THE FIRST HUNTERS.
WE have many societies which have as their object the preservation of what is ancient and valuable in monuments and works of art, and during the last half- century or so, since the national conscience has been stirred to some sense of its responsibility, much has been preserved or reamed which might have been accidentally lost or deliberately destroyed. Much else has perished, and much which, perhaps, could not have been saved. We can rescue and preserve the work of man; what we cannot do, or at least have not done, is to preserve man himself. Ancient races of men die out or are "edged out" before the progress of the very civilization which interests itself in their origin and their history, and which may even do its best, without avail, to guard and preserve them. This is an aspect of an important anthropological problem which receives particular attention in Professor Sollas's exhaustive and inspiring book, "Ancient Hunters" (Mac- millan and Co., 12s. net). He illustrates his point by two instances in particular—the extinction of the aborigines of Tasmania and the practical extermination of the African Bushmen. Both of these races have a peculiar interest for the anthropologist, because through both of them we are able to get at instructive analogies with the habits and customs of primitive man, regarded in particular as a hunter. Professor Tylor, lecturing in 1905 before the Aroliacologieal Institute, exhibited a number of flint implements and flakes from the cave of Le Moustier, in Dordogne, which, as he said, corre- sponded in make to those of the Tasmanian natives, " with such curious exactness that were it not for the different stone they are chipped from it would be hardly possible to dis- tinguish them." And yet, with this curiously close parallel awaiting the study of men of science, and with the knowledge that in Tasmanian customs, forms of worship, folklore, and weapons there was a wealth of material ready to the hand and mind of the anthropologist, " we allowed this supremely interesting people, the last representatives of one of the earliest stages of human culture, to perish without having made any serious effort to ascertain all that could be known about it." That is the burden of Professor Sollas's complaint, and it is surely justified by the facts. It may be true, as he points out, that a race of hunters cannot live side by side with an agricultural people; that when the hunting-ground of one of the tribes is occupied by the new arrivals the tribe which is driven out is bound to break over the boundaries of its neighbours, and that when once this "law of the jungle" is broken quarrels and eventually war break out among the tribes, and the race, weakened by internal feuds, is already in sight of the end. That is doubtless true ; but what is astonish- ing is that with the Tasmanian race disappearing before our eyes so little was done to obtain a real knowledge of its habits and history. If the Tasmanian stone implements so closely resembled those of primitive man, as we know him to have existed in Dordogne, may not other Tasmanian relics provide analogies with those of the ancient hunters of Europe P Here, for instance, is an observation which may be considered in connexion with the discovery of marked stones in European caves. " One day we noticed a woman arranging stones : they were flat, oval, about two inches wide, and marked in various directions with black and red lines. These, we learned, represented absent friends, and one larger than the rest a corpulent woman on Flinders Island, known as Mother Brown." Professor Sollas, in giving this description by another writer, J. Backhouse, of the Tasmanian woman's arrangement of stones, recalls the painted stones found by E. Piette in the cave of Mas d'Azil, Ariege. These stones also are " flat, oval, and about two inches wide," and are marked in various ways with red and black lines and spots. Some of them have even what are apparently letters on them, and one, which Professor Sollas illustrates, either by accident or by design is inscribed with the letters F E I. Of these and other inscribed stones a French authority, M. Hoernes, remarks that they offer one of the darkest problems of prehistoric times, and Professor Sollas, in sug- gesting that some light might have been thrown upon the problem by the Tasmanian stones, can only lament a lost opportunity. "The Tasmanians have disappeared, and these stones with them ; not a single specimen, not even a drawing, is preserved in any of our museums."
We have lost much with the Tasmanians; is it possible that there is an even greater loss in the gradual extinction of the Bushmen P Professor Sollas has a fascinating theory to put forward on this point, and to understand it from the beginning we must go back some thirty years to a discovery which was made in Santander, in Spain, by a Spanish nobleman, Marcellano de Sautuola. In 1878 he was visiting the International Exhibition at Paris, and there learnt something of the discoveries which had been made in the caves of Southern France. He decided to explore some caves near his home in Santander, and in one of these, the cave of Altamira, he found the usual palieolithie debris, bones of extinct animals, worked flints, and so on. While he was examining these debris his little daughter, who had accompanied him into the cave, and who soon grew tired of watching him, began restlessly looking about. She had evidently seen something which interested her, for she cried out the word " Tords 1" and kept on repeating it until her father managed to get her to show him what she had seen. She pointed to the roof of the cave, and there he saw an extraordinary picture of a collection of animals—bisons, horses, deer, and other creatures—some of them life-size and all drawn with great vigour and faithfulness. M. do Sautuola, convinced that he had made a discovery of the highest importance, lost no time in bringing his facts before the Archeological Congress of 1879, only to find them received with the most profound scepticism. Other discoveries of the same kind, though not so important, were made in succeeding years ; but it was not until more than twenty years afterwards, in 1901, that the increasing number of discoveries and the volume of proof of their genuineness con- vinced the sceptics, and M. Cartailhac, who at first had been one of the most uncompromising of M. de Sautuola's opponents, had the courage to admit that he was mistaken. So that it was scarcely ten years ago that it was established beyond doubt that these elaborate and admirable studies of animals were the work of men of that era of the palaiolithio age which is known as the Aurignacian. And now comes the important question asked by Professor Sollas. Who are the modern descendants of these gifted Aurignacians P Are there any modern descendants P Or have the Aurignacian painters and sculptors vanished before some other force of civilization; have they been absorbed, for instance, into such a nation as the Egyptians P In looking for an answer to that question Professor Bolles asks another. Is there any- where to be seen to-day a style of painting or sculpture which resembles the Aurignacian P There is the work of the Bushmen. The Bushmen, an intelligent and artistic people who have been "edged out" of their native hunting-grounds by the more progressive civilizations of the Boer and the Briton, have practically disappeared. A debased remnant maintain a, struggle for existence in the Kalahari desert; but the Bush- men as a people have gone. They have left behind them paintings, however, which entitle them to a high place among primitive peoples, and which are so exactly alike in character to Aurignacian work as to suggest the value of further com- parisons. Paintings of hunting scenes in which elands, ostriches, and lions stalk, and are themselves stalked, show precisely the boldness, the vigour of outline, the sense of light and shade, and the value of colour which distinguish Aurignacian work. Can we, then, find any further parallel? We may notice, to begin with, the curious fact that the Aurignacian very seldom draws the human figure. When he does he imports a good deal of life and action into his work, but he evidently prefers to draw the animals he hunts. The Bushman is not so doubtful as to his capacity for drawing men, and when he does his treatment of the figure, as a whole, has a distinct resemblance to Aurignacian work. But that is not all. The Aurignacian, though he did not often draw man, was not afraid of carving human figures, and almost invariably chose for his subject the nude female figure. In the Bush- men's drawings, as in the figures of the living men and women, parts of the body are excessively developed, so that the figure becomes what is known as steatopygous ; and when we look at the sculptures of the Aurignacians we find in the same way this marked steatopygy. This is at least what might be expected if we were to suppose the Bushmen of our own day to be descended from an Aurignacian ancestry.
We have not space to follow Professor Sollas through the whole of his investigation; he will no doubt find plenty of readers of his work in its complete form. But it is a fas- cinating theory which he puts forward—a race of cave-dwell- ing hunters gifted with high artistic feeling and powers of execution, gradually migrating or being expelled by other races from Dordogne and the West through the South of Europe across the whole broad sweep of Africa to the Cape. At the Cape in our own day they come to their end ; but they have left their mark on the world's history. Wherever they have gone they have taken their art with them; and, as Professor Sollas points out, "had the passion for art which possessed the Bushman been less strong or less enduring," the story of their migration from Europe " would probably have remained unsuspected to all time." More than that, for it has led investigators like Professor Sollas to fresh specu- lations. It would be strange, he points out in conclusion, if this were the sole migration of its kind ; the chances are that there may be others some of which we may yet be able to discover.
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