Robert Marett - Anthropology

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During the succeeding main stage of the palaeolithic epoch there was
a decided set-back in the culture, as judged by the quality of the
workmanship in flint. Those were the days of the Mousterians who dined
off woolly rhinoceros in Jersey. Their stone implements, worked only
on one face, are poor things by comparison with those of late St. Acheul
days, though for a time degenerated forms of the latter seem to have
remained in use. What had happened? We can only guess. Probably
something to do with the climate was at the bottom of this change for
the worse. Thus M. Rutot believes that during the ice-age each big
freeze was followed by an equally big flood, preceding each fresh
return of milder weather. One of these floods, he thinks, must have
drowned out the neat-fingered race of St. Acheul, and left the coast
clear for the Mousterians with their coarser type of culture. Perhaps
they were coarser in their physical type as well.[1]

[Footnote 1: Theirs was certainly the rather ape-like Neanderthal
build. If, however, the skull found at Galley Hill, near Northfleet
in Kent, amongst the gravels laid down by the Thames when it was about
ninety feet above its present level, is of early palaeolithic date,
as some good authorities believe, there was a kind of man away back
in the drift-period who had a fairly high forehead and moderate
brow-ridges, and in general was a less brutal specimen of humanity
than our Mousterian friend of the large grinders.]

To the credit of the Mousterians, however, must be set down the fact
that they are associated with the habit of living in caves, and perhaps
may even have started it; though some implements of the drift type
occur in Le Moustier itself, as well as in other caves, such as the
famous Kent's Cavern near Torquay. Climate, once more, has very
possibly to answer for having thus driven man underground. Anyway,
whether because they must, or because they liked it, the Mousterians
went on with their cave life during an immense space of time, making
little progress; unless it were to learn gradually how to sharpen bones
into implements. But caves and bones alike were to play a far more
striking part in the days immediately to follow.

The third and last main stage of the palaeolithic epoch developed by
degrees into a golden age of art. But I cannot dwell on all its glories.
I must pass by the beautiful work in flint; such as the thin blades
of laurel-leaf pattern, fairly common in France but rare in England,
belonging to the stage or type of culture known as the Solutrian (from
Solutre in the department of Saone-et-Loire). I must also pass by the
exquisite French examples of the carvings or engravings of bone and
ivory; a single engraving of a horse's head, from the cave at Creswell
Crags in Derbyshire, being all that England has to offer in this line.
Any good museum can show you specimens or models of these delightful
objects; whereas the things about which I am going to speak must remain
hidden away for ever where their makers left them--I mean the paintings
and engravings on the walls of the French and Spanish caves.

I invite you to accompany me in the spirit first of all to the cave
of Gargas near Aventiron, under the shadow of the Pic du Midi in the
High Pyrenees. Half-way up a hill, in the midst of a wilderness of
rocky fragments, the relics of the ice-age, is a smallish hole, down
which we clamber into a spacious but low-roofed grotto, stretching
back five hundred feet or so into infinite darkness. Hard by the mouth,
where the light of day freely enters, are the remains of a hearth,
with bone-refuse and discarded implements mingling with the ashes to
a considerable depth. A glance at these implements, for instance the
small flint scraper with narrow high back and perpendicular chipping
along the sides, is enough to show that the men who once warmed their
fingers here were of the so-called Aurignacian type (Aurignac in the
department of Haute Garonne, in southern France), that is to say, lived
somewhere about the dawn of the third stage of the palaeolithic epoch.
Directly after their disappearance nature would seem to have sealed
up the cave again until our time, so that we can study them here all
by themselves.

Now let us take our lamps and explore the secrets of the interior.
The icy torrents that hollowed it in the limestone have eaten away
rounded alcoves along the sides. On the white surface of these, glazed
over with a preserving film of stalactite, we at once notice the
outlines of many hands. Most of them left hands, showing that the
Aurignacians tended to be right-handed, like ourselves, and dusted
on the paint, black manganese or red ochre, between the outspread
fingers in just way that we, too, would find convenient. Curiously
enough, this practice of stencilling hands upon the walls of caves
is in vogue amongst the Australian natives; though unfortunately, they
keep the reason, if there is any deeper one than mere amusement,
strictly to themselves. Like the Australians, again, and other rude
peoples, these Aurignacians would appear to have been given to lopping
off an occasional finger--from some religious motive, we may guess--to
judge from the mutilated look of a good many of the handprints.

The use of paint is here limited to this class of wall-decoration.
But a sharp flint makes an excellent graving tool; and the Aurignacian
hunter is bent on reproducing by this means the forms of those
game-animals about which he doubtless dreams night and day. His efforts
in this direction, however, rather remind us of those of our
infant-schools. Look at this bison. His snout is drawn sideways, but
the horns branch out right and left as if in a full-face view. Again,
our friend scamps details such as the legs. Sheer want of skill, we
may suspect, leads him to construct what is more like the symbol of
something thought than the portrait of something seen. And so we wander
farther and farther into the gloomy depths, adding ever new specimens
to our pre-historic menagerie, including the rare find of a bird that
looks uncommonly like the penguin. Mind, by the way, that you do not
fall into that round hole in the floor. It is enormously deep; and
more than forty cave-bears have left their skeletons at the bottom,
amongst which your skeleton would be a little out of place.

Next day let us move off eastwards to the Little Pyrenees to see another
cave, Niaux, high up in a valley scarred nearly up to the top by former
glaciers. This cave is about a mile deep; and it will take you half
a mile of awkward groping amongst boulders and stalactites, not to
mention a choke in one part of the passage such as must puzzle a fat
man, before the cavern becomes spacious, and you find yourself in the
vast underground cathedral that pre-historic man has chosen for his
picture-gallery. This was a later stock, that had in the meantime
learnt how to draw to perfection. Consider the bold black and white
of that portrait of a wild pony, with flowing mane and tail, glossy
barrel, and jolly snub-nosed face. It is four or five feet across,
and not an inch of the work is out of scale. The same is true of nearly
every one of the other fifty or more figures of game-animals. These
artists could paint what they saw.

Yet they could paint up on the walls what they thought, too. There
are likewise whole screeds of symbols waiting, perhaps waiting for
ever, to be interpreted. The dots and lines and pothooks clearly belong
to a system of picture-writing. Can we make out their meaning at all?
Once in a way, perhaps. Note these marks looking like two different
kinds of throwing-club; at any rate, there are Australian weapons not
unlike them. To the left of them are a lot of dots in what look like
patterns, amongst which we get twice over the scheme of one dot in
the centre of a circle of others. Then, farther still to the left,
comes the painted figure of a bison; or, to be more accurate, the front
half is painted, the back being a piece of protruding rock that gives
the effect of low relief. The bison is rearing back on its haunches,
and there is a patch of red paint, like an open wound, just over the
region of its heart. Let us try to read the riddle. It may well embody
a charm that ran somewhat thus: "With these weapons, and by these
encircling tactics, may we slay a fat bison, O ye powers of the dark!"
Depend upon it, the men who went half a mile into the bowels of a
mountain, to paint things up on the walls, did not do so merely for
fun. This is a very eerie place, and I daresay most of us would not
like to spend the night there alone; though I know a pre-historian
who did. In Australia, as we shall see later on, rock-paintings of
game-animals, not so lifelike as these of the old days, but symbolic
almost beyond all recognizing, form part of solemn ceremonies whereby
good hunting is held to be secured. Something of the sort, then, we
may suppose, took place ages ago in the cave of Niaux. So, indeed,
it was a cathedral after a fashion; and, having in mind the carven
pillars of stalactite, the curving alcoves and side-chapels, the
shining white walls, and the dim ceiling that held in scorn our powerful
lamps, I venture to question whether man has ever lifted up his heart
in a grander one.

Space would fail me if I now sought to carry you off to the cave of
Altamira, near Santander, in the north-west of Spain. Here you might
see at its best a still later style of rock-painting, which deserts
mere black and white for colour-shading of the most free description.
Indeed, it is almost too free, in my judgment; for, though the control
of the artist over his rude material is complete, he is inclined to
turn his back on real life, forcing the animal forms into attitudes
more striking than natural, and endowing their faces sometimes, as
it seems to me, with almost human expressions. Whatever may be thought
of the likelihood of these beasts being portrayed to look like men,
certain it is that in the painted caves of this period the men almost
invariably have animal heads, as if they were mythological beings,
half animal and half human; or else--as perhaps is more
probable--masked dancers. At one place, however--namely, in the rock
shelter of Cogul near Lerida, on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees,
we have a picture of a group of women dancers who are not masked, but
attired in the style of the hour. They wear high hats or chignons,
tight waists, and bell-shaped skirts. Really, considering that we thus
have a contemporary fashion-plate, so to say, whilst there are likewise
the numerous stencilled hands elsewhere on view, and even, as I have
seen with my own eyes at Niaux in the sandy floor, hardened over with
stalagmite, the actual print of a foot, we are brought very near to
our palaeolithic forerunners; though indefinite ages part them from
us if we reckon by sheer time.

* * * * *

Before ending this chapter, I have still to make good a promise to
say something about the neolithic men of western Europe. These people
often, though not always, polished their stone; the palaeolithic folk
did not. That is the distinguishing mark by which the world is pleased
to go. It would be fatal to forget, however, that, with this trifling
difference, go many others which testify more clearly to the contrast
between the older and newer types of culture. Thus it has still to
be proved that the palaeolithic races ever used pottery, or that they
domesticated animals--for instance, the fat ponies which they were
so fond of eating; or that they planted crops. All these things did
the neolithic peoples sooner or later; so that it would not be strange
if palaeolithic man withdrew in their favour, because he could not
compete. Pre-history is at present almost silent concerning the manner
of his passing. In a damp and draughty tunnel, however, called Mas
d'Azil, in the south of France, where the river Arize still bores its
way through a mountain, some palaeolithic folk seem to have lingered
on in a sad state of decay. The old sureness of touch in the matter
of carving bone had left them. Again, their painting was confined to
the adorning of certain pebbles with spots and lines, curious objects,
that perhaps are not without analogy in Australia, whilst something
like them crops up again in the north of Scotland in what seems to
be the early iron-age. Had the rest of the palaeolithic men already
followed the reindeer and other arctic animals towards the north-east?
Or did the neolithic invasion, which came from the south, wipe out
the lot? Or was there a commingling of stocks, and may some of us have
a little dose of palaeolithic blood, as we certainly have a large dose
of neolithic? To all these questions it can only be replied that we
do not yet know.

No more do we know half as much as we should like about fifty things
relating to the small, dark, long-headed neolithic folk, with a
language that has possibly left traces in the modern Basque, who spread
over the west till they reached Great Britain--it probably was an
island by this time--and erected the well-known long barrows and other
monuments of a megalithic (great-stone) type; though not the round
barrows, which are the work of a subsequent round-headed race of the
bronze-age. Every day, however, the spade is adding to our knowledge.
Besides, most of the ruder peoples of the modern world were at the
neolithic stage of culture at the time of their discovery by Europeans.
Hence the weapons, the household utensils, the pottery, the
pile-dwellings, and so on, can be compared closely; and we have a fresh
instance of the way in which one branch of anthropology can aid another.

In pursuance of my plan, however, of merely pitching here and there
on an illustrative point, I shall conclude by an excursion to Brandon,
just on the Suffolk side of the border between that county and Norfolk.
Here we can stand, as it were, with one foot in neolithic times and
the other in the life of to-day. When Canon Greenwell, in 1870, explored
in this neighbourhood one of the neolithic flint-mines known as Grime's
Graves, he had to dig out the rubbish from a former funnel-shaped pit
some forty feet deep. Down at this level, it appeared, the neolithic
worker had found the layer of the best flint. This he quarried by means
of narrow galleries in all directions. For a pick he used a red-deer's
antler. In the British Museum is to be seen one of these with the miner's
thumb-mark stamped on a piece of clay sticking to the handle. His lamp
was a cup of chalk. His ladder was probably a series of rough steps
cut in the sides of the pit. As regards the use to which the material
was put, a neolithic workshop was found just to the south of Grime's
Graves. Here, scattered about on all sides, were the cores, the
hammer-stones that broke them up, and knives, scrapers, borers,
spear-heads and arrow-heads galore, in all stages of manufacture.

Well, now let us hie to Lingheath, not far off, and what do we find?
A family of the name of Dyer carry on to-day exactly the same old method
of mining. Their pits are of squarer shape than the neolithic ones,
but otherwise similar. Their one-pronged pick retains the shape of
the deer's antler. Their light is a candle stuck in a cup of chalk.
And the ladder is just a series of ledges or, as they call them, "toes"
in the wall, five feet apart and connected by foot-holes. The miner
simply jerks his load, several hundredweight of flints, from ledge
to ledge by the aid of his head, which he protects with something that
neolithic man was probably without, namely, an old bowler hat. He even
talks a language of his own. "Bubber-hutching on the sosh" is the term
for sinking a pit on the slant, and, for all we can tell, may have
a very ancient pedigree. And what becomes of the miner's output? It
is sold by the "jag"--a jag being a pile just so high that when you
stand on any side you can see the bottom flint on the other--to the
knappers of Brandon. Any one of these--for instance, my friend Mr.
Fred Snare--will, while you wait, break up a lump with a short round
hammer into manageable pieces. Then, placing a "quarter" with his left
hand the leather pad that covers his knee, he will, with an oblong
hammer, strike off flake after flake, perhaps 1,500 in a morning; and
finally will work these up into sharp-edged squares to serve as
gun-flints for the trade with native Africa. Alas! the palmy days of
knapping gun-flints for the British Army will never return to Brandon.
Still, there must have been trade depression in those parts at any
time from the bronze-age up to the times of Brown Bess; for the
strike-a-lights, still to be got at a penny each, can have barely kept
the wolf from the door. And Mr. Snare is not merely an artisan but
an artist. He has chipped out a flint ring, a feat which taxed the
powers of the clever neolithic knappers of pre-dynastic Egypt; whilst
with one of his own flint fishhooks he has taken a fine trout from
the Little Ouse that runs by the town.

Thus there are things in old England that are older even than some
of our friends wot. In that one county of Suffolk, for instance, the
good flint--so rich in colour as it is, and so responsive to the hammer,
at any rate if you get down to the lower layers or "sases," for instance,
the floorstone, or the black smooth-stone that is generally below
water-level--has served the needs of all the palaeolithic periods,
and of the neolithic age as well, and likewise of the modern Englishmen
who fought with flintlocks at Waterloo, or still more recently took
out tinder-boxes with them to the war in South Africa. And what does
this stand for in terms of the antiquity of man? Thousands of years?
We do not know exactly; but say rather hundreds of thousands of years.

CHAPTER III
RACE

There is a story about the British sailor who was asked to state what
he understood by a Dago. "Dagoes," he replied, "is anything wot isn't
our sort of chaps." In exactly the same way would an ancient Greek
have explained what he meant by a "barbarian." When it takes this
wholesale form we speak, not without reason, of race-prejudice. We
may well wonder in the meantime how far this prejudice answers to
something real. Race would certainly seem to be a fact that stares
one in the face.

Stroll down any London street: you cannot go wrong about that Hindu
student with features rather like ours but of a darker shade. The short
dapper man with eyes a little aslant is no less unmistakably a Japanese.
It takes but a slightly more practised eye to pick out the German waiter,
the French chauffeur, and the Italian vendor of ices. Lastly, when
you have made yourself really good at the game, you will be scarcely
more likely to confuse a small dark Welshman with a broad florid
Yorkshireman than a retriever with a mastiff.

Yes, but remember that you are judging by the gross impression, not
by the element of race or breed as distinguished from the rest. Here,
you say, come a couple of our American cousins. Perhaps it is their
speech that betrayeth them; or perhaps it is the general cut of their
jib. If you were to go into their actual pedigrees, you would find
that the one had a Scotch father and a mother from out of Dorset; whilst
the other was partly Scandinavian and partly Spanish with a tincture
of Jew. Yet to all intents and purposes they form one type. And, the
more deeply you go into it, the more mixed we all of us turn out to
be, when breed, and breed alone, is the subject of inquiry. Yet race,
in the only sense that the word has for an anthropologist, means
inherited breed, and nothing more or less--inherited breed, and all
that it covers, whether bodily or mental features.

For race, let it not be forgotten, presumably extends to mind as well
as to body. It is not merely skin-deep. Contrast the stoical Red Indian
with the vivacious Negro; or the phlegmatic Dutchman with the
passionate Italian. True, you say, but what about the influence of
their various climates, or again of their different ideals of
behaviour? Quite so. It is immensely difficult to separate the effects
of the various factors. Yet surely the race-factor counts for something
in the mental constitution. Any breeder of horses will tell you that
neither the climate of Newmarket, nor careful training, nor any
quantity of oats, nor anything else, will put racing mettle into
cart-horse stock.

In what follows, then, I shall try to show just what the problem about
the race-factor is, even if I have to trespass a little way into general
biology in order to do so.[2] And I shall not attempt to conceal the
difficulties relating to the race-problem. I know that the ordinary
reader is supposed to prefer that all the thinking should be done
beforehand, and merely the results submitted to him. But I cannot
believe that he would find it edifying to look at half-a-dozen books
upon the races of mankind, and find half-a-dozen accounts of their
relationships, having scarcely a single statement in common. Far
better face the fact that race still baffles us almost completely.
Yet, breed is there; and, in its own time and in its own way, breed
will out.

[Footnote 2: The reader is advised to consult also the more
comprehensive study on _Evolution_ by Professors Geddes and Thomson
in this series.]

Race or breed was a moment ago described as a factor in human nature.
But to break up human nature into factors is something that we can
do, or try to do, in thought only. In practice we can never succeed
in doing anything of the kind. A machine such as a watch we can take
to bits and then put together again. Even a chemical compound such
as water we can resolve into oxygen and hydrogen and then reproduce
out of its elements. But to dissect a living thing is to kill it once
and for all. Life, as was said in the first chapter, is something unique,
with the unique property of being able to evolve. As life evolves,
that is to say changes, by being handed on from certain forms to certain
other forms, a partial rigidity marks the process together with a
partial plasticity. There is a stiffening, so to speak, that keeps
the life-force up to a point true to its old direction; though, short
of that limit, it is free to take a new line of its own. Race, then,
stands for the stiffening in the evolutionary process. Just up to what
point it goes in any given case we probably can never quite tell. Yet,
if we could think our way anywhere near to that point in regard to
man, I doubt not that we should eventually succeed in forging a fresh
instrument for controlling the destinies of our species, an instrument
perhaps more powerful than education itself--I mean, eugenics, the
art of improving the human breed.

To see what race means when considered apart, let us first of all take
your individual self, and ask how you would proceed to separate your
inherited nature from the nature which you have acquired in the course
of living your life. It is not easy. Suppose, however, that you had
a twin brother born, if indeed that were possible, as like you as one
pea is like another. An accident in childhood, however, has caused
him to lose a leg. So he becomes a clerk, living a sedentary life in
an office. You, on the other hand, with your two lusty legs to help
you, become a postman, always on the run. Well, the two of you are
now very different men in looks and habits. He is pale and you are
brown. You play football and he sits at home reading. Nevertheless,
any friend who knows you both intimately will discover fifty little
things that bespeak in you the same underlying nature and bent. You
are both, for instance, slightly colour-blind, and both inclined to
fly into violent passions on occasion. That is your common inheritance
peeping out--if, at least, your friend has really managed to make
allowance for your common bringing-up, which might mainly account for
the passionateness, though hardly for the colour-blindness.

But now comes the great difficulty. Let us further suppose that you
two twins marry wives who are also twins born as like as two peas;
and each pair of you has a family. Which of the two batches of children
will tend on the whole to have the stronger legs? Your legs are strong
by use; your brother's are weak by disuse. But do use and disuse make
any difference to the race? That is the theoretical question which,
above all others, complicates and hampers our present-day attempts
to understand heredity.

In technical language, this is the problem of use-inheritance,
otherwise known as the inheritance of acquired characters. It is apt
to seem obvious to the plain man that the effects of use and disuse
are transmitted to offspring. So, too, thought Lamarck, who half a
century before Darwin propounded a theory of the origin of species
that was equally evolutionary in its way. Why does the giraffe have
so long a neck? Lamarck thought it was because the giraffe had acquired
a habit of stretching his neck out. Every time there was a bad season,
the giraffes must all stretch up as high as ever they could towards
the leafy tops of the trees; and the one that stretched up farthest
survived, and handed on the capacity for a like feat to his fortunate
descendants. Now Darwin himself was ready to allow that use and disuse
might have some influence on the offspring's inheritance; but he
thought that this influence was small as compared with the influence
of what, for want of a better term, he called spontaneous variation.
Certain of his followers, however, who call themselves Neo-Darwinians,
are ready to go one better. Led by the German biologist, Weismann,
they would thrust the Lamarckians, with their hypothesis of
use-inheritance, clean out of the field. Spontaneous variation, they
assert, is all that is needed to prepare the way for the selection
of the tall giraffe. It happened to be born that way. In other words,
its parents had it in them to breed it so. This is not a theory that
tells one anything positive. It is merely a caution to look away from
use and disuse to another explanation of variation that is not yet
forthcoming.

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