The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and MankindWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
World history
though it would seem from the absence of any common roots for spokes,
rim, or axle that their wheels were not wheelwright’s wheels with
spokes, but made of the trunks of trees shaped out with an axe between
the ends.
These primitive waggons were drawn by oxen. The early Aryans did not
ride or drive horses; they had very little to do with horses. The
Reindeer men were a horse-people, but the Neolithic Aryans were a
cow-people. They ate beef, not horse; and after many ages they began
this use of draught cattle. They reckoned wealth by cows. They wandered,
following pasture, and “trekking” their goods, as the South African
Boers do, in ox-waggons, though of course their waggons were much
clumsier than any to be found in the world to-day. They probably ranged
over very wide areas. They were migratory, but not in the strict sense
of the word “nomadic”; they moved in a slower, clumsier fashion than did
the later, more specialized nomadic peoples. They were forest and
parkland people without horses. They were developing a migratory life
out of the more settled “forest clearing” life of the earlier Neolithic
period. Changes of climate which were replacing forest by pasture, and
the accidental burning of forests by fire may have assisted this
development.
When these early “Aryans” came to big rivers or open water, they built
boats, at first hollow tree trunks and then skin-covered frameworks of
lighter wood. Before history began there was already some Aryan
canoe-traffic across the English Channel and in the Baltic, and also
among the Greek islands. But the Aryans, as we shall see later, were
probably not the first peoples to take to the sea.
We have already described the sort of home the primitive Aryan occupied
and his household life, so far as the remains of the Swiss
pile-dwellings enable us to describe these things. Mostly his houses
were of too flimsy a sort, probably of wattle and mud, to have survived,
and possibly he left them and trekked on for very slight reasons. The
Aryan peoples burnt their dead, a custom they still preserve in India,
but their predecessors, the long-barrow people, the Iberians, buried
their dead in a sitting position. In some ancient Aryan burial mounds
(round barrows) the urns containing the ashes of the departed are shaped
like houses, and these represent rounded huts with thatched roofs. See
Fig. p. 57.
The grazing of the primitive Aryan was far more important to him than
his agriculture. At first he cultivated with a rough wooden hoe; then,
after he had found out the use of cattle for draught purposes, he began
real ploughing with oxen, using at first a suitably bent tree bough as
his plough. His first cultivation before that came about must have been
rather in the form of garden patches near the house buildings than of
fields. Most of the land his tribe occupied was common land on which the
cattle grazed together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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