From some time during the first inter-stadial of the last great glaciation (say some time after about 40,000 years ago), we have more accurate dates for the European-Mediterranean area and less accurate ones for the rest of the Old World. This is probably because the effects of the last glaciation have been studied in the European-Mediterranean area more than they have been elsewhere.

A NEW TRADITION APPEARS

Something new was probably beginning to happen in the European-Mediterranean area about 40,000 years ago, though all the rest of the Old World seems to have been going on as it had been. I can’t be sure of this because the information we are using as a basis for dates is very inaccurate for the areas outside of Europe and the Mediterranean.

We can at least make a guess. In Egypt and north Africa, men were still using the old methods of making stone tools. This was especially true of flake tools of the Levalloisian type, save that they were growing smaller and smaller as time went on. But at the same time, a new tradition was becoming popular in westernmost Asia and in Europe. This was the blade-tool tradition.

BLADE TOOLS

A stone blade is really just a long parallel-sided flake, as the drawing shows. It has sharp cutting edges, and makes a very useful knife. The real trick is to be able to make one. It is almost impossible to make a blade out of any stone but flint or a natural volcanic glass called obsidian. And even if you have flint or obsidian, you first have to work up a special cone-shaped “blade-core,” from which to whack off blades.

You whack with a hammer stone against a bone or antler punch which is directed at the proper place on the blade-core. The blade-core has to be well supported or gripped while this is going on. To get a good flint blade tool takes a great deal of know-how.

Remember that a tradition in stone tools means no more than that some particular way of making the tools got started and lasted a long time. Men who made some tools in one tradition or set of habits would also make other tools for different purposes by means of another tradition or set of habits. It was even possible for the two sets of habits to become combined.

THE EARLIEST BLADE TOOLS

The oldest blade tools we have found were deep down in the layers of the Mount Carmel caves, in Tabun Eb and Ea. Similar tools have been found in equally early cave levels in Syria; their popularity there seems to fluctuate a bit. Some more or less parallel-sided flakes are known in the Levalloisian industry in France, but they are probably no earlier than Tabun E. The Tabun blades are part of a local late “Acheulean” industry, which is characterized by core-biface “hand axes,” but which has many flake tools as well. Professor F.E. Zeuner believes that this industry may be more than 120,000 years old; actually its date has not yet been fixed, but it is very old—older than the fossil finds of modern-like men in the same caves.

For some reason, the habit of making blades in Palestine and Syria was interrupted. Blades only reappeared there at about the same time they were first made in Europe, some time after 45,000 years ago; that is, after the first phase of the last glaciation was ended.

We are not sure just where the earliest persisting habits for the production of blade tools developed. Impressed by the very early momentary appearance of blades at Tabun on Mount Carmel, Professor Dorothy A. Garrod first favored the Near East as a center of origin. She spoke of “some as yet unidentified Asiatic centre,” which she thought might be in the highlands of Iran or just beyond. But more recent work has been done in this area, especially by Professor Coon, and the blade tools do not seem to have an early appearance there. When the blade tools reappear in the Syro-Palestinian area, they do so in industries which also include Levalloiso-Mousterian flake tools. From the point of view of form and workmanship, the blade tools themselves are not so fine as those which seem to be making their appearance in western Europe about the same time. There is a characteristic Syro-Palestinian flake point, possibly a projectile tip, called the Emiran, which is not known from Europe. The appearance of blade tools, together with Levalloiso-Mousterian flakes, continues even after the Emiran point has gone out of use.

It seems clear that the production of blade tools did not immediately swamp the set of older habits in Europe, too; the use of flake tools also continued there. This was not so apparent to the older archeologists, whose attention was focused on individual tool types. It is not, in fact, impossible—although it is certainly not proved—that the technique developed in the preparation of the Levalloisian tortoise core (and the striking of the Levalloisian flake from it) might have followed through to the conical core and punch technique for the production of blades. Professor Garrod is much impressed with the speed of change during the later phases of the last glaciation, and its probable consequences. She speaks of “the greater number of industries having enough individual character to be classified as distinct ... since evolution now starts to outstrip diffusion.” Her “evolution” here is of course an industrial evolution rather than a biological one. Certainly the people of Europe had begun to make blade tools during the warm spell after the first phase of the last glaciation. By about 40,000 years ago blades were well established. The bones of the blade tool makers we’ve found so far indicate that anatomically modern men had now certainly appeared. Unfortunately, only a few fossil men have so far been found from the very beginning of the blade tool range in Europe (or elsewhere). What I certainly shall not tell you is that conquering bands of fine, strong, anatomically modern men, armed with superior blade tools, came sweeping out of the East to exterminate the lowly Neanderthalers. Even if we don’t know exactly what happened, I’d lay a good bet it wasn’t that simple.

We do know a good deal about different blade industries in Europe. Almost all of them come from cave layers. There is a great deal of complication in what we find. The chart (p. 72) tries to simplify this complication; in fact, it doubtless simplifies it too much. But it may suggest all the complication of industries which is going on at this time. You will note that the upper portion of my much simpler chart (p. 65) covers the same material (in the section marked “Various Blade-Tool Industries”). That chart is certainly too simplified. You will realize that all this complication comes not only from the fact that we are finding more material. It is due also to the increasing ability of men to adapt themselves to a great variety of situations. Their tools indicate this adaptiveness. We know there was a good deal of climatic change at this time. The plants and animals that men used for food were changing, too. The great variety of tools and industries we now find reflect these changes and the ability of men to keep up with the times. Now, for example, is the first time we are sure that there are tools to make other tools. They also show men’s increasing ability to adapt themselves.

SPECIAL TYPES OF BLADE TOOLS

The most useful tools that appear at this time were made from blades.

1. The “backed” blade. This is a knife made of a flint blade, with one edge purposely blunted, probably to save the user’s fingers from being cut. There are several shapes of backed blades (p. 73).

TWO BURINS

2. The burin or “graver.” The burin was the original chisel. Its cutting edge is transverse, like a chisel’s. Some burins are made like a screw-driver, save that burins are sharp. Others have edges more like the blade of a chisel or a push plane, with only one bevel. Burins were probably used to make slots in wood and bone; that is, to make handles or shafts for other tools. They must also be the tools with which much of the engraving on bone (see p. 83) was done. There is a bewildering variety of different kinds of burins.

3. The “tanged” point. These stone points were used to tip arrows or light spears. They were made from blades, and they had a long tang at the bottom where they were fixed to the shaft. At the place where the tang met the main body of the stone point, there was a marked “shoulder,” the beginnings of a barb. Such points had either one or two shoulders.

4. The “notched” or “strangulated” blade. Along with the points for arrows or light spears must go a tool to prepare the arrow or spear shaft. Today, such a tool would be called a “draw-knife” or a “spoke-shave,” and this is what the notched blades probably are. Our spoke-shaves have sharp straight cutting blades and really “shave.” Notched blades of flint probably scraped rather than cut.

5. The “awl,” “drill,” or “borer.” These blade tools are worked out to a spike-like point. They must have been used for making holes in wood, bone, shell, skin, or other things.

6. The “end-scraper on a blade” is a tool with one or both ends worked so as to give a good scraping edge. It could have been used to hollow out wood or bone, scrape hides, remove bark from trees, and a number of other things (p. 78).

There is one very special type of flint tool, which is best known from western Europe in an industry called the Solutrean. These tools were usually made of blades, but the best examples are so carefully worked on both sides (bifacially) that it is impossible to see the original blade. This tool is

7. The “laurel leaf” point. Some of these tools were long and dagger-like, and must have been used as knives or daggers. Others were small, called “willow leaf,” and must have been mounted on spear or arrow shafts. Another typical Solutrean tool is the “shouldered” point. Both the “laurel leaf” and “shouldered” point types are illustrated (see above and p. 79).

The industries characterized by tools in the blade tradition also yield some flake and core tools. We will end this list with two types of tools that appear at this time. The first is made of a flake; the second is a core tool.

8. The “keel-shaped round scraper” is usually small and quite round, and has had chips removed up to a peak in the center. It is called “keel-shaped” because it is supposed to look (when upside down) like a section through a boat. Actually, it looks more like a tent or an umbrella. Its outer edges are sharp all the way around, and it was probably a general purpose scraping tool (see illustration, p. 81). 9. The “keel-shaped nosed scraper” is a much larger and heavier tool than the round scraper. It was made on a core with a flat bottom, and has one nicely worked end or “nose.” Such tools are usually large enough to be easily grasped, and probably were used like push planes (see illustration, p. 81).

The stone tools (usually made of flint) we have just listed are among the most easily recognized blade tools, although they show differences in detail at different times. There are also many other kinds. Not all of these tools appear in any one industry at one time. Thus the different industries shown in the chart (p. 72) each have only some of the blade tools we’ve just listed, and also a few flake tools. Some industries even have a few core tools. The particular types of blade tools appearing in one cave layer or another, and the frequency of appearance of the different types, tell which industry we have in each layer.

OTHER KINDS OF TOOLS

By this time in Europe—say from about 40,000 to about 10,000 years ago—we begin to find other kinds of material too. Bone tools begin to appear. There are knives, pins, needles with eyes, and little double-pointed straight bars of bone that were probably fish-hooks. The fish-line would have been fastened in the center of the bar; when the fish swallowed the bait, the bar would have caught cross-wise in the fish’s mouth.

One quite special kind of bone tool is a long flat point for a light spear. It has a deep notch cut up into the breadth of its base, and is called a “split-based bone point” (p. 82). We know examples of bone beads from these times, and of bone handles for flint tools. Pierced teeth of some animals were worn as beads or pendants, but I am not sure that elks’ teeth were worn this early. There are even spool-shaped “buttons” or toggles.

Antler came into use for tools, especially in central and western Europe. We do not know the use of one particular antler tool that has a large hole bored in one end. One suggestion is that it was a thong-stropper used to strop or work up hide thongs (see illustration, below); another suggestion is that it was an arrow-shaft straightener.

Another interesting tool, usually of antler, is the spear-thrower, which is little more than a stick with a notch or hook on one end. The hook fits into the butt end of the spear, and the length of the spear-thrower allows you to put much more power into the throw (p. 82). It works on pretty much the same principle as the sling.

Very fancy harpoons of antler were also made in the latter half of the period in western Europe. These harpoons had barbs on one or both sides and a base which would slip out of the shaft (p. 82). Some have engraved decoration.

THE BEGINNING OF ART

In western Europe, at least, the period saw the beginning of several kinds of art work. It is handy to break the art down into two great groups: the movable art, and the cave paintings and sculpture. The movable art group includes the scratchings, engravings, and modeling which decorate tools and weapons. Knives, stroppers, spear-throwers, harpoons, and sometimes just plain fragments of bone or antler are often carved. There is also a group of large flat pebbles which seem almost to have served as sketch blocks. The surfaces of these various objects may show animals, or rather abstract floral designs, or geometric designs.

Some of the movable art is not done on tools. The most remarkable examples of this class are little figures of women. These women seem to be pregnant, and their most female characteristics are much emphasized. It is thought that these “Venus” or “Mother-goddess” figurines may be meant to show the great forces of nature—fertility and the birth of life.

CAVE PAINTINGS

In the paintings on walls and ceilings of caves we have some examples that compare with the best art of any time. The subjects were usually animals, the great cold-weather beasts of the end of the Ice Age: the mammoth, the wooly rhinoceros, the bison, the reindeer, the wild horse, the bear, the wild boar, and wild cattle. As in the movable art, there are different styles in the cave art. The really great cave art is pretty well restricted to southern France and Cantabrian (northwestern) Spain.

There are several interesting things about the “Franco-Cantabrian” cave art. It was done deep down in the darkest and most dangerous parts of the caves, although the men lived only in the openings of caves. If you think what they must have had for lights—crude lamps of hollowed stone have been found, which must have burned some kind of oil or grease, with a matted hair or fiber wick—and of the animals that may have lurked in the caves, you’ll understand the part about danger. Then, too, we’re sure the pictures these people painted were not simply to be looked at and admired, for they painted one picture right over other pictures which had been done earlier. Clearly, it was the act of painting that counted. The painter had to go way down into the most mysterious depths of the earth and create an animal in paint. Possibly he believed that by doing this he gained some sort of magic power over the same kind of animal when he hunted it in the open air. It certainly doesn’t look as if he cared very much about the picture he painted—as a finished product to be admired—for he or somebody else soon went down and painted another animal right over the one he had done.

The cave art of the Franco-Cantabrian style is one of the great artistic achievements of all time. The subjects drawn are almost always the larger animals of the time: the bison, wild cattle and horses, the wooly rhinoceros, the mammoth, the wild boar, and the bear. In some of the best examples, the beasts are drawn in full color and the paintings are remarkably alive and charged with energy. They come from the hands of men who knew the great animals well—knew the feel of their fur, the tremendous drive of their muscles, and the danger one faced when he hunted them.

Another artistic style has been found in eastern Spain. It includes lively drawings, often of people hunting with bow and arrow. The East Spanish art is found on open rock faces and in rock-shelters. It is less spectacular and apparently more recent than the Franco-Cantabrian cave art.

LIFE AT THE END OF THE ICE AGE IN EUROPE

Life in these times was probably as good as a hunter could expect it to be. Game and fish seem to have been plentiful; berries and wild fruits probably were, too. From France to Russia, great pits or piles of animal bones have been found. Some of this killing was done as our Plains Indians killed the buffalo—by stampeding them over steep river banks or cliffs. There were also good tools for hunting, however. In western Europe, people lived in the openings of caves and under overhanging rocks. On the great plains of eastern Europe, very crude huts were being built, half underground. The first part of this time must have been cold, for it was the middle and end phases of the last great glaciation. Northern Europe from Scotland to Scandinavia, northern Germany and Russia, and also the higher mountains to the south, were certainly covered with ice. But people had fire, and the needles and tools that were used for scraping hides must mean that they wore clothing.

It is clear that men were thinking of a great variety of things beside the tools that helped them get food and shelter. Such burials as we find have more grave-gifts than before. Beads and ornaments and often flint, bone, or antler tools are included in the grave, and sometimes the body is sprinkled with red ochre. Red is the color of blood, which means life, and of fire, which means heat. Professor Childe wonders if the red ochre was a pathetic attempt at magic—to give back to the body the heat that had gone from it. But pathetic or not, it is sure proof that these people were already moved by death as men still are moved by it.

Their art is another example of the direction the human mind was taking. And when I say human, I mean it in the fullest sense, for this is the time in which fully modern man has appeared. On page 34, we spoke of the Cro-Magnon group and of the Combe Capelle-BrÜnn group of Caucasoids and of the Grimaldi “Negroids,” who are no longer believed to be Negroid. I doubt that any one of these groups produced most of the achievements of the times. It’s not yet absolutely sure which particular group produced the great cave art. The artists were almost certainly a blend of several (no doubt already mixed) groups. The pair of Grimaldians were buried in a grave with a sprinkling of red ochre, and were provided with shell beads and ornaments and with some blade tools of flint. Regardless of the different names once given them by the human paleontologists, each of these groups seems to have shared equally in the cultural achievements of the times, for all that the archeologists can say.

MICROLITHS

One peculiar set of tools seems to serve as a marker for the very last phase of the Ice Age in southwestern Europe. This tool-making habit is also found about the shore of the Mediterranean basin, and it moved into northern Europe as the last glaciation pulled northward. People began making blade tools of very small size. They learned how to chip very slender and tiny blades from a prepared core. Then they made these little blades into tiny triangles, half-moons (“lunates”), trapezoids, and several other geometric forms. These little tools are called “microliths.” They are so small that most of them must have been fixed in handles or shafts.

We have found several examples of microliths mounted in shafts. In northern Europe, where their use soon spread, the microlithic triangles or lunates were set in rows down each side of a bone or wood point. One corner of each little triangle stuck out, and the whole thing made a fine barbed harpoon. In historic times in Egypt, geometric trapezoidal microliths were still in use as arrowheads. They were fastened—broad end out—on the end of an arrow shaft. It seems queer to give an arrow a point shaped like a “T.” Actually, the little points were very sharp, and must have pierced the hides of animals very easily. We also think that the broader cutting edge of the point may have caused more bleeding than a pointed arrowhead would. In hunting fleet-footed animals like the gazelle, which might run for miles after being shot with an arrow, it was an advantage to cause as much bleeding as possible, for the animal would drop sooner.

We are not really sure where the microliths were first invented. There is some evidence that they appear early in the Near East. Their use was very common in northwest Africa but this came later. The microlith makers who reached south Russia and central Europe possibly moved up out of the Near East. Or it may have been the other way around; we simply don’t yet know.

Remember that the microliths we are talking about here were made from carefully prepared little blades, and are often geometric in outline. Each microlithic industry proper was made up, in good part, of such tiny blade tools. But there were also some normal-sized blade tools and even some flake scrapers, in most microlithic industries. I emphasize this bladelet and the geometric character of the microlithic industries of the western Old World, since there has sometimes been confusion in the matter. Sometimes small flake chips, utilized as minute pointed tools, have been called “microliths.” They may be microlithic in size in terms of the general meaning of the word, but they do not seem to belong to the sub-tradition of the blade tool preparation habits which we have been discussing here.

LATER BLADE-TOOL INDUSTRIES OF THE NEAR EAST AND AFRICA

The blade-tool industries of normal size we talked about earlier spread from Europe to central Siberia. We noted that blade tools were made in western Asia too, and early, although Professor Garrod is no longer sure that the whole tradition originated in the Near East. If you look again at my chart (p. 72) you will note that in western Asia I list some of the names of the western European industries, but with the qualification “-like” (for example, “Gravettian-like”). The western Asiatic blade-tool industries do vaguely recall some aspects of those of western Europe, but we would probably be better off if we used completely local names for them. The “Emiran” of my chart is such an example; its industry includes a long spike-like blade point which has no western European counterpart.

When we last spoke of Africa (p. 66), I told you that stone tools there were continuing in the Levalloisian flake tradition, and were becoming smaller. At some time during this process, two new tool types appeared in northern Africa: one was the Aterian point with a tang (p. 67), and the other was a sort of “laurel leaf” point, called the “Sbaikian.” These two tool types were both produced from flakes. The Sbaikian points, especially, are roughly similar to some of the Solutrean points of Europe. It has been suggested that both the Sbaikian and Aterian points may be seen on their way to France through their appearance in the Spanish cave deposits of Parpallo, but there is also a rival “pre-Solutrean” in central Europe. We still do not know whether there was any contact between the makers of these north African tools and the Solutrean tool-makers. What does seem clear is that the blade-tool tradition itself arrived late in northern Africa.

NETHER AFRICA

Blade tools and “laurel leaf” points and some other probably late stone tool types also appear in central and southern Africa. There are geometric microliths on bladelets and even some coarse pottery in east Africa. There is as yet no good way of telling just where these items belong in time; in broad geological terms they are “late.” Some people have guessed that they are as early as similar European and Near Eastern examples, but I doubt it. The makers of small-sized Levalloisian flake tools occupied much of Africa until very late in time.

THE FAR EAST

India and the Far East still seem to be going their own way. In India, some blade tools have been found. These are not well dated, save that we believe they must be post-Pleistocene. In the Far East it looks as if the old chopper-tool tradition was still continuing. For Burma, Dr. Movius feels this is fairly certain; for China he feels even more certain. Actually, we know very little about the Far East at about the time of the last glaciation. This is a shame, too, as you will soon agree.

THE NEW WORLD BECOMES INHABITED

At some time toward the end of the last great glaciation—almost certainly after 20,000 years ago—people began to move over Bering Strait, from Asia into America. As you know, the American Indians have been assumed to be basically Mongoloids. New studies of blood group types make this somewhat uncertain, but there is no doubt that the ancestors of the American Indians came from Asia.

The stone-tool traditions of Europe, Africa, the Near and Middle East, and central Siberia, did not move into the New World. With only a very few special or late exceptions, there are no core-bifaces, flakes, or blade tools of the Old World. Such things just haven’t been found here.

This is why I say it’s a shame we don’t know more of the end of the chopper-tool tradition in the Far East. According to Weidenreich, the Mongoloids were in the Far East long before the end of the last glaciation. If the genetics of the blood group types do demand a non-Mongoloid ancestry for the American Indians, who else may have been in the Far East 25,000 years ago? We know a little about the habits for making stone tools which these first people brought with them, and these habits don’t conform with those of the western Old World. We’d better keep our eyes open for whatever happened to the end of the chopper-tool tradition in northern China; already there are hints that it lasted late there. Also we should watch future excavations in eastern Siberia. Perhaps we shall find the chopper-tool tradition spreading up that far.

THE NEW ERA

Perhaps it comes in part from the way I read the evidence and perhaps in part it is only intuition, but I feel that the materials of this chapter suggest a new era in the ways of life. Before about 40,000 years ago, people simply “gathered” their food, wandering over large areas to scavenge or to hunt in a simple sort of way. But here we have seen them “settling-in” more, perhaps restricting themselves in their wanderings and adapting themselves to a given locality in more intensive ways. This intensification might be suggested by the word “collecting.” The ways of life we described in the earlier chapters were “food-gathering” ways, but now an era of “food-collecting” has begun. We shall see further intensifications of it in the next chapter.