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
He never used stone for building house walls until upon the very verge
of history. He used stone for hearths (_e.g._ at Glastonbury) and
sometimes stone sub-structures. He did, however, make a sort of stone
house in the centre of the great mounds in which he buried his
illustrious dead. He may have learnt this custom from his Iberian
neighbours and predecessors. It was these dark whites of the heliolithic
culture, and not the primitive Aryans, who were responsible for such
primitive temples as Stonehenge or Carnac in Brittany.
His social life was growing. Man was now living in clans and tribal
communities. These clans and communities clashed; they took each other’s
grazing land, they sought to rob each other; there began a new thing in
human life, _war_. For war is not a primeval thing; it has not been in
this world for more than 20,000 years. To this day very primitive
peoples, such as the Australian black-fellows, do not understand war.
The Palæolithic Age was an age of fights and murder, no doubt, but not
of the organized collective fighting of numbers of men.[91] But now men
could talk together and group themselves under leaders, and they found a
need of centres where they could come together with their cattle in time
of raids and danger. They began to make camps with walls of earth and
palisades, many of which are still to be traced in the history-worn
contours of the European scenery. The leaders under whom men fought in
war were often the same men as the sacrificial purifiers who were their
early priests.
The knowledge of bronze spread late in Europe. Neolithic man had been
making his slow advances age by age for 7000 or 8000 years before the
metals came. By that time his social life had developed so that there
were men of various occupations and men and women of different ranks in
the community. There were men who worked wood and leather, potters and
carvers. The women span and wove and embroidered. There were chiefs and
families that were distinguished as leaderly and noble; and man varied
the monotony of his herding and wandering, he consecrated undertakings
and celebrated triumphs, held funeral assemblies, and distinguished the
traditional seasons of the year, by _feasts_. His meats we have already
glanced at; but somewhen between 10,000 B.C. and the broadening
separation of the Aryan peoples towards 2000 or 1000 B.C., mankind
discovered fermentation, and began to brew intoxicating drinks. He made
these of honey, of barley, and, as the Aryan tribes spread southward, of
the grape. And he got merry and drunken. Whether he first used yeast to
make his bread light or to ferment his drink we do not know.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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