The Stone Age
Admiral Fitzroy adduces the following striking facts strongly bearing on the great geological inquiry of “Flint Tools,” and “Implements in the Drift.”
Tierra del Fuego, with its innumerable islands and rocky islets, like mountain ranges half sunk in ocean, combines every variety of aspect—storm-beaten rocky summits, several thousand feet above the sea—glaciers so extensive that the eye cannot trace their limits—densely wooded hillsides—grand cascades and sheltered sandy coves,—altogether such a combination of Swiss, Norwegian, and Greenland scenery as can hardly be realized or believed to exist near Cape Horn. Yet, even there—by lake-like waters, though so near the wildest of oceans—thousands of savages exist, and migrate in bark canoes!
In 1830 four of those aborigines were brought to England. In 1833 three of them were restored to their native places (one having died). They had then acquired enough of our language to talk about common things. From their information and our own sight are the following facts:—The natives of Tierra del Fuego use stone tools, flint knives, arrow and spear heads of flint or volcanic glass, for cutting bark for canoes, flesh, blubber, sinews, and spears, knocking shell-fish off rocks, breaking large shells, killing guanacoes (in time of deep snow), and for weapons. In every sheltered cove where wigwams are placed, heaps of refuse—shells and stones, offal and bones—are invariably found. Often they appear very old, being covered deeply with wind-driven sand, or water-washed soil, on which there is a growth of vegetation. These are like the “kitchen middens” of the so-called “stone age” in Scandinavia.
No human bones would be found in them (unless dogs had dragged some there), because the dead bodies are sunk in deep water with large stones, or burnt. These heaps are from six to ten feet high, and from ten or twenty to more than fifty yards in length. All savages in the present day use stone tools, not only in Tierra del Fuego, but in Australia, Polynesia, Northernmost America, and Arctic Asia. In any former ages of the world, wherever savages spread, as radiating from some centre, similar habits and means of existence must have been prevalent; therefore casual discovery of such traces of human migration, buried in or under masses of water-moved detritus, may seem scarcely sufficient to define a so-called “stone age.”