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Title: Prehistoric Men

Author: Robert J. (Robert John) Braidwood

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PREHISTORIC MEN

by

ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD

Research Associate, Old World Prehistory

Professor

Oriental Institute and Department of Anthropology

University of Chicago

Drawings by Susan T. Richert

[Illustration]

Chicago Natural History Museum

Popular Series

Anthropology, Number 37

Third Edition Issued in Co-operation with

The Oriental Institute, The University of Chicago

Edited by Lillian A. Ross

Printed in the United States of America

by Chicago Natural History Museum Press

Copyright 1948, 1951, and 1957 by Chicago Natural History Museum

First edition 1948

Second edition 1951

Third edition 1957

Fourth edition 1959

Preface

[Illustration]

Like the writing of most professional archeologists, mine has been

confined to so-called learned papers. Good, bad, or indifferent, these

papers were in a jargon that only my colleagues and a few advanced

students could understand. Hence, when I was asked to do this little

book, I soon found it extremely difficult to say what I meant in simple

fashion. The style is new to me, but I hope the reader will not find it

forced or pedantic; at least I have done my very best to tell the story

simply and clearly.

Many friends have aided in the preparation of the book. The whimsical

charm of Miss Susan Richert’s illustrations add enormously to the

spirit I wanted. She gave freely of her own time on the drawings and

in planning the book with me. My colleagues at the University of

Chicago, especially Professor Wilton M. Krogman (now of the University

of Pennsylvania), and also Mrs. Linda Braidwood, Associate of the

Oriental Institute, and Professors Fay-Cooper Cole and Sol Tax, of

the Department of Anthropology, gave me counsel in matters bearing on

their special fields, and the Department of Anthropology bore some of

the expense of the illustrations. From Mrs. Irma Hunter and Mr. Arnold

Maremont, who are not archeologists at all and have only an intelligent

layman’s notion of archeology, I had sound advice on how best to tell

the story. I am deeply indebted to all these friends.

While I was preparing the second edition, I had the great fortune

to be able to rework the third chapter with Professor Sherwood L.

Washburn, now of the Department of Anthropology of the University of

California, and the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters with Professor

Hallum L. Movius, Jr., of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. The

book has gained greatly in accuracy thereby. In matters of dating,

Professor Movius and the indications of Professor W. F. Libby’s Carbon

14 chronology project have both encouraged me to choose the lowest

dates now current for the events of the Pleistocene Ice Age. There is

still no certain way of fixing a direct chronology for most of the

Pleistocene, but Professor Libby’s method appears very promising for

its end range and for proto-historic dates. In any case, this book

names “periods,” and new dates may be written in against mine, if new

and better dating systems appear.

I wish to thank Dr. Clifford C. Gregg, Director of Chicago Natural

History Museum, for the opportunity to publish this book. My old

friend, Dr. Paul S. Martin, Chief Curator in the Department of

Anthropology, asked me to undertake the job and inspired me to complete

it. I am also indebted to Miss Lillian A. Ross, Associate Editor of

Scientific Publications, and to Mr. George I. Quimby, Curator of

Exhibits in Anthropology, for all the time they have given me in

getting the manuscript into proper shape.

ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD

_June 15, 1950_

Preface to the Third Edition

In preparing the enlarged third edition, many of the above mentioned

friends have again helped me. I have picked the brains of Professor F.

Clark Howell of the Department of Anthropology of the University of

Chicago in reworking the earlier chapters, and he was very patient in

the matter, which I sincerely appreciate.

All of Mrs. Susan Richert Allen’s original drawings appear, but a few

necessary corrections have been made in some of the charts and some new

drawings have been added by Mr. John Pfiffner, Staff Artist, Chicago

Natural History Museum.

ROBERT J. BRAIDWOOD

_March 1, 1959_

Contents

PAGE

How We Learn about Prehistoric Men 7

The Changing World in Which Prehistoric Men Lived 17

Prehistoric Men Themselves 22

Cultural Beginnings 38

More Evidence of Culture 56

Early Moderns 70

End and Prelude 92

The First Revolution 121

The Conquest of Civilization 144

End of Prehistory 162

Summary 176

List of Books 180

Index 184

HOW WE LEARN about Prehistoric Men

[Illustration]

Prehistory means the time before written history began. Actually, more

than 99 per cent of man’s story is prehistory. Man is at least half a

million years old, but he did not begin to write history (or to write

anything) until about 5,000 years ago.

The men who lived in prehistoric times left us no history books, but

they did unintentionally leave a record of their presence and their way

of life. This record is studied and interpreted by different kinds of

scientists.

SCIENTISTS WHO FIND OUT ABOUT PREHISTORIC MEN

The scientists who study the bones and teeth and any other parts

they find of the bodies of prehistoric men, are called _physical

anthropologists_. Physical anthropologists are trained, much like

doctors, to know all about the human body. They study living people,

too; they know more about the biological facts of human “races” than

anybody else. If the police find a badly decayed body in a trunk,

they ask a physical anthropologist to tell them what the person

originally looked like. The physical anthropologists who specialize in

prehistoric men work with fossils, so they are sometimes called _human

paleontologists_.

ARCHEOLOGISTS

There is a kind of scientist who studies the things that prehistoric

men made and did. Such a scientist is called an _archeologist_. It is

the archeologist’s business to look for the stone and metal tools, the

pottery, the graves, and the caves or huts of the men who lived before

history began.

But there is more to archeology than just looking for things. In

Professor V. Gordon Childe’s words, archeology “furnishes a sort of

history of human activity, provided always that the actions have

produced concrete results and left recognizable material traces.” You

will see that there are at least three points in what Childe says:

1. The archeologists have to find the traces of things left behind by

ancient man, and

2. Only a few objects may be found, for most of these were probably

too soft or too breakable to last through the years. However,

3. The archeologist must use whatever he can find to tell a story--to

make a “sort of history”--from the objects and living-places and

graves that have escaped destruction.

What I mean is this: Let us say you are walking through a dump yard,

and you find a rusty old spark plug. If you want to think about what

the spark plug means, you quickly remember that it is a part of an

automobile motor. This tells you something about the man who threw

the spark plug on the dump. He either had an automobile, or he knew

or lived near someone who did. He can’t have lived so very long ago,

you’ll remember, because spark plugs and automobiles are only about

sixty years old.

When you think about the old spark plug in this way you have

just been making the beginnings of what we call an archeological

_interpretation_; you have been making the spark plug tell a story.

It is the same way with the man-made things we archeologists find

and put in museums. Usually, only a few of these objects are pretty

to look at; but each of them has some sort of story to tell. Making

the interpretation of his finds is the most important part of the

archeologist’s job. It is the way he gets at the “sort of history of

human activity” which is expected of archeology.

SOME OTHER SCIENTISTS

There are many other scientists who help the archeologist and the

physical anthropologist find out about prehistoric men. The geologists

help us tell the age of the rocks or caves or gravel beds in which

human bones or man-made objects are found. There are other scientists

with names which all begin with “paleo” (the Greek word for “old”). The

_paleontologists_ study fossil animals. There are also, for example,

such scientists as _paleobotanists_ and _paleoclimatologists_, who

study ancient plants and climates. These scientists help us to know

the kinds of animals and plants that were living in prehistoric times

and so could be used for food by ancient man; what the weather was

like; and whether there were glaciers. Also, when I tell you that

prehistoric men did not appear until long after the great dinosaurs had

disappeared, I go on the say-so of the paleontologists. They know that

fossils of men and of dinosaurs are not found in the same geological

period. The dinosaur fossils come in early periods, the fossils of men

much later.

Since World War II even the atomic scientists have been helping the

archeologists. By testing the amount of radioactivity left in charcoal,

wood, or other vegetable matter obtained from archeological sites, they

have been able to date the sites. Shell has been used also, and even

the hair of Egyptian mummies. The dates of geological and climatic

events have also been discovered. Some of this work has been done from

drillings taken from the bottom of the sea.

This dating by radioactivity has considerably shortened the dates which

the archeologists used to give. If you find that some of the dates

I give here are more recent than the dates you see in other books

on prehistory, it is because I am using one of the new lower dating

systems.

[Illustration: RADIOCARBON CHART

The rate of disappearance of radioactivity as time passes.[1]]

[1] It is important that the limitations of the radioactive carbon

“dating” system be held in mind. As the statistics involved in

the system are used, there are two chances in three that the

“date” of the sample falls within the range given as plus or

minus an added number of years. For example, the “date” for the

Jarmo village (see chart), given as 6750 ± 200 B.C., really

means that there are only two chances in three that the real

date of the charcoal sampled fell between 6950 and 6550 B.C.

We have also begun to suspect that there are ways in which the

samples themselves may have become “contaminated,” either on

the early or on the late side. We now tend to be suspicious of

single radioactive carbon determinations, or of determinations

from one site alone. But as a fabric of consistent

determinations for several or more sites of one archeological

period, we gain confidence in the “dates.”

HOW THE SCIENTISTS FIND OUT

So far, this chapter has been mainly about the people who find out

about prehistoric men. We also need a word about _how_ they find out.

All our finds came by accident until about a hundred years ago. Men

digging wells, or digging in caves for fertilizer, often turned up

ancient swords or pots or stone arrowheads. People also found some odd

pieces of stone that didn’t look like natural forms, but they also

didn’t look like any known tool. As a result, the people who found them

gave them queer names; for example, “thunderbolts.” The people thought

the strange stones came to earth as bolts of lightning. We know now

that these strange stones were prehistoric stone tools.

Many important finds still come to us by accident. In 1935, a British

dentist, A. T. Marston, found the first of two fragments of a very

important fossil human skull, in a gravel pit at Swanscombe, on the

River Thames, England. He had to wait nine months, until the face of

the gravel pit had been dug eight yards farther back, before the second

fragment appeared. They fitted! Then, twenty years later, still another

piece appeared. In 1928 workmen who were blasting out rock for the

breakwater in the port of Haifa began to notice flint tools. Thus the

story of cave men on Mount Carmel, in Palestine, began to be known.

Planned archeological digging is only about a century old. Even before

this, however, a few men realized the significance of objects they dug

from the ground; one of these early archeologists was our own Thomas

Jefferson. The first real mound-digger was a German grocer’s clerk,

Heinrich Schliemann. Schliemann made a fortune as a merchant, first

in Europe and then in the California gold-rush of 1849. He became an

American citizen. Then he retired and had both money and time to test

an old idea of his. He believed that the heroes of ancient Troy and

Mycenae were once real Trojans and Greeks. He proved it by going to

Turkey and Greece and digging up the remains of both cities.

Schliemann had the great good fortune to find rich and spectacular

treasures, and he also had the common sense to keep notes and make

descriptions of what he found. He proved beyond doubt that many ancient

city mounds can be _stratified_. This means that there may be the

remains of many towns in a mound, one above another, like layers in a

cake.

You might like to have an idea of how mounds come to be in layers.

The original settlers may have chosen the spot because it had a good

spring and there were good fertile lands nearby, or perhaps because

it was close to some road or river or harbor. These settlers probably

built their town of stone and mud-brick. Finally, something would have

happened to the town--a flood, or a burning, or a raid by enemies--and

the walls of the houses would have fallen in or would have melted down

as mud in the rain. Nothing would have remained but the mud and debris

of a low mound of _one_ layer.

The second settlers would have wanted the spot for the same reasons

the first settlers did--good water, land, and roads. Also, the second

settlers would have found a nice low mound to build their houses on,

a protection from floods. But again, something would finally have

happened to the second town, and the walls of _its_ houses would have

come tumbling down. This makes the _second_ layer. And so on....

In Syria I once had the good fortune to dig on a large mound that had

no less than fifteen layers. Also, most of the layers were thick, and

there were signs of rebuilding and repairs within each layer. The mound

was more than a hundred feet high. In each layer, the building material

used had been a soft, unbaked mud-brick, and most of the debris

consisted of fallen or rain-melted mud from these mud-bricks.

This idea of _stratification_, like the cake layers, was already a

familiar one to the geologists by Schliemann’s time. They could show

that their lowest layer of rock was oldest or earliest, and that the

overlying layers became more recent as one moved upward. Schliemann’s

digging proved the same thing at Troy. His first (lowest and earliest)

city had at least nine layers above it; he thought that the second

layer contained the remains of Homer’s Troy. We now know that Homeric

Troy was layer VIIa from the bottom; also, we count eleven layers or

sub-layers in total.

Schliemann’s work marks the beginnings of modern archeology. Scholars

soon set out to dig on ancient sites, from Egypt to Central America.

ARCHEOLOGICAL INFORMATION

As time went on, the study of archeological materials--found either

by accident or by digging on purpose--began to show certain things.

Archeologists began to get ideas as to the kinds of objects that

belonged together. If you compared a mail-order catalogue of 1890 with

one of today, you would see a lot of differences. If you really studied

the two catalogues hard, you would also begin to see that certain

objects “go together.” Horseshoes and metal buggy tires and pieces of

harness would begin to fit into a picture with certain kinds of coal

stoves and furniture and china dishes and kerosene lamps. Our friend

the spark plug, and radios and electric refrigerators and light bulbs

would fit into a picture with different kinds of furniture and dishes

and tools. You won’t be old enough to remember the kind of hats that

women wore in 1890, but you’ve probably seen pictures of them, and you

know very well they couldn’t be worn with the fashions of today.

This is one of the ways that archeologists study their materials.

The various tools and weapons and jewelry, the pottery, the kinds

of houses, and even the ways of burying the dead tend to fit into

pictures. Some archeologists call all of the things that go together to

make such a picture an _assemblage_. The assemblage of the first layer

of Schliemann’s Troy was as different from that of the seventh layer as

our 1900 mail-order catalogue is from the one of today.

The archeologists who came after Schliemann began to notice other

things and to compare them with occurrences in modern times. The

idea that people will buy better mousetraps goes back into very

ancient times. Today, if we make good automobiles or radios, we can

sell some of them in Turkey or even in Timbuktu. This means that a

few present-day types of American automobiles and radios form part

of present-day “assemblages” in both Turkey and Timbuktu. The total

present-day “assemblage” of Turkey is quite different from that of

Timbuktu or that of America, but they have at least some automobiles

and some radios in common.

Now these automobiles and radios will eventually wear out. Let us

suppose we could go to some remote part of Turkey or to Timbuktu in a

dream. We don’t know what the date is, in our dream, but we see all

sorts of strange things and ways of living in both places. Nobody

tells us what the date is. But suddenly we see a 1936 Ford; so we

know that in our dream it has to be at least the year 1936, and only

as many years after that as we could reasonably expect a Ford to keep

in running order. The Ford would probably break down in twenty years’

time, so the Turkish or Timbuktu “assemblage” we’re seeing in our dream

has to date at about A.D. 1936-56.

Archeologists not only “date” their ancient materials in this way; they

also see over what distances and between which peoples trading was

done. It turns out that there was a good deal of trading in ancient

times, probably all on a barter and exchange basis.

EVERYTHING BEGINS TO FIT TOGETHER

Now we need to pull these ideas all together and see the complicated

structure the archeologists can build with their materials.

Even the earliest archeologists soon found that there was a very long

range of prehistoric time which would yield only very simple things.

For this very long early part of prehistory, there was little to be

found but the flint tools which wandering, hunting and gathering

people made, and the bones of the wild animals they ate. Toward the

end of prehistoric time there was a general settling down with the

coming of agriculture, and all sorts of new things began to be made.

Archeologists soon got a general notion of what ought to appear with

what. Thus, it would upset a French prehistorian digging at the bottom

of a very early cave if he found a fine bronze sword, just as much as

it would upset him if he found a beer bottle. The people of his very

early cave layer simply could not have made bronze swords, which came

later, just as do beer bottles. Some accidental disturbance of the

layers of his cave must have happened.

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.

Prehistoric Men THEMSELVES

[Illustration]

DO WE KNOW WHERE MAN ORIGINATED?

For a long time some scientists thought the “cradle of mankind” was in

central Asia. Other scientists insisted it was in Africa, and still

others said it might have been in Europe. Actually, we don’t know

where it was. We don’t even know that there was only _one_ “cradle.”

If we had to choose a “cradle” at this moment, we would probably say

Africa. But the southern portions of Asia and Europe may also have been

included in the general area. The scene of the early development of

mankind was certainly the Old World. It is pretty certain men didn’t

reach North or South America until almost the end of the Ice Age--had

they done so earlier we would certainly have found some trace of them

by now.

The earliest tools we have yet found come from central and south

Africa. By the dating system I’m using, these tools must be over

500,000 years old. There are now reports that a few such early tools

have been found--at the Sterkfontein cave in South Africa--along with

the bones of small fossil men called “australopithecines.”

Not all scientists would agree that the australopithecines were “men,”

or would agree that the tools were made by the australopithecines

themselves. For these sticklers, the earliest bones of men come from

the island of Java. The date would be about 450,000 years ago. So far,

we have not yet found the tools which we suppose these earliest men in

the Far East must have made.

Let me say it another way. How old are the earliest traces of men we

now have? Over half a million years. This was a time when the first

alpine glaciation was happening in the north. What has been found so

far? The tools which the men of those times made, in different parts

of Africa. It is now fairly generally agreed that the “men” who made

the tools were the australopithecines. There is also a more “man-like”

jawbone at Kanam in Kenya, but its find-spot has been questioned. The

next earliest bones we have were found in Java, and they may be almost

a hundred thousand years younger than the earliest African finds. We

haven’t yet found the tools of these early Javanese. Our knowledge of

tool-using in Africa spreads quickly as time goes on: soon after the

appearance of tools in the south we shall have them from as far north

as Algeria.

Very soon after the earliest Javanese come the bones of slightly more

developed people in Java, and the jawbone of a man who once lived in

what is now Germany. The same general glacial beds which yielded the

later Javanese bones and the German jawbone also include tools. These

finds come from the time of the second alpine glaciation.

So this is the situation. By the time of the end of the second alpine

or first continental glaciation (say 400,000 years ago) we have traces

of men from the extremes of the more southerly portions of the Old

World--South Africa, eastern Asia, and western Europe. There are also

some traces of men in the middle ground. In fact, Professor Franz

Weidenreich believed that creatures who were the immediate ancestors

of men had already spread over Europe, Africa, and Asia by the time

the Ice Age began. We certainly have no reason to disbelieve this, but

fortunate accidents of discovery have not yet given us the evidence to

prove it.

MEN AND APES

Many people used to get extremely upset at the ill-formed notion

that “man descended from the apes.” Such words were much more likely

to start fights or “monkey trials” than the correct notion that all

living animals, including man, ascended or evolved from a single-celled

organism which lived in the primeval seas hundreds of millions of years

ago. Men are mammals, of the order called Primates, and man’s living

relatives are the great apes. Men didn’t “descend” from the apes or

apes from men, and mankind must have had much closer relatives who have

since become extinct.

Men stand erect. They also walk and run on their two feet. Apes are

happiest in trees, swinging with their arms from branch to branch.

Few branches of trees will hold the mighty gorilla, although he still

manages to sleep in trees. Apes can’t stand really erect in our sense,

and when they have to run on the ground, they use the knuckles of their

hands as well as their feet.

A key group of fossil bones here are the south African

australopithecines. These are called the _Australopithecinae_ or

“man-apes” or sometimes even “ape-men.” We do not _know_ that they were

directly ancestral to men but they can hardly have been so to apes.

Presently I’ll describe them a bit more. The reason I mention them

here is that while they had brains no larger than those of apes, their

hipbones were enough like ours so that they must have stood erect.

There is no good reason to think they couldn’t have walked as we do.

BRAINS, HANDS, AND TOOLS

Whether the australopithecines were our ancestors or not, the proper

ancestors of men must have been able to stand erect and to walk on

their two feet. Three further important things probably were involved,

next, before they could become men proper. These are:

1. The increasing size and development of the brain.

2. The increasing usefulness (specialization) of the thumb and hand.

3. The use of tools.

Nobody knows which of these three is most important, or which came

first. Most probably the growth of all three things was very much

blended together. If you think about each of the things, you will see

what I mean. Unless your hand is more flexible than a paw, and your

thumb will work against (or oppose) your fingers, you can’t hold a tool

very well. But you wouldn’t get the idea of using a tool unless you had

enough brain to help you see cause and effect. And it is rather hard to

see how your hand and brain would develop unless they had something to

practice on--like using tools. In Professor Krogman’s words, “the hand

must become the obedient servant of the eye and the brain.” It is the

_co-ordination_ of these things that counts.

Many other things must have been happening to the bodies of the

creatures who were the ancestors of men. Our ancestors had to develop

organs of speech. More than that, they had to get the idea of letting

_certain sounds_ made with these speech organs have _certain meanings_.

All this must have gone very slowly. Probably everything was developing

little by little, all together. Men became men very slowly.

WHEN SHALL WE CALL MEN MEN?

What do I mean when I say “men”? People who looked pretty much as we

do, and who used different tools to do different things, are men to me.

We’ll probably never know whether the earliest ones talked or not. They

probably had vocal cords, so they could make sounds, but did they know

how to make sounds work as symbols to carry meanings? But if the fossil

bones look like our skeletons, and if we find tools which we’ll agree

couldn’t have been made by nature or by animals, then I’d say we had

traces of _men_.

The australopithecine finds of the Transvaal and Bechuanaland, in

south Africa, are bound to come into the discussion here. I’ve already

told you that the australopithecines could have stood upright and

walked on their two hind legs. They come from the very base of the

Pleistocene or Ice Age, and a few coarse stone tools have been found

with the australopithecine fossils. But there are three varieties

of the australopithecines and they last on until a time equal to

that of the second alpine glaciation. They are the best suggestion

we have yet as to what the ancestors of men _may_ have looked like.

They were certainly closer to men than to apes. Although their brain

size was no larger than the brains of modern apes their body size and

stature were quite small; hence, relative to their small size, their

brains were large. We have not been able to prove without doubt that

the australopithecines were _tool-making_ creatures, even though the

recent news has it that tools have been found with australopithecine

bones. The doubt as to whether the australopithecines used the tools

themselves goes like this--just suppose some man-like creature (whose

bones we have not yet found) made the tools and used them to kill

and butcher australopithecines. Hence a few experts tend to let

australopithecines still hang in limbo as “man-apes.”

THE EARLIEST MEN WE KNOW

I’ll postpone talking about the tools of early men until the next

chapter. The men whose bones were the earliest of the Java lot have

been given the name _Meganthropus_. The bones are very fragmentary. We

would not understand them very well unless we had the somewhat later

Javanese lot--the more commonly known _Pithecanthropus_ or “Java

man”--against which to refer them for study. One of the less well-known

and earliest fragments, a piece of lower jaw and some teeth, rather

strongly resembles the lower jaws and teeth of the australopithecine

type. Was _Meganthropus_ a sort of half-way point between the

australopithecines and _Pithecanthropus_? It is still too early to say.

We shall need more finds before we can be definite one way or the other.

Java man, _Pithecanthropus_, comes from geological beds equal in age

to the latter part of the second alpine glaciation; the _Meganthropus_

finds refer to beds of the beginning of this glaciation. The first

finds of Java man were made in 1891-92 by Dr. Eugene Dubois, a Dutch

doctor in the colonial service. Finds have continued to be made. There

are now bones enough to account for four skulls. There are also four

jaws and some odd teeth and thigh bones. Java man, generally speaking,

was about five feet six inches tall, and didn’t hold his head very

erect. His skull was very thick and heavy and had room for little more

than two-thirds as large a brain as we have. He had big teeth and a big

jaw and enormous eyebrow ridges.

No tools were found in the geological deposits where bones of Java man

appeared. There are some tools in the same general area, but they come

a bit later in time. One reason we accept the Java man as man--aside

from his general anatomical appearance--is that these tools probably

belonged to his near descendants.

Remember that there are several varieties of men in the whole early

Java lot, at least two of which are earlier than the _Pithecanthropus_,

“Java man.” Some of the earlier ones seem to have gone in for

bigness, in tooth-size at least. _Meganthropus_ is one of these

earlier varieties. As we said, he _may_ turn out to be a link to

the australopithecines, who _may_ or _may not_ be ancestral to men.

_Meganthropus_ is best understandable in terms of _Pithecanthropus_,

who appeared later in the same general area. _Pithecanthropus_ is

pretty well understandable from the bones he left us, and also because

of his strong resemblance to the fully tool-using cave-dwelling “Peking

man,” _Sinanthropus_, about whom we shall talk next. But you can see

that the physical anthropologists and prehistoric archeologists still

have a lot of work to do on the problem of earliest men.

PEKING MEN AND SOME EARLY WESTERNERS

The earliest known Chinese are called _Sinanthropus_, or “Peking man,”

because the finds were made near that city. In World War II, the United

States Marine guard at our Embassy in Peking tried to help get the

bones out of the city before the Japanese attack. Nobody knows where

these bones are now. The Red Chinese accuse us of having stolen them.

They were last seen on a dock-side at a Chinese port. But should you

catch a Marine with a sack of old bones, perhaps we could achieve peace

in Asia by returning them! Fortunately, there is a complete set of

casts of the bones.

Peking man lived in a cave in a limestone hill, made tools, cracked

animal bones to get the marrow out, and used fire. Incidentally, the

bones of Peking man were found because Chinese dig for what they call

“dragon bones” and “dragon teeth.” Uneducated Chinese buy these things

in their drug stores and grind them into powder for medicine. The

“dragon teeth” and “bones” are really fossils of ancient animals, and

sometimes of men. The people who supply the drug stores have learned

where to dig for strange bones and teeth. Paleontologists who get to

China go to the drug stores to buy fossils. In a roundabout way, this

is how the fallen-in cave of Peking man at Choukoutien was discovered.

Peking man was not quite as tall as Java man but he probably stood

straighter. His skull looked very much like that of the Java skull

except that it had room for a slightly larger brain. His face was less

brutish than was Java man’s face, but this isn’t saying much.

Peking man dates from early in the interglacial period following the

second alpine glaciation. He probably lived close to 350,000 years

ago. There are several finds to account for in Europe by about this

time, and one from northwest Africa. The very large jawbone found

near Heidelberg in Germany is doubtless even earlier than Peking man.

The beds where it was found are of second alpine glacial times, and

recently some tools have been said to have come from the same beds.

There is not much I need tell you about the Heidelberg jaw save that it

seems certainly to have belonged to an early man, and that it is very

big.

Another find in Germany was made at Steinheim. It consists of the

fragmentary skull of a man. It is very important because of its

relative completeness, but it has not yet been fully studied. The bone

is thick, but the back of the head is neither very low nor primitive,

and the face is also not primitive. The forehead does, however, have

big ridges over the eyes. The more fragmentary skull from Swanscombe in

England (p. 11) has been much more carefully studied. Only the top and

back of that skull have been found. Since the skull rounds up nicely,

it has been assumed that the face and forehead must have been quite

“modern.” Careful comparison with Steinheim shows that this was not

necessarily so. This is important because it bears on the question of

how early truly “modern” man appeared.

Recently two fragmentary jaws were found at Ternafine in Algeria,

northwest Africa. They look like the jaws of Peking man. Tools were

found with them. Since no jaws have yet been found at Steinheim or

Swanscombe, but the time is the same, one wonders if these people had

jaws like those of Ternafine.

WHAT HAPPENED TO JAVA AND PEKING MEN

Professor Weidenreich thought that there were at least a dozen ways in

which the Peking man resembled the modern Mongoloids. This would seem

to indicate that Peking man was really just a very early Chinese.

Several later fossil men have been found in the Java-Australian area.

The best known of these is the so-called Solo man. There are some finds

from Australia itself which we now know to be quite late. But it looks

as if we may assume a line of evolution from Java man down to the

modern Australian natives. During parts of the Ice Age there was a land

bridge all the way from Java to Australia.

TWO ENGLISHMEN WHO WEREN’T OLD

The older textbooks contain descriptions of two English finds which

were thought to be very old. These were called Piltdown (_Eoanthropus

dawsoni_) and Galley Hill. The skulls were very modern in appearance.

In 1948-49, British scientists began making chemical tests which proved

that neither of these finds is very old. It is now known that both

“Piltdown man” and the tools which were said to have been found with

him were part of an elaborate fake!

TYPICAL “CAVE MEN”

The next men we have to talk about are all members of a related group.

These are the Neanderthal group. “Neanderthal man” himself was found in

the Neander Valley, near Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1856. He was the first

human fossil to be recognized as such.

[Illustration: PRINCIPAL KNOWN TYPES OF FOSSIL MEN

CRO-MAGNON

NEANDERTHAL

MODERN SKULL

COMBE-CAPELLE

SINANTHROPUS

PITHECANTHROPUS]