea fish have also been discovered, whence we know that these mound-raisers were possessed of the art of navigation, though doubtless in a most primitive form. Among remains believed to be contemporary with the shell mounds are found canoes not built of planks, as our boats and as most canoes are nowadays, but merely hollowed out of the trunks of trees; sometimes these canoes are quite straight fore and aft, just as the trunk was when it was cut, sometimes a little bevelled from below, like a punt of the present day; but we believe they are never found rounded or pointed at the prow. Here, then, we see another discovery which has been of the greatest use to mankind, whereof the first traces come to us from these northern shell mounds. That ‘heart with oak and bronze thrice bound,’ the man who first ventured to sea in the first vessel, had lived before this time. Whoever he was, we cannot, if we think of it, refuse to endorse the praise bestowed upon him by the poet; it required no mean courage to venture out to sea on such a strange make-shift as was the first canoe. Perhaps the earliest experiment was an involuntary one, made by some one who was washed away upon a large log or felled tree. We can fancy how thence would arise the notion of venturing again a little way, then of hollowing a seat in the middle of the trunk, until the primitive canoes, such as we find, came into existence.

In these imperfect vessels men gradually ventured further and further into the ocean; and, judging of the extent of their voyages by the deep-sea remains, we may be certain that their bravery was fatal to many. This is in all probability the history of the discovery or re-discovery of the art of navigation among savage people generally; in all cases does the canoe precede the regular boat. I say ‘re-discovery’ because a nation which has settled long inland might very easily lose the art even if their ancestors had possessed it. For it is a fact that people rarely begin attempts at ship-building before they come to live near the sea. As long as they can range freely on land, their rivers do not tempt them to any dangerous experiments. But the vast plain of the sea is too important, and makes too great an impression on their imagination for its charm to be long withstood. Sooner or later, with much risk of life, men are sure to try and explore its solitudes, and navigation takes its rise. This art of seafaring, then, is amongst the most noticeable of the belongings of the fishermen of the shell mounds. Considering that they had none but rude stone implements, the felling and hollowing of trees must have been an affair of no small labour, and very likely occupied a great deal of their time when they were not actually seeking their food, even though the agency of fire supplemented the ineffectual blows of their stone weapons. They probably used nets for their sea-fishing, made most likely of twisted bark or grass. And they were hunters as well as fishers, for it has been said that the remains of various animals have been discovered on the shell mounds. From these remains we see that the age of the post-glacial animals has by this time quite passed away; no mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, or cave lion or bear is found; even the reindeer, which in palæolithic days must have ranged over France and Switzerland, has retired to the north.

The fact is, the climate is now much more temperate and uniform than in the first stone age. Then the reindeer and the chamois, animals which belong naturally to regions of ice and snow, freely traversed, in winter at least, the valleys or the plains far towards the south of Europe.[7] But as the climate changed, the first was driven to the extreme north of Europe, and the second to the higher mountain peaks. The only extinct species belonging to the shell mounds is the wild bull (bos primigenius), which however survived in Europe until quite historical times. His remains appear in great numbers, as do those of the seal, now very rare, and the beaver, which is extinct in Denmark. No remains of any domesticated animal are found; but the existence of tame dogs is guessed at from the fact that the bones bear traces of the gnawing of canine teeth, and from the absence of bones of young birds and of the softer bones of animals generally. For it has been shown experimentally that just such portions are absent from these skeletons as will be devoured when birds or animals of the same species are given to dogs at this day. Dogs, therefore, we may feel pretty sure, were domesticated by the stone-age men; so here again we can see the beginning of a step in civilization which has been of incalculable benefit to man, the taming of animals for his use. The ox, the sheep, the goat, were as yet unknown; man was still in the hunter’s condition, and had not advanced to the shepherd state, only training for his use the dog, to assist him in pursuit of the wild animals who supplied part of his food. He was, too, utterly devoid of all agricultural knowledge. Probably the domestication of the dog marks a sort of transition state between the hunter and the shepherd. When that experiment has been tried, the notion must sooner or later spring up of training other animals, and keeping them for use or food. With regard to the dogs themselves, it is a curious fact that those of the stone age are smaller than those of the bronze period, while the dogs of the bronze age are again smaller than those of the age of iron. This is an illustration of the well-known fact that domestication increases the size and improves the character of animals, as gardening does that of plants.

There is one other negative fact which we gather from the bones of these refuse-heaps—no human bones are mingled with them; so we may conclude that these men were not cannibals. In fact, cannibalism is an extraordinary perversion of human nature, arising it is difficult to say exactly how, and only showing itself among particular people and under peculiar conditions. There is no doubt that, among a very large proportion of the savage nations which at present inhabit our globe, cannibalism is practised, and of this fact many explanations have been offered; but they are generally far-fetched and unsatisfactory; and it is certainly not within our scope to discuss them here. How little natural cannibalism is even to the most savage men is proved by the fact that man is scarcely ever, except under urgent necessity, found to feed upon the flesh of carnivorous or flesh-eating animals, and this alone, besides every instinct of our nature, would be sufficient to prevent him from eating his fellow-men.

We have many proofs of the great antiquity of the shell mounds. Their position gives one. Whilst most of them are confined to the immediate neighbourhood of the seashore, some few are found at a distance of several miles inland. These exceptions may always be referred to the presence of a stream which has gradually deposited its mud at the place where it emptied itself into the sea, or to some other sufficient cause of the protrusion of the coast-line; so that these miles of new coast have come into existence after the shell mounds were raised. On the other hand, there are no mounds upon those parts of the coast which border on the Western Ocean. But it is just here that, owing to a gradual depression of the land at the rate of two or three inches in a century[8] the waves are slowly eating away the shore. This is what happens on every sea-coast. Almost all over the world there is a small but constant movement of the solid crust of the earth, which is, in fact, only a crust over the molten mass within. Sometimes, and in some places, the imprisoned mass makes itself felt, in violent upheavals, in sudden cracks of the inclosing surface, which we call earthquakes and volcanoes; but oftener its effect is slight and almost unnoticed. This interchange of state between the kingdoms of the land and of the ocean helps to show us the time which has passed between the making of the kitchen-middens and our own days. There seems little doubt that all along the Danish coast of the North Sea, as well as on that of the Baltic, these mounds once stood; but by the gradual undermining of the cliffs the former series have all been swept away, while the latter have, as it appears, been moved a little inland; and we have seen that when there was another cause present to form land between the kitchen-middens and the sea, the distance has often been increased to several miles.

Here is another and a still stronger proof of the antiquity of the shell mounds. If we examine the shells themselves, we find that they all belong to still living species, and they are all exactly similar to such as might be found in the ocean at the present day. But it happens that this is not now the case with the shells of the same fish belonging to the Baltic Sea. For the waters of this sea are now brackish, and not salt; and since they became so the shell-fish in it have gradually grown smaller, and do not now attain half their natural size. The oyster, moreover, will not now live at all in the Baltic, except near its entrance, where, whenever the wind blows from the north-west, a strong current of salt ocean water is poured in. Yet oyster shells are especially abundant in the kitchen-middens. From all this we gather that, at the time of the making of these mounds, there must have been free communication between the ocean and the Baltic Sea. In all probability, in fact, there were a number of such passages through the peninsula of Jutland, which was consequently at that time an archipelago.

The tumuli

or barrows.

As ages passed on the descendants of these isolated fishermen spread themselves over Europe, and, improving in their way of life and mastery over mechanical arts, found themselves no longer constrained to trust for their livelihood to the spoils of the sea-shallows. They made lances and axes (headed with stone), and perfected the use of the bow and arrow until they became masters of the game of the forest. And then, after a while, man grew out of this hunter stage and domesticated other animals besides the dog: oxen, pigs, and geese. No longer occupied solely by the search for his daily food, he raised mighty tombs—huge mounds of earth enclosing a narrow grave—to the departed great men of his race; and he reared up those enormous masses of stone called cromlechs or dolmens—such as we see at Stonehenge—as altars to his gods.[9]

The great tombs of earth—which have their fellows not in Europe only, but over the greater part of the world—are the special and characteristic features of the stone age. The raisers of the kitchen-middens probably preceded the men who built the tombs; for their mode of life was, as we should say, the most primitive; but they were confined to a corner of Europe. The tomb-builders formed one of a mighty brotherhood of men linked together by the characteristics of a common civilization. These stone-age sepulchres, called in England tumuli, barrows, or hows, are hills of earth from one to as much as four hundred feet long, by a breadth and height of from thirty to fifty feet. They are either chambered or unchambered; that is, they are either raised over a small vault made of stone (with perhaps a sort of vestibule or entrance chamber), or else a mere hollow has been excavated within the mound. In these recesses repose the bodies of the dead, some great chieftain or hero—the father of his people, who came to be regarded after his death with almost the veneration of a god. Beside the dead were placed various implements and utensils, left there to do him honour or service, to assist him upon the journey to that undiscovered country whither he was bound; the best of sharpened knives or spear-heads, some jars of their rude pottery, once filled with food and drink, porridge, rough cakes and beer.[10] And maybe a wife or two, and some captives of the last battle were sacrificed to his shade, that he might not go quite unattended into that ‘other world.’ The last ceremony, the slaughter of human victims to the manes of the dead, was not always, but it must have been often, enacted. Out of thirty-two stone-age barrows excavated in Wiltshire, seventeen contained only one skeleton, and the rest various numbers, from two to an indefinite number; and, in one case at least, all the skulls save one were found cleft as by a stone hatchet.

At the doors of the mounds or in an entrance chamber many bones have been discovered, the traces of a funeral feast, the wake or watch kept on the evening of the burial. Likely enough, if the chief were almost deified after death, the funeral feast would become periodical. It would be considered canny and of good omen that the elders of the tribe should meet there at times in solemn conclave, on the eve of a warlike expedition or whenever the watchful care of the dead hero might avail his descendants. From the remains of these feasts, and from the relics of the tombs, we have the means of forming some idea of man’s acquirements at this time. His implements are improvements upon those of the stone age: in all respects, that is, save in this one, that he had now no barbed weapons; whereas we remember that in the caves barbed harpoons are frequently met with. Nor, again, had he the artistic talent of the cave-dwellers: no traces of New Stone-age drawings have come to light. For the rest, his implements and weapons may be divided into a few distinctive classes:—

1. Hammers, hatchets, tomahawks, or chisels; an instrument made of a heavy piece of stone brought to a sharp cutting edge at one end, and at the other rounded or flat, so as to serve the double purpose of a hammer and an axe. When these are of an elongated form they are called celts or chisels. As subspecies to the hammers and celts we have picks and gouges. 2. Arrow and spear heads, which differ in size but not much in form, both being long and narrow in shape, often closely resembling the leaf of the laurel or the bay, sometimes of a diamond shape, but more often having the lateral corners nearest to the end which fitted into the shaft. Viewed edgeways, they also appear to taper towards either end, for while one point was designed to pierce the victim, the other was fitted into a cleft handle, and bound into it with cord or sinew. Implements have been discovered still fitted into their handles. 3. The stone knives, which have generally two cutting edges, and when this is the case do not greatly differ from the spear-heads, though they are commonly less pointed than the latter. And to these three important forms we may add, as less important types, a rounded form of implement, generally called a scraper, and similar to the scrapers of the palæolithic era; stones designed for slinging, net-weights, and perhaps corn-grinders or nut-crushers. A few bone implements have been found in the tumuli, a pin, a chisel, and a knife or so; but they are very rare, they are never carved, and have not one quarter of the interest which belongs to the bone implements of the caves. Finally, we must not omit to say that in Anhalt, in Germany, a large stone has been found which seems to have served the purpose of a plough. For there can be little doubt that if some of the tumuli belong to a time before the use of domesticated animals—save the dog—they last down to a time when man not only had tame oxen, pigs, goats, and geese,[11] but also sowed and planted, and lived the life of an agricultural race; nor will it be said that such an advance was extraordinary when we say that the minimum duration of the age of polished stone in central Europe was probably two thousand years.

Other relics from the mounds, not less interesting than the weapons, are their vessels of pottery; for here we see the earliest traces of another art. This pottery is of a black colour, curiously mixed with powdered shells, perhaps to strengthen the clay, perhaps for ornament. Its pottery belongs to the latter portion of this age of stone, a period distinguished not only by the use of domestic animals, but also by the growth of cereals. We have said that bones of cattle, swine, and in one case of a goose, have been found among the refuse of the funeral feasts. But man was still a hunter, as he is to this day, though he had found other means of support besides the wild game; so we also find the bones of the red deer and the wild bull, both of which supplied him with food. Wolves’ teeth, too, have been found pierced, so as to be strung into a necklace; for personal adornment formed, in those days as now, part of the interest of life. Jet beads have been discovered in large numbers, and even some of amber, which seems to have been brought from the Baltic to these countries and as far south as Switzerland; and it is known that during the last portion of what is, nevertheless, still the stone period, the most precious metal of all, gold, was used for ornament. Gold is the one metal which is frequently found on the surface of the ground, and therefore it was naturally the first to come under the eye of man.

The religion of the mound-builders probably consisted in part of the worship of the dead, so that the very tombs themselves, and not the cromlechs only, were a sort of temples. And yet they had the deepest dread of the reappearance of the departed upon earth—of his ghost. To prevent his ‘walking’ they adopted a strange practical form of exorcism. They strewed the ground at the grave’s mouth with sharp stones or broken pieces of pottery, as though a ghost could have his feet cut, and by fear of that be kept from returning to his old haunts. For ages and ages after the days of the mound-builders the same custom lived on of which we here see the rise. The same ceremony—turned now to an unmeaning rite—was used for the graves of those, such as murderers or suicides, who might be expected to sleep uneasily in their narrow house. This is the custom which is referred to in the speech of the priest to Laertes.[12] Ophelia had died under such suspicion of suicide, that it was a stretch of their rule, he says, to grant her Christian burial.