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
Whether they tamed and domesticated the horse is still an open question.
Perhaps they learnt to do so by degrees as the centuries passed. At any
rate, we find late Palæolithic drawings of horses with marks about the
heads that are strongly suggestive of bridles, and there exists a
carving of a horse’s head showing what is perhaps a rope of twisted skin
or tendon. But even if they tamed the horse, it is still more doubtful
whether they rode it or had much use for it when it was tamed. The horse
they knew was a wild pony with a beard under its chin, not up to
carrying a man for any distance. It is improbable that these men had yet
learnt the rather unnatural use of animal’s milk as food. If they tamed
the horse at last, it was the only animal they seem to have tamed. They
had no dogs, and they had little to do with any sort of domesticated
sheep or cattle.
It greatly aids us to realize their common humanity that these earliest
true men could draw. Both races, it would seem, drew astonishingly well.
They were by all standards savages, but they were artistic savages. They
drew better than any of their successors down to the beginnings of
history. They drew and painted on the cliffs and cave walls that they
had wrested from the Neanderthal men. And the surviving drawings come to
the ethnologist, puzzling over bones and scraps, with the effect of a
plain message shining through guesswork and darkness. They drew on bones
and antlers; they carved little figures.
These late Palæolithic people not only drew remarkably well for our
information, and with an increasing skill as the centuries passed, but
they have also left us other information about their lives in their
graves. They buried. They buried their dead, often with ornaments,
weapons, and food; they used a lot of colour in the burial, and
evidently painted the body. From that one may infer that they painted
their bodies during life. Paint was a big fact in their lives. They were
inveterate painters; they used black, brown, red, yellow, and white
pigments, and the pigments they used endure to this day in the caves of
France and Spain. Of all modern races, none have shown so pictorial a
disposition; the nearest approach to it has been among the American
Indians.
[Illustration: A Reindeer Age Masterpiece]
[Illustration:
Reindeer Age (_Aurignacian_)
Engravings & Carvings]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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