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
vitality was reinforced by dreams of the departed. They may have
ascribed a sort of were-wolf existence to the dead, and wished to
propitiate them.
The Reindeer man, we feel, was too intelligent and too like ourselves
not to have had some speech, but quite probably it was not very
serviceable for anything beyond direct statement or matter of fact
narrative. He lived in a larger community than the Neanderthaler, but
how large we do not know. Except when game is swarming, hunting
communities must not keep together in large bodies or they will starve.
The Indians who depend upon the caribou in Labrador must be living under
circumstances rather like those of the Reindeer men. They scatter in
small family groups, as the caribou scatter in search of food; but when
the deer collect for the seasonal migration, the Indians also collect.
That is the time for trade and feasts and marriages. The simplest
American Indian is 10,000 years more sophisticated than the Reindeer
man, but probably that sort of gathering and dispersal was also the way
of Reindeer men. At Solutré in France there are traces of a great
camping and feasting-place. There was no doubt an exchange of news
there, but one may doubt if there was anything like an exchange of
ideas. One sees no scope in such a life for theology or philosophy or
superstition or speculation. Fears, yes; but unsystematic fears; fancies
and freaks of the imagination, but personal and transitory freaks and
fancies.
Perhaps there was a certain power of suggestion in these encounters. A
fear really felt needs few words for its transmission; a value set upon
something may be very simply conveyed.
In these questions of primitive thought and religion, we must remember
that the lowly and savage peoples of to-day probably throw very little
light on the mental state of men before the days of fully developed
language. Primordial man could have had little or no tradition before
the development of speech. All savage and primitive peoples of to-day,
on the contrary, are soaked in tradition--the tradition of thousands of
generations. They may have weapons like their remote ancestors and
methods like them, but what were slight and shallow impressions on the
minds of their predecessors are now deep and intricate grooves worn
throughout the intervening centuries generation by generation.
§ 2
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