A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
13.THE BEGINNINGS OF CULTIVATION
We are still very ignorant about the beginnings of cultivation and settlement in the world although a vast amount of research and speculation has been given to these matters in the last fifty years.
All that we can say with any confidence at present is that somewhen about 15,000 and 12,000 B.C. while the Azilian people were in the south of Spain and while the remnants of the earlier hunters were drifting northward and eastward, somewhere in North Africa or Western Asia or in that great Mediterranean valley that is now submerged under the waters of the Mediterranean sea, there were people who, age by age, were working out two vitally important things; they were beginning cultivation and they were domesticating animals. They were also beginning to make, in addition to the chipped implements of their hunter forebears, implements of polished stone. They had discovered the possibility of basketwork and roughly woven textiles of plant fibre, and they were beginning to make a rudely modelled pottery.
They were entering upon a new phase in human culture, the Neolithic
phase (New Stone Age) as distinguished from the Palæolithic (Old Stone)
phase of the Cro-Magnards, the Grimaldi people, the Azilians and their
like. [1] Slowly these Neolithic people spread over the warmer parts
of the world; and the arts they had mastered, the plants and animals
they had learnt to use, spread by imitation and acquisition even more
widely than they did. By 10,000 B.C., most of mankind was at the
Neolithic level.
Now the ploughing of land, the sowing of seed, the reaping of harvest,
threshing and grinding, may seem the most obviously reasonable steps to
a modern mind just as to a modern mind it is a commonplace that the
world is round. What else could you do? people will ask. What else
can it be? But to the primitive man of twenty thousand years ago
neither of the systems of action and reasoning that seem so sure and
manifest to us to-day were at all obvious. He felt his way to
effectual practice through a multitude of trials and misconceptions,
with fantastic and unnecessary elaborations and false interpretations
at every turn. Somewhere in the Mediterranean region, wheat grew wild;
and man may have learnt to pound and then grind up its seeds for food
long before he learnt to sow. He reaped before he sowed.
And it is a very remarkable thing that throughout the world wherever
there is sowing and harvesting there is still traceable the vestiges of
a strong primitive association of the idea of sowing with the idea of a
blood sacrifice, and primarily of the sacrifice of a human being. The
study of the original entanglement of these two things is a profoundly
attractive one to the curious mind; the interested reader will find it
very fully developed in that monumental work, Sir J. G. Frazer’s
_Golden Bough_. It was an entanglement, we must remember, in the
childish, dreaming, myth-making primitive mind; no reasoned process
will explain it. But in that world of 12,000 to 20,000 years ago, it
would seem that whenever seed time came round to the Neolithic peoples
there was a human sacrifice. And it was not the sacrifice of any mean
or outcast person; it was the sacrifice usually of a chosen youth or
maiden, a youth more often who was treated with profound deference and
even worship up to the moment of his immolation. He was a sort of
sacrificial god-king, and all the details of his killing had become a
ritual directed by the old, knowing men and sanctioned by the
accumulated usage of ages.
NEOLITHIC FLINT IMPLEMENTS
At first primitive men, with only a very rough idea of the seasons,
must have found great difficulty in determining when was the propitious
moment for the seed-time sacrifice and the sowing. There is some
reason for supposing that there was an early stage in human experience
when men had no idea of a year. The first chronology was in lunar
months; it is supposed that the years of the Biblical patriarchs are
really moons, and the Babylonian calendar shows distinct traces of an
attempt to reckon seed time by taking thirteen lunar months to see it
round. This lunar influence upon the calendar reaches down to our own
days. If usage did not dull our sense of its strangeness we should
think it a very remarkable thing indeed that the Christian Church does
not commemorate the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ on the
proper anniversaries but on dates that vary year by year with the
phases of the moon.
It may be doubted whether the first agriculturalists made any
observation of the stars. It is more likely that stars were first
observed by migratory herdsmen, who found them a convenient mark of
direction. But once their use in determining seasons was realized,
their importance to agriculture became very great. The seed-time
sacrifice was linked up with the southing or northing of some prominent
star. A myth and worship of that star was for primitive man an almost
inevitable consequence.
It is easy to see how important the man of knowledge and experience,
the man who knew about the blood sacrifice and the stars, became in
this early Neolithic world.
The fear of uncleanness and pollution, and the methods of cleansing
that were advisable, constituted another source of power for the
knowledgeable men and women. For there have always been witches as well
as wizards, and priestesses as well as priests. The early priest was
really not so much a religious man as a man of applied science. His
science was generally empirical and often bad; he kept it secret from
the generality of men very jealously; but that does not alter the fact
that his primary function was knowledge and that his primary use was a
practical use.
Twelve or fifteen thousand years ago, in all the warm and fairly
well-watered parts of the Old World these Neolithic human communities,
with their class and tradition of priests and priestesses and their
cultivated fields and their development of villages and little walled
cities, were spreading. Age by age a drift and exchange of ideas went
on between these communities. Eliot Smith and Rivers have used the
term “Heliolithic culture” for the culture of these first agricultural
peoples. “Heliolithic” (Sun and Stone) is not perhaps the best
possible word to use for this, but until scientific men give us a
better one we shall have to use it. Originating somewhere in the
Mediterranean and western Asiatic area, it spread age by age eastward
and from island to island across the Pacific until it may even have
reached America and mingled with the more primitive ways of living of
the Mongoloid immigrants coming down from the North.
Wherever the brownish people with the Heliolithic culture went they
took with them all or most of a certain group of curious ideas and
practices. Some of them are such queer ideas that they call for the
explanation of the mental expert. They made pyramids and great mounds,
and set up great circles of big stones, perhaps to facilitate the
astronomical observation of the priests; they made mummies of some or
all of their dead; they tattooed and circumcized; they had the old
custom, known as the _couvade_, of sending the _father_ to bed and rest
when a child was born, and they had as a luck symbol the well-known
Swastika.
If we were to make a map of the world with dots to show how far these
group practices have left their traces, we should make a belt along the
temperate and sub-tropical coasts of the world from Stonehenge and
Spain across the world to Mexico and Peru. But Africa below the
equator, north central Europe, and north Asia would show none of these
dottings; there lived races who were developing along practically
independent lines.
The term Palæolithic we may note is also used to cover the Neanderthaler and even the Eolithic implements. The pre-human age is called the “Older Palæolithic;” the age of true men using unpolished stones in the “Newer Palæolithic.”