The Prehistoric World; Or, Vanished RacesAllen, Emory Adams
History
The Prehistoric World; Or, Vanished Races
Allen, Emory Adams
Archaeology; Indians; Prehistoric peoples
We have seen that the highest rank we can assign to Paleolithic
man in the scale of civilization is Upper Savagism. But when
Neolithic man appeared, he was in the middle status of Barbarism.
The time, therefore, between the disappearance of Paleolithic man
and the arrival of Neolithic man was long enough to enable
primitive man to pass one entire ethnical period, that of Lower
Barbarism. But this requires a very long period of time, probably
several times as long as the entire series of years since
Civilization first appeared, which is supposed to be in the
neighborhood of five thousand years ago.5
We must now turn our attention to Neolithic man himself and learn
what we can of his culture, and discover, if possible, what race
it was that spread over Europe after it had been for so long a
time an uninhabitable country. A few remarks by way of
introduction will not be considered amiss.
We are learning that tribal organization, implying communism in
living, is characteristic of prehistoric people.6 Tribal
organization sufficed to advance man to the very confines of
civilization. We have no doubt but that this was the state of
society amongst the Neolithic people. But this implies living in
communities or villages. We need not picture to ourselves a
country dotted with houses, the abodes of single families; such
did not exist, but here and there were fortified villages.
Still another consequence follows from this tribal state of
society. There was no such thing as a strong central government.
Each tribe obeyed its own chief, and a state of war nearly always
existed between different tribes. Such we know was the state of
things among the Indian tribes of America. Travelers tell us that
it is so to-day in Africa. Each tribe stood ready to defend
itself or to make war on its neighbors. One great point,
therefore, in constructing a village, was to secure a place that
could be easily defended.
Bearing these principles in mind, let us see what we can learn of
their habitations. Owing to a protracted drouth, the water in the
Swiss lakes was unusually low in the Winter of 1854, and the
inhabitants of Meilen, on the Lake Zürich, took advantage of this
state of affairs to throw up embankments some distance out from
the old shore, and thus gain a strip of land along the coast. In
carrying out this design, they found in the mud at the bottom of
the lake a number of piles, some thrown down and others upright,
fragments of rough pottery, bone and stone instruments, and
various other relics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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