Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives

By W.J. Sollas

Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives is an overview of early human hunters and their contemporary native hunters.A table of contents is included.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles River Editors
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781508014775

Book preview

ANCIENT HUNTERS AND THEIR MODERN REPRESENTATIVES

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W.J. Sollas

WAXKEEP PUBLISHING

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This book is a work of nonfiction and is intended to be factually accurate.

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Copyright © 2015 by W.J. Sollas

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

ANCIENT HUNTERS AND THEIR MODERN REPRESENTATIVES

CHAPTER I.THE GREAT ICE AGE

CHAPTER II.THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN

CHAPTER III.EOLITHS

CHAPTER IV.EXTINCT HUNTERS. THE TASMANIANS

CHAPTER V.THE MOST ANCIENT HUNTERS

CHAPTER VI.MIDDLE PALÆOLITHIC

CHAPTER VII.THE AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES

CHAPTER VIII.THE AURIGNACIAN AGE

CHAPTER IX.THE BUSHMEN

CHAPTER X.THE SOLUTRIAN AGE

CHAPTER XI.MAGDALENIAN MAN

CHAPTER XII.THE ESKIMO

CHAPTER XIII.THE AZILIANS

CHAPTER XIV.CHRONOLOGY

Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives

By W.J. Sollas

PREFACE

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THE SUBSTANCE OF THIS WORK, at least in its main outlines, was first set forth in a course of three lectures delivered before the Royal Institution in 1906, and subsequently published as a series of articles contributed, at the request of the Editor, Dr. N. H. Alcock, to Science Progress.

My original intention was simply to gather these together and to re-publish them in book-form with adequate illustration. But in the meanwhile the rapid progress of discovery had rendered necessary so many changes in the text that I took advantage of the opportunity to introduce a good deal of additional matter, and to enlarge the short summaries treating of recent hunting races, especially the Australians and Bushmen.

The manuscript as delivered to the printers in 1910 contained an account of our knowledge as it existed up to the end of the previous year; since then, however, many important discoveries have been made known; to render an account of them all was impossible, but by the kind indulgence of Messrs. Macmillan, I have been able to incorporate such as are of more than usual interest, particularly to myself. This must be my apology to those Authors whose recent work finds no mention, especially regret that I been unable to refer to Mr. Marett’s account of his explorations in Jersey, and the important conclusions to which they lead on the oscillations of land and sea.

My thanks are due to a number of friends who have assisted me in my studies. In France, our great teacher in these matters, I am indebted first to M. Cartailhac, the Nestor of pre-historic Archaeology, through whose kindness I enjoyed, in company with my friend Mr. Marett, an unrivalled opportunity of studying the painted caves of Ariège and the Hautes Pyrénées, and next to Prof. Breuil and M. Peyrony, who made us acquainted with those of Dordogne, to Prof. Boule, who introduced me to the fossil man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints, and to M. Commont, who initiated me into the mysteries of the Mousterian industry. In Germany I learnt much from Dr. R. R. Schmidt, who guided my studies of the Palaeolithic deposits of Würtemberg; in Belgium from M. Rutot, whose kindness and information are both inexhaustible, as well as from Professors Fraipont and Max Lohest, the discoverers and expounders of the skeletons from Spy. In England my old friend the Rev. Magens Mello guided me through the caves of Creswell Crag; Dr. Sturge made me at home among the treasures of his great collection, probably one of the finest collections of flint implements in the world; Prof. Tylor, Prof. Haddon, Mr. H. Balfour and Mr. Montgomery Bell, have assisted me in the most efficacious manner, by frank discussion, and the late Mr. Pengelly many years ago led me with humorous and illuminating discourse through the recesses of the famous Kent’s Hole, near Torquay.

I am also under great obligations to those generous friends and colleagues who have given me permission to borrow illustrations from their published works; in every case acknowledgement has been made of the source, but I desire in addition to express my especial thanks to Professor Boule and the publishers of L’Anthropologie, who have allowed me to ransack this thesaurus and to carry away from it some of my richest spoils; to M. Commont, whose figures of Mousterian implements are all from his own collection; to the Smithsonian Institution for the use of many illustrations published by the Bureau of American Ethnology, and to the Commission for Ledelsen af de geologiske og geographiske Undersøgelser i Grønland, for the use of illustrations published in the Meddelelser om Grønland.

I have also to thank my assistant Mr. C. J. Bayzand for the skilful manner in which he has prepared the illustrations for publication; many of them have been re-drawn by him.

I believe this is the first time that a general survey has been attempted—at least in the English tongue—of the vast store of facts which have rewarded the labours of investigators into the early history of Man during the past half-century. It is difficult to over-estimate their importance; they afford a new picture of the mode of life and intellectual status of our primitive predecessors, differing in many of its details from that which suggested itself to the imagination of earlier investigators.

In reviewing the successive Palaeolithic industries as they occur in Europe, I find little evidence of indigenous evolution, but much that suggests the influence of migrating races; if this is a heresy it is at least respectable and is now rapidly gaining adherents. In a collateral branch of enquiry it has been powerfully advocated by Graebner and it received the support of Dr. Rivers in his recent important Address to the British Association at Portsmouth.

No allusion has been made to the belief so strongly held by Piette that the Aurignacians had learnt to bridle the horse, because the evidence seemed insufficient to establish so startling a conclusion; now, however, we have reason to believe that the Magdalenians drove behind a reindeer harnessed to a sledge, Piette’s view acquires a fresh interest, and deserves renewed investigation.

In every branch, of Natural Science progress is now so rapid that few accepted conclusions can be regarded as more than provisional; and this is especially true of prehistoric Archaeology. General views, whatever other interest they may have, are chiefly useful as suggesting the way to fresh enquiry. If the brief summary presented in the present work should have happily that effect, it will have exceeded my anticipations in accomplishing its aim.

W. J. SOLLAS.

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD.

September, 1911.

ANCIENT HUNTERS AND THEIR MODERN REPRESENTATIVES

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CHAPTER I.THE GREAT ICE AGE

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THE CHANGES WHICH HAVE AFFECTED the face of the earth since the dawn of recorded history are comparatively few and unimportant. In some regions, as in the British Isles, great tracts of forest and marsh have been replaced by cultivated land, and some few species of wild animals, such as wolves and bears, have been exterminated; but, so far as we can judge, the climate has remained the same, and no movements have permanently disturbed the level of the sea. The recent period seems to have been one of geological repose, affording a peaceful and stable arena for the great drama of human existence. The historian consequently may pursue his researches untroubled by disturbances of the environment, accepting the world as it now is, as that which, so far as he is concerned, has always been. But directly we extend our inquiries into antecedent periods, and endeavour to recall the story of our species from the unwritten past, we are conscious of a new regime: not constancy, but change seems to dominate the environment. The climate loses its stability; it swings slowly to and fro between extremes of heat and cold, of moisture and dryness, in long oscillations several times repeated. Harmoniously with these, successive assemblages of living forms—southern, temperate, northern—faunas of the forest, the tundra, and the steppe—make their appearance in the temperate European zone, disappear to reappear, and then finally vanish, either altogether or into remote regions of the earth.

Even the land itself ceases to maintain its solid firmness, but subsides over larger or smaller areas beneath the waters of the encroaching sea, or in some places rises to greater altitudes, and even shares in the increasing growth of mountain chains.

No doubt, in a retrospective glance, we are liable to a deceptive effect of perspective, and events widely separated in fact appear unduly crowded together by foreshortening. We are not, however, altogether without the means of making an appropriate correction for this illusion. The geological scale of time, though far from exact, is sufficiently so for the purpose, and, judged by this standard, the duration of the latest epoch of terrestrial history, known as the Pleistocene, cannot have exceeded some three or four hundred thousands of years. It corresponds with the chief period of human development, and includes four complete oscillations of climate; one of them being of much longer duration than the rest.

The Great Ice Age.—Of the many changing elements which contribute to the geology of the Pleistocene epoch, climate is one of the most important, and to this, therefore, in the first place, we will turn our attention. The recent existence of a great Ice age was first divined by Schimper, the poet-naturalist, whose enthusiasm fired the imagination and stimulated the researches of the indefatigable Agassiz.

As a result of his investigations, Agassiz announced his belief that the earth had passed at no distant date through a period of extreme cold, when ice and snow enmantled a large part of its surface. Attempts, persisting even down to the present day, have been made to overturn or belittle this conclusion, but with very imperfect success, and it now stands more assured than ever. As the number of observers increases scarcely a year passes which does not bring some important discovery to bear additional testimony to its truth.

The evidence on which Agassiz based his views was derived, in the first instance, from a study of the Swiss glaciers and of the effects associated with their existence. The contemporaries of Agassiz—Forbes and Tyndall—and subsequent generations of scientific explorers have pursued their researches in the same region; and this land of lofty peaks, which has furnished inspiration to so many great discoverers in other branches of science, is thus pre-eminently classic ground for the glacialist. Let us then commence our studies in the Alps, and, as a preliminary to further investigation, make ourselves acquainted with phenomena now alien to our land.

The Gorner Grat.—When Agassiz began his researches, glaciers were but little known, even to the travelled Englishman; now a crowd of summer visitors makes holiday upon them. It matters little to which of the many glacier systems we direct our attention; perhaps one of the best known is that which contributes to the astonishing panorama unfolded before us from the Gorner Grat (Plate I). Dominating the scene is an array of majestic snowy peaks. On the extreme left stands the mighty complex mass of Monte Rosa, then the Bretthorn; in front of us the Matterhorn rises in its superb and isolated grandeur; farther to the right come the Dente Blanche, the Gabelhorn, the Rothhorn; and last, the shapely Weisshorn, which from some points of view, but not here, offers the most complete realisation of the ideal of mountain beauty.

Below lies a wide valley, filled deep with a mass of slowly flowing ice, fed by many tributaries pouring down from the broad snow-fields which sweep around and between the mountain fastnesses. Two main streams—the Grenz and the Gorner glaciers—unite on almost equal terms, and flow together as the Boden glacier, which comes to an end at the upper margin of the Hinter Wald, above Zermatt, where it melts away into the hurrying Visp.

Suppose now that by some magic wand we could wave away all these streams of ice, and dismantle the mountains of their snowy robes, leaving the rocks exposed and bare. A strange and wonderful landscape would then stand revealed; the valleys, as far up as the ice had filled them, would be modelled in smooth and round and flowing outlines, in striking contrast to the rugged forms of the frost-splintered mountain summits. Angular fragments of rock, some of them very large, the remnants of the lateral moraine, would lie scattered over the valley sides, marking the line where the glacier had lapped against its banks; and a heap of debris, confusedly piled together, would stretch across the valley in a broken crescentic mound, like the ruins of a great natural dam. This is the terminal moraine, and marks the end of the vanished glacier. Behind it we might see a basin-like depression, in which the glacier had sunk itself by abrasion (Fig. 1); and within this, rising from its surface, elongated hummocks, or drumlins, of boulder clay. These radiate from the centre of the basin outwards, streaming like a swarm of fishes swimming against a current. They record the streamlines of the once flowing ice.

When we have gazed on the desolate scene long enough to distinguish its principal features, we will descend from our eyrie and examine them more in detail. The smoothness of rounded outline which we have already remarked is found to be due to the abrasive action of the glacier, which has ground away all the asperities of its bed; crags and jutting rocks have been worn down into rounded bosses (roches moutonnées) (Fig. 2), the smooth surfaces of which are striated by grooves and scratches all running in the same direction as that once taken by the glacier in its flow.

The drumlins consist of a tough clay, crowded with stones of all sorts and sizes, but bearing very remarkable features by which they are readily distinguished.

Originally angular fragments, they are now subangular, their sharp edges and corners having been ground away and rounded off by the ice; their flattened faces are smoothed and polished, and covered with scratches which run in parallel groups, generally in the direction of the longest axis of the stone, but occasionally crossing it (Fig. 3). The whole assemblage of scratched stones and clay is known as till or boulder clay.

Such, then, are the signs which would be left behind on the disappearance of the ice.

It requires no magic wand to bring about the transformation we have imagined; an amelioration of climate will suffice. Even at the present time the Boden glacier, like so many other great glaciers in Switzerland, is diminishing in bulk; its surface, instead of bulging up, is sagging in like an empty paunch, since the annual snowfall is insufficient to make good the annual loss due to melting away. A general rise of temperature over Switzerland to the extent of 4° or 5° C. would drive the snow-line high up the mountain peaks, and all the glaciers would disappear.

Effects of Refrigeration.—Let us now suppose that the climate, instead of ameliorating, grows gradually more severe. The Boden glacier will be more richly replenished by its tributaries; it will bulge upwards and downwards, and descend farther into the valley of the Visp; if the mean annual temperature falls low enough—say, 5° C. below the present—it will extend downwards till it reaches the valley of the Rhône All the glaciers which lie in valleys tributary to the Rhône will similarly enlarge, as will the glacier of the Rhône itself.

The Rhône Valley.—If, bearing this possibility in mind, we walk down the valley of the Visp, we shall discover on every side signs of an ancient extension of the ice, and on the most stupendous scale. The swollen Visp glacier evidently soon became confluent with that which filled the Sass-tal, and their united volume then entered the glacier of the Rhône. This, which now ends close to the Furca, had then already attained there a thickness of some 5,000 ft., and overflowed the Grimsal pass (Fig. 4). Farther down, where the Sasser-Visp glacier entered, it was even thicker. Filling the valley, it pursued its course past the bend at Martigny, and emerged from the Alps to overwhelm, in a great fan-shaped expansion, all the region now occupied by the lakes of Geneva and Neuchatel; it rose against the flanks of the Jura to a height which shows it to have possessed, even at this distance from its source, a thickness of over 3,000 ft. But it did not terminate here; it surmounted the Jura, and debouched on the plains of France (Fig. 4). There it deposited its terminal moraine, which runs in a much indented, but on the whole crescentic, line from Vienne, through Lyons, past Villefranche, to Villereversure, Arlay, Mesnay, Morteau, till it re-enters Swiss territory, between Maiche and Seignelegier, to become continuous farther on with the similar moraine of the great Rhône glacier (Fig. 5).

Switzerland in the Ice Age.—As might have been expected, this increase in volume was not confined to the glaciers of the Rhône valley. All the glaciers of Switzerland were affected in a corresponding degree; and the whole of this territory, now dotted over with numberless farms and villages and with great towns like Zurich and Geneva, was buried beneath a continuous sheet of snow and ice.

The Ice Sheet of Northern Europe.—It is not necessary to visit Switzerland to become familiar with the signs left by the ancient ice of the Glacial epoch; they surround us on every hand at home, and are amongst the commonest features of the mountainous parts of our land. Smoothed and striated surfaces, boulder clay and superficial morainic material, testify to the passage of the ice, indicate its direction, afford evidence of its thickness, and mark its boundaries. If we follow the southern boundary of the ice, we shall find that it will take us out of Britain and lead us right across the continent of Europe (Fig. 6). After stretching from Kerry to Wexford, and through the Bristol Channel to London, it crosses the sea, continues its course through Antwerp, past Magdeburg, Cracow, Kiev, runs south of Moscow to Kazan, and then terminates at the southern end of the Ural mountains. All that lies to the north of this line—the greater part of the British Isles, Northern Germany, Scandinavia, and almost the whole of European Russia—was buried out of sight beneath a mantle of ice formed by the confluence of many colossal glaciers.

The Ice Sheet of North America.—At the same time a large part of North America was overwhelmed (Fig. 7). The great terminal moraine which marks the southern boundary of the ice can be traced with occasional interruptions from Nantucket, through Long Island past New York, towards the western extremity of Lake Erie, then along a sinuous course in the same direction as the Ohio, down to its confluence with the Mississippi; then it follows the Missouri as far as Kansas City, and beyond runs approximately parallel to that river, but south of it, through Nebraska, Dakota and Montana, and Washington, where it meets the coast north of Columbia river. Within this boundary nearly the half of North America was buried beneath a thick sheet of ice, flowing more or less radiately outwards from a central region situated in and about the region of Hudson Bay.

The co-existence of two continental ice-caps, one on each side of the Atlantic Ocean, is a sufficiently impressive fact, and that the Ocean itself enjoyed no immunity from the rigours of the time is shown by the discovery of boulders, which appear to have been carried by ice, in close proximity to the Azores (about lat. 38° N.) A review of the evidence may fairly lead us to conclude that a general lowering of the temperature, probably to the extent of about 5° C, affected the whole of that part of the Northern hemisphere which lies outside the Tropic of Cancer.

Ancient Glaciation in the Southern Hemisphere.—A similar fall of temperature seems to have affected the Southern hemisphere. If we turn to our antipodes we discover obvious signs of the former existence of glaciers in the Kosciusko plateau or Muniong range of New South Wales (lat. 36° 22′ S., height 7,328 ft.). The snow-fields on the watershed gave birth to glaciers which flowed down the valleys on each side; to the west to a level of at most 6,300 ft., to the east of 5,800 or perhaps 5,500 ft. The largest of these glaciers was only a few hundred feet in thickness and three miles in length. The facts observed in the Kosciusko plateau indicate a former lowering of the snow-line to the extent of 2,200 to 2,700 ft.

In Tasmania, the former existence of Pleistocene glaciers has long been known, and they point to a lowering of the snow-line to the extent of 4,000 ft.

New Zealand differs from Australia and Tasmania, inasmuch as many great glaciers still move down the valleys of its lofty mountains, the Southern Alps, and reach in some cases to within 610 ft. of the existing sea; but it presents similar evidence of an ancient extension of the ice, and of a lowering of the snow-line by some 3,000 or 4,000 ft.

After a careful consideration of all the facts, Penck concludes that the descent of the snow-line during the glacial epoch was approximately the same in both hemispheres, i.e. between 3,000 and 4,000 ft.

So far no indications of a Pleistocene glaciation have been observed in South Africa, but the southernmost extremity of the Cape lies north of Mount Kosciusko, the most northerly point of Australia at which glacial markings have been recognised, so that this perhaps is only what might have been expected; but in South America, which extends farther towards the pole, they are once more manifest; boulder clay and erratic blocks are widely distributed over the plains of Tierra del Fuego and South Patagonia. After a survey of the evidence Moreno remarks: In Patagonia an immense ice-sheet extended to the present Atlantic coast, and farther east, during the first ice period; while, during the second, terminal moraines . . [were] . . left as far as thirty miles north and fifty miles south to the east of the present crest of the Cordillera. And Steinmann, in summarising the results of his observations, remarks: "Where the ice extended over the plain in a great mer de glace, as near as the Strait of Magellan, the glacial formations correspond with those of North Germany or the lake region of North America. Where it flowed through deep valleys into the sea, as in the Patagonian archipelago, it repeats the fjord landscape of Norway or Alaska. In the well-watered parts of the Cordillera of Central Patagonia and South Chili, marginal lakes occur, with the same characters as those of the Swiss Alps, bordered by terminal moraines of no great height."

Ancient Glaciation in the Tropics.—If the temperate regions of both hemispheres experienced a lowering of temperature at all approaching 5° C. the tropics themselves could scarcely remain unaffected, and we might expect to find some signs of a colder climate even in the torrid zone. Though these signs are to be sought in regions which are difficult of access and rarely visited by skilled observers, yet an increasing body of evidence shows that they actually exist. In South America "traces left by the Ice age extend along the whole mountain chain from Cape Horn (lat. 56° S.) up