The End of the Stone Age
The struggle to keep alive during the cold period was terrible. Many races of men and animals, whose bones we have found, disappeared from the face of the earth.
Whole tribes and clans were wiped out by hunger and cold and want. First the children would die and then the parents. The old people were left to the mercy of the wild animals who hastened to occupy the undefended cave. Until another change in the climate or the slowly decreasing moisture of the air made life impossible for these wild invaders and forced them to find a retreat in the heart of the African jungle where they have lived ever since.
This part of my history is very difficult because the changes which I must describe were so very slow and so very gradual.
Nature is never in a hurry. She has all eternity in which to accomplish her task and she can afford to bring about the necessary changes with deliberate care.
Prehistoric man lived through at least four definite eras when the ice descended far down into the valleys and covered the greater part of the European continent.
The last one of these periods came to an end almost thirty thousand years ago.
From that moment on man left behind him concrete evidence of his existence in the form of tools and arms and pictures and in a general way we can say that history begins when the last cold period had become a thing of the past.
The endless struggle for life had taught the survivors many things.
Stone and wooden implements had become as common as steel tools are in our own days.
Gradually the rudely chipped flint axe had been replaced by one of polished flint which was infinitely more practical. It allowed man to attack many animals at whose mercy he had been since the beginning of time.
The mammoth was no longer seen.
The musk-ox had retreated to the polar circle.
The tiger had left Europe for good.
The cave-bear no longer ate little children.
The powerful brain of the weakest and most helpless of all living creatures—Man—had devised such terrible instruments of destruction that he was now the master of all the other animals.
The first great victory over Nature had been gained but many others were to follow.
Equipped with a full set of tools both for hunting and fishing, the cave-dweller looked for new living quarters.
The shores of rivers and lakes offered the best opportunity for a regular livelihood.
The old caves were deserted and the human race moved toward the water.
Now that man could handle heavy axes, the felling of trees no longer offered any great difficulties.
For countless ages birds had been constructing comfortable houses out of chips of wood and grass amidst the branches of trees.
Man followed their example.
He, too, built himself a nest and called it his “home.”
He did not, except in a few parts of Asia, take to the trees which were a bit too small and unsteady for his purpose.
He cut down a number of logs. These he drove firmly into the soft bottom of a shallow lake. On top of them he constructed a wooden platform and upon this platform he erected his first wooden house.
It offered many advantages over the old cave.
No wild animals could break into it and robbers could not enter it. The lake itself was an inexhaustible store-room containing an endless supply of fresh fish.
These houses built on piles were much healthier than the old caves and they gave the children a chance to grow up into strong men. The population increased steadily and man began to occupy vast tracts of wilderness which had been unoccupied since the beginning of time.
And all the time new inventions were made which made life more comfortable and less dangerous.
Often enough these innovations were not due to the cleverness of man’s brain.
He simply copied the animals.
You know of course that there are a large number of beasties who prepare for the long winter by burying nuts and acorns and other food which is abundant during the summer. Just think of the squirrels who are for ever filling their larder in gardens and parks with supplies for the winter and the early spring.
Early man, less intelligent in many respects than the squirrels, had not known how to preserve anything for the future.
He ate until his hunger was stilled, but what he did not need right away he allowed to rot. As a result he often went without his meals during the cold period and many of his children died from hunger and want.
Until he followed the example of the animals and prepared for the future by laying in sufficient stores when the harvest had been good and there was an abundance of wheat and grain.
We do not know which genius first discovered the use of pottery but he deserves a statue.
Very likely it was a woman who had got tired of the eternal chores of the kitchen and wanted to make her household duties a little less exacting. She noticed that chunks of clay, when exposed to the rays of the sun, got baked into a hard substance.
If a flat piece of clay could be transformed into a brick, a slightly curved piece of the same material must produce a similar result.
And behold, the brick grew into a piece of pottery and the human race was able to save for the day of tomorrow.
If you think that my praises of this invention are exaggerated, look at the breakfast table and see what pottery, in one form and the other, means in your own life.
Your oatmeal is served in a dish.
The cream is served from a pitcher.
Your eggs are carried from the kitchen to the dining-room table on a plate.
Your milk is brought to you in a china mug. Then go to the store-room (if there is no store-room in your house go to the nearest Delicatessen store). You will see how all the things which we are supposed to eat tomorrow and next week and next year have been put away in jars and cans and other artificial containers which Nature did not provide for us but which man was forced to invent and perfect before he could be assured of his regular meals all the year around.
Even a gas-tank is nothing but a large pitcher, made of iron because iron does not break as easily as china and is less porous than clay. So are barrels and bottles and pots and pans. They all serve the same purpose—of providing us in the future with those things of which we happen to have an abundance at the present moment.
And because he could preserve eatable things for the day of need, man began to raise vegetables and grain and saved the surplus for future consumption.
This explains why, during the late Stone Age, we find the first wheat-fields and the first gardens, grouped around the settlements of the early pile-dwellers.
It also tells us why man gave up his habit of wandering and settled down in one fixed spot where he raised his children until the day of his death when he was decently buried among his own people.
It is safe to say that these earliest ancestors of ours would have given up the ways of savages of their own accord if they had been left to their fate.
But suddenly there was an end to their isolation.
Prehistoric man was discovered.
A traveler from the unknown south-land who had dared to cross the turbulent sea and the forbidding mountain passes had found his way to the wild people of Central Europe.
On his back he carried a pack.
When he had spread his wares before the gaping curiosity of the bewildered natives, their eyes beheld wonders of which their minds had never dared to dream.
They saw bronze hammers and axes and tools made of iron and helmets made of copper and beautiful ornaments consisting of a strangely colored substance which the foreign visitor called “glass.”
And overnight the Age of Stone came to an end.
It was replaced by a new civilization which had discarded wooden and stone implements centuries before and had laid the foundations for that “Age of Metal” which has endured until our own day.
It is of this new civilization that I shall tell you in the rest of my book and if you do not mind, we shall leave the northern continent for a couple of thousand years and pay a visit to Egypt and to western Asia.
“But,” you will say, “this is not fair. You promise to tell us about prehistoric man and then, just when the story is going to be interesting, you close the chapter and you jump to another part of the world and we must jump with you whether we like it or not.”
I know. It does not seem the right thing to do.
Unfortunately, history is not at all like mathematics.
When you solve a sum you go from “a” to “b” and from “b” to “c” and from “c” to “d” and so on.
History on the other hand jumps from “a” to “z” and then back to “f” and next to “m” without any apparent respect for neatness and order.
There is a good reason for this.
History is not exactly a science.
It tells the story of the human race and most people, however much we may try to change their nature, refuse to behave with the regularity and the precision of the tables of multiplication.
No two men ever do precisely the same thing.
No two human brains ever reach exactly the same conclusion.
You will notice that for yourself when you grow up.
It was not different a few hundred centuries ago.
Prehistoric man, as I just told you, was on a fair way to progress.
He had managed to survive the ice and the snow and the wild animals and that in itself, was a great deal.
He had invented many useful things.
Suddenly, however, other people in a different part of the world entered the race.
They rushed forward at a terrible speed and within a very short space of time they reached a height of civilization which had never before been seen upon our planet. Then they set forth to teach what they knew to the others who had been less intelligent than themselves.
Now that I have explained this to you, does it not seem just to give the Egyptians and the people of western Asia their full share of the chapters of this book?