Prehistoric Men 3

Prehistoric Men 3

With any luck, archeologists do their digging in a layered, stratified

site. They find the remains of everything that would last through

time, in several different layers. They know that the assemblage in

the bottom layer was laid down earlier than the assemblage in the next

layer above, and so on up to the topmost layer, which is the latest.

They look at the results of other “digs” and find that some other

archeologist 900 miles away has found ax-heads in his lowest layer,

exactly like the ax-heads of their fifth layer. This means that their

fifth layer must have been lived in at about the same time as was the

first layer in the site 200 miles away. It also may mean that the

people who lived in the two layers knew and traded with each other. Or

it could mean that they didn’t necessarily know each other, but simply

that both traded with a third group at about the same time.

 

You can see that the more we dig and find, the more clearly the main

facts begin to stand out. We begin to be more sure of which people

lived at the same time, which earlier and which later. We begin to

know who traded with whom, and which peoples seemed to live off by

themselves. We begin to find enough skeletons in burials so that the

physical anthropologists can tell us what the people looked like. We

get animal bones, and a paleontologist may tell us they are all bones

of wild animals; or he may tell us that some or most of the bones are

those of domesticated animals, for instance, sheep or cattle, and

therefore the people must have kept herds.

 

More important than anything else--as our structure grows more

complicated and our materials increase--is the fact that “a sort

of history of human activity” does begin to appear. The habits or

traditions that men formed in the making of their tools and in the

ways they did things, begin to stand out for us. How characteristic

were these habits and traditions? What areas did they spread over?

How long did they last? We watch the different tools and the traces

of the way things were done--how the burials were arranged, what

the living-places were like, and so on. We wonder about the people

themselves, for the traces of habits and traditions are useful to us

only as clues to the men who once had them. So we ask the physical

anthropologists about the skeletons that we found in the burials. The

physical anthropologists tell us about the anatomy and the similarities

and differences which the skeletons show when compared with other

skeletons. The physical anthropologists are even working on a

method--chemical tests of the bones--that will enable them to discover

what the blood-type may have been. One thing is sure. We have never

found a group of skeletons so absolutely similar among themselves--so

cast from a single mould, so to speak--that we could claim to have a

“pure” race. I am sure we never shall.

 

We become particularly interested in any signs of change--when new

materials and tool types and ways of doing things replace old ones. We

watch for signs of social change and progress in one way or another.

 

We must do all this without one word of written history to aid us.

Everything we are concerned with goes back to the time _before_ men

learned to write. That is the prehistorian’s job--to find out what

happened before history began.

 

 

 

 

THE CHANGING WORLD in which Prehistoric Men Lived

 

[Illustration]

 

 

Mankind, we’ll say, is at least a half million years old. It is very

hard to understand how long a time half a million years really is.

If we were to compare this whole length of time to one day, we’d get

something like this: The present time is midnight, and Jesus was

born just five minutes and thirty-six seconds ago. Earliest history

began less than fifteen minutes ago. Everything before 11:45 was in

prehistoric time.

 

Or maybe we can grasp the length of time better in terms of

generations. As you know, primitive peoples tend to marry and have

children rather early in life. So suppose we say that twenty years

will make an average generation. At this rate there would be 25,000

generations in a half-million years. But our United States is much less

than ten generations old, twenty-five generations take us back before

the time of Columbus, Julius Caesar was alive just 100 generations ago,

David was king of Israel less than 150 generations ago, 250 generations

take us back to the beginning of written history. And there were 24,750

generations of men before written history began!

 

I should probably tell you that there is a new method of prehistoric

dating which would cut the earliest dates in my reckoning almost

in half. Dr. Cesare Emiliani, combining radioactive (C14) and

chemical (oxygen isotope) methods in the study of deep-sea borings,

has developed a system which would lower the total range of human

prehistory to about 300,000 years. The system is still too new to have

had general examination and testing. Hence, I have not used it in this

book; it would mainly affect the dates earlier than 25,000 years ago.

 

 

CHANGES IN ENVIRONMENT

 

The earth probably hasn’t changed much in the last 5,000 years (250

generations). Men have built things on its surface and dug into it and

drawn boundaries on maps of it, but the places where rivers, lakes,

seas, and mountains now stand have changed very little.

 

In earlier times the earth looked very different. Geologists call the

last great geological period the _Pleistocene_. It began somewhere

between a half million and a million years ago, and was a time of great

changes. Sometimes we call it the Ice Age, for in the Pleistocene

there were at least three or four times when large areas of earth

were covered with glaciers. The reason for my uncertainty is that

while there seem to have been four major mountain or alpine phases of

glaciation, there may only have been three general continental phases

in the Old World.[2]

 

[2] This is a complicated affair and I do not want to bother you

with its details. Both the alpine and the continental ice sheets

seem to have had minor fluctuations during their _main_ phases,

and the advances of the later phases destroyed many of the

traces of the earlier phases. The general textbooks have tended

to follow the names and numbers established for the Alps early

in this century by two German geologists. I will not bother you

with the names, but there were _four_ major phases. It is the

second of these alpine phases which seems to fit the traces of

the earliest of the great continental glaciations. In this book,

I will use the four-part system, since it is the most familiar,

but will add the word _alpine_ so you may remember to make the

transition to the continental system if you wish to do so.

 

Glaciers are great sheets of ice, sometimes over a thousand feet

thick, which are now known only in Greenland and Antarctica and in

high mountains. During several of the glacial periods in the Ice Age,

the glaciers covered most of Canada and the northern United States and

reached down to southern England and France in Europe. Smaller ice

sheets sat like caps on the Rockies, the Alps, and the Himalayas. The

continental glaciation only happened north of the equator, however, so

remember that “Ice Age” is only half true.

 

As you know, the amount of water on and about the earth does not vary.

These large glaciers contained millions of tons of water frozen into

ice. Because so much water was frozen and contained in the glaciers,

the water level of lakes and oceans was lowered. Flooded areas were

drained and appeared as dry land. There were times in the Ice Age when

there was no English Channel, so that England was not an island, and a

land bridge at the Dardanelles probably divided the Mediterranean from

the Black Sea.

 

A very important thing for people living during the time of a

glaciation was the region adjacent to the glacier. They could not, of

course, live on the ice itself. The questions would be how close could

they live to it, and how would they have had to change their way of

life to do so.

 

 

GLACIERS CHANGE THE WEATHER

 

Great sheets of ice change the weather. When the front of a glacier

stood at Milwaukee, the weather must have been bitterly cold in

Chicago. The climate of the whole world would have been different, and

you can see how animals and men would have been forced to move from one

place to another in search of food and warmth.

 

On the other hand, it looks as if only a minor proportion of the whole

Ice Age was really taken up by times of glaciation. In between came

the _interglacial_ periods. During these times the climate around

Chicago was as warm as it is now, and sometimes even warmer. It may

interest you to know that the last great glacier melted away less than

10,000 years ago. Professor Ernst Antevs thinks we may be living in an

interglacial period and that the Ice Age may not be over yet. So if you

want to make a killing in real estate for your several hundred times

great-grandchildren, you might buy some land in the Arizona desert or

the Sahara.

 

We do not yet know just why the glaciers appeared and disappeared, as

they did. It surely had something to do with an increase in rainfall

and a fall in temperature. It probably also had to do with a general

tendency for the land to rise at the beginning of the Pleistocene. We

know there was some mountain-building at that time. Hence, rain-bearing

winds nourished the rising and cooler uplands with snow. An increase

in all three of these factors--if they came together--would only have

needed to be slight. But exactly why this happened we do not know.

 

The reason I tell you about the glaciers is simply to remind you of the

changing world in which prehistoric men lived. Their surroundings--the

animals and plants they used for food, and the weather they had to

protect themselves from--were always changing. On the other hand, this

change happened over so long a period of time and was so slow that

individual people could not have noticed it. Glaciers, about which they

probably knew nothing, moved in hundreds of miles to the north of them.

The people must simply have wandered ever more southward in search

of the plants and animals on which they lived. Or some men may have

stayed where they were and learned to hunt different animals and eat

different foods. Prehistoric men had to keep adapting themselves to new

environments and those who were most adaptive were most successful.

 

 

OTHER CHANGES

 

Changes took place in the men themselves as well as in the ways they

lived. As time went on, they made better tools and weapons. Then, too,

we begin to find signs of how they started thinking of other things

than food and the tools to get it with. We find that they painted on

the walls of caves, and decorated their tools; we find that they buried

their dead.

 

At about the time when the last great glacier was finally melting away,

men in the Near East made the first basic change in human economy.

They began to plant grain, and they learned to raise and herd certain

animals. This meant that they could store food in granaries and “on the

hoof” against the bad times of the year. This first really basic change

in man’s way of living has been called the “food-producing revolution.”

By the time it happened, a modern kind of climate was beginning. Men

had already grown to look as they do now. Know-how in ways of living

had developed and progressed, slowly but surely, up to a point. It was

impossible for men to go beyond that point if they only hunted and fished and gathered wild foods. Once the basic change was made--once the food-producing revolution became effective--technology leaped ahead and civilization and written history soon began.