PRIMITIVE MAN.* THE public mind is apt to be a
little confused on the subject of primitive man. People sometimes talk as if "the ancient Britons," or the builders of Stonehenge and Avebury, and the men who used the flint axes or celts, were, if not all one, at any rate very closely allied. No greater mistake could possibly be made. Between the true primitive man, that awful parent of humanity who sits secluded in the night of time, and the wild tribesmen who once lived in England the life the Solomon Islander now lives in the Pacific, the gulf is far wider, deeper, more essential, more significant, than that between the most civilised European and the savages of Queensland and New Guinea. The mind is horror-bound as it contemplates the crouching ape-like mammal whose claw- like hands clenched the flint hammers and swung the flint axes, which our fields still yield to testify to his ghastly ingenuity. Primitive man has not left us many records of himself, but what he has left are quite enough to enable us to conjure up a picture of what he was. Mr. Stevenson, in one of his most charming essays, has told us that, however long or splendid may be our family tree, in the topmost branch sits "probably arboreal." It is a gruesome notion, this thought that the creature who scattered his rude stone implements along the Downs was our ancestor, that he holds a mirror up to humanity, and that in him we see our true reflection. Yet after all we should perhaps rather admire than shrink from the thought of an origin so odious. If man as we know him now has in truth descended from this bent-backed, bow- legged Caliban, we may indeed feel that he was shaped for some great end. There must be something essentially noble in him, as good Sir Thomas Browne opined, if, starting with Palmolithic man, so much has been achieved. Man may be vile, but how many thousand times better than primitive man? What hopes, too, for the future of the race may not be indulged in by those who note what some ten or twenty thousand years have accomplished ? If the men of the future are to be as much above us as we are above primitive man, who can fix a boundary to the development of the species. The thought of the apish flint-chipper should then be an ennobling and not a shameful one. Our roots may be in the rank earth, but, God be praised ! man has that in him which has enabled him to overcome the beast in his nature, and to show that it is but in seeming that he is pure animal.
In the work before us Mr. Worthington Smith describes some very curious finds of the axes used by primitive man— finds made by him on the top of the Bedfordshire Downs, and in the neighbourhood of London—for primitive man, like modern man, seems to have favoured the lower portion of the Thames valley. But he does more than chronicle this or that discovery of celts. He begins his book with a very interesting attempt to draw a picture of the life led by Palmolithic man. No doubt a good many of the details of the picture are disputable, and all are necessarily conjectural ; but in spite of this it is very cleverly constructed and well worth the perusal of those who wish to come closer to the men of whom Mr. Worthington Smith says, "the barbarians who preceded the ancient civilisations of Rome, Assyria, and Egypt, are modern as compared with the remote antiquity of the savages whose houses, weapons, and tools, are described in this book." Here is Mr. Worthington Smith's account of a conjectured night visit to one of the English haunts of primitive man :— "Man's voice at that time was probably not an articulate voice, but a jabber, a shout, a roar. A shriek or groan of pain is heard, a shout of alarm, or a roar of fury. Loud hilarious sounds as of .etrange laughing are beard, and quick, jabbering, threatening • Matt, the Prtinevat Savage : his Haunts and Mies from Mel:fill-tow of Bedford- shire to Biaokualt. By Worthington G. Smith. London 1 Rdward Stanford. sounds of quz.rrelling. Coughing is heard, but no sound of fear, or hate, or love is expressed in articulate words. If we imagine the darkness to have lifted, we see the men and women standing about or crouching—many carrying bones and stone tools—near fires. There is one central fire and several minor fires bounding the fringe of the human haunt. The fires are kindled from sparks (derived from the concussion of flints), applied to dry grass. Some of the men and women are feeding the flames with ferns, twigs, tree-branches, and logs. Other men and women are seen sitting or lying about in dens or hovels formed of tree- branches and stones, or resting under bushes, trees, fallen trunks, or natural sheltering banks of earth. Hairy children are seen running about or crawling on all fours. Bones, some with half- putrid meat attached, are seen strewn about in all directions. The human creatures differ in aspect from the generality of men, women, and children of the present day ; they are somewhat shorter in stature, bigger in belly, broader in the back, and less upright. They have but little calf to the legs. The females are considerably shorter than the males ; they bear children in their early youth, and cease to grow. All are naked, or only slightly protected with ill-dried skins. They are much more hairy than human creatures of the present time, especially the old males and the children. In this character they resemble the present race of hairy Ainos of the northern islands of the Japan Archipelago. The hair is long and straight, not curly, the colour probably bright chestnut-rod, and the skin copper-colour. The heads are long and flat, and the features perhaps somewhat unpleasing. The foreheads recede, the large, bushy, red eyebrows meet over the nose, the brows are heavy and deeply overshadow the eyes beneath. The beards, whiskers, and moustaches vary in style and extent, as such appendages va.ry now. Many of the women have whiskers, beards, and moustaches. The noses arc large and flat, with big nostrils. The teeth project slightly in a muzzlelike fashion ; the lower jaws are massive and powerful, and the chins slightly recede. The ears are el,ghtly pointed, and generally without lobes at the base. Such ladies as possess lobes probably have them pierced, and a small feather (the forerunner of the earring) is pushed through the orifice."
Of articulate talk there was probably little, but by gestures and by imitative sounds the Flint men were able to make their wants known. The social instinct was to some extent developed. "They perhaps lift a fallen friend, extract a thorn, temporarily look after an orphan, or perhaps aid in catching parasites. If, however, friends get badly hurt by beasts of prey or by accident, such injured companions are hunted away or liilled as soon as possible. Fever patients, consumptives, the blind, the half-blind, and fractious children are driven off and killed, for the earliest human savages probably possessed but scant sympathy for either pleasure or pain in their fel- lows." The only industry would be the making of stone implements. "The old males and females, aided by children, would be despatched to look after suitable blocks of flint, to push such flints out of the chalk, stiff clay, or earth with sticks, and bring them to the human haunt. There, by the fireside, the more skilled and light-handed human creatures would, with anvil, hammer, and punch stones, fabricate pointed stone weapons and keen-edged oval choppers and knives." Space does not allow us to give any more of Mr. Worthington Smith's sketch of the life led by primitive man. Before, how- ever, we proceed to notice the account of his diggings, we must quote what he says as to the disappearance of primitive man in England :— "From what direction Palacelithic man came, when he first reached this country, no one certainly knows ; he could not have come from the north, north-east, or north-west, or west, or south- west. He probably came from the south or south-east, but his original home or starting-place is unknown, What direction he took when he finally left Western Europe is unknown. Why he left no one knows, beyond the surmise that this part of the world in some way became unsuitable for him. He went to some more suitable position, and became the progenitor of Mesolithic, Neo- lithic, and other races. Descendants of Palasolithic men through the Mesolithic and Neolithic series, of course exist at the present day, but which modern race is nearest to the oldest race is open to question. Individuals with skulls of the earliest or Canstadt type are not uncommon in various parts of Europe, including Lpndon. The possessors of such skulls are not mentally inferior to the owners of typical modern skulls."
These facts deepen the mystery and horror that surrounds the episode of the occupation of these islands by Palmolithic man. The question whence and whither is absolutely un- solvable.
One of the most interesting things about Mr. Worthington Smith's investigations is the fact that he discovered what was in fact a Palmelithic flint.axe factory. At Coddington, near Dunstable, he not only found "more than five hundred arti- ficially struck flint flakes or splinters," but found the flint axes from which they had been struck in Palwolithic times. How can he prove that they belonged to each other ? may be asked by the incredulous. The answer is simple,—He fitted them together,—i.e., replaced the flakes on the masses of flint from which they had been struck. Unfortunately, we cannot do more than note the peculiarly interesting character of this discovery. Those who want to learn how the tools and weapons of the old Stone Age were worked by primitive man and "that accomplished lady his wife," must turn to the pages of the work before us. They will find it excellent reading.
We must, however, before we leave this interesting and curious book, mention the excursus on forged Palteolithic implements. It appears that certain guileless antiquaries— Mr. Worthington Smith was not one of them—explained to carpenters, masons, and others concerned with foundations, the nature of flint implements. They asked for flints shaped in particular ways—and they got them. But unfortunately they were not made in Palmolithic times. In their minute descrip- tions of what they wanted, the antiquaries had shown men accustomed to use hammers how to produce the required articles. Here is Mr. Worthington Smith's account of the doings of the forgers
"Collectors at one time lent the men their best genuine tools as aids to discovery, and one special forger was most successful in exactly imitating the best type forms to the minutest details. The genuine Stoke Newington implements are often keen-edged, and as often highly lustrous. At first the forgeries were all dull and lustreless. On this fact being made known to the forgers, they vigorously brushed their forgeries all over with a very hard brush ; the result was an excellent and natural- looking lustre or polish. Next, the collectors wanted slightly abraded edges, some genuine tools being slightly abraded. To meet this demand the men put the tools into a twisted sack, and shook the sack with its contained implements together with natural stones and sand, till the tools exhibited a proper amount of abrasion. Some wise person next showed the men that many genuine tools were stained with ochre, caused by the presence of iron in the soil. To provide this colour the men kept large iron saucepans constantly boiling on their fires,—saucepans filled with forged implements, old rusty nails, and other iron frag- ments; this gave the required tint, but some of the purchasers suspected the tools, and put them again into boiling water, with the result that the ochreous colour soon came off and left the tools grey. Potash removed the colour. This was because the men at first boiled the tools after they had brushed them up to produce a lustre. The forgers now boiled their unpolished grey tools in their saucepans and polished them up afterwards. When this was done, reboiling would not remove the ochreous colour derived from the iron, and the longer the tools were boiled the more permanently ochreous they became."
Mr. Worthington Smith goes on to recount how a believer in " pre-glacial " man asked for ice-scratched tools, and how the ingenious labourers in a gravel-pit saw he got them.
The work before us ends with chapters on Mesolithic and Neolithic tools ; and here we must leave Mr. Worthington Smith's book. And yet we have said nothing of the skeleton of the girl and the baby found in the round tumulus on Dun- stable Downs, and of the two hundred "fairy loaves" (fossil sea-urchins) which edged the grave.
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