Still more conflict and confusion have resulted from attempts to divide
the Stone Age into watertight compartments. In 1865 Sir John Lubbock
proposed two divisions—the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age—and the
Neolithic, or New Stone Age.[13] The Paleolithic included objects found
in caves and glacial gravels; the Neolithic, on the surface and in
tombs. The first period ran from some vague beginning hundreds of
thousands of years ago up to the advent of the Neolithic after the
glaciers had melted. By definition, paleolithic man made chipped stone
implements and no other kind. Neolithic man was supposed to be
distinguished by the making of ground, or—as we usually say—polished,
stone axes and of other tools shaped by rubbing instead of chipping;
agriculture, pottery, and textiles came in as secondary traits.
After a time, however, archaeologists found some disturbing
discrepancies. Before neolithic man grew grain and wove textiles,
someone of an earlier age seems to have been making axes from antlers,
turning out new artifacts called microliths—tiny chips of flint which
were set in a row along a wooden or bone handle to make a kind of saw or
a sickle—and also producing a partially polished ax with a ground edge,
and making crude pots. This was all very upsetting to the old scheme of
dividing prehistory into the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. So science
inserted the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, between the two, in order
to account for the appearance of the new tools.
The trouble with the system that Lubbock launched is that man’s behavior
toward stone is a very poor basis for classifying him in culture or
time. For a while it fitted our knowledge of the prehistory of Europe.
Now it is out of line on that continent, and completely askew so far as
the rest of the world is concerned. The kind of stone available often
determines whether a man will chip or grind it. When first discovered,
South Sea Islanders were still polishing stone because they had no
flint.[14] Some Australian natives make chipped stone tools while their
neighbors, who control a supply of diorite, go in for polishing; yet
none of these Blackfellows can be considered as anything but
paleolithic.
Like the Bronze Age, the Neolithic suffers from having shrunk in length.
Rickard figures “that 700 years covers what was meant to be a major
division of human chronology.”[15] To reach this figure he puts the end
of the Paleolithic at 3000 B.C., which seems much too late, and the
beginning of bronze at 2300. Even though we use the date of N. C. Nelson
for the beginning of the Neolithic—5500 B.C.[16]—we have a New Stone Age
of only 3,200 years.
Gordon Childe goes so far as to declare that “there is no such thing as
a neolithic civilization.”[17] Different people, living under different
climates and on different soils, have developed different elements of
the culture of the New Stone Age and combined them with elements of
other cultures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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