A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
14.PRIMITIVE NEOLITHIC CIVILIZATIONS
About 10,000 B.C. the geography of the world was very similar in its general outline to that of the world to-day. It is probable that by that time the great barrier across the Straits of Gibraltar that had hitherto banked back the ocean waters from the Mediterranean valley had been eaten through, and that the Mediterranean was a sea following much the same coastlines as it does now. The Caspian Sea was probably still far more extensive than it is at present, and it may have been continuous with the Black Sea to the north of the Caucasus Mountains. About this great Central Asian sea lands that are now steppes and deserts were fertile and habitable. Generally it was a moister and more fertile world. European Russia was much more a land of swamp and lake than it is now, and there may still have been a land connexion between Asia and America at Behring Straits.
It would have been already possible at that time to have distinguished
the main racial divisions of mankind as we know them to-day. Across
the warm temperate regions of this rather warmer and better-wooded
world, and along the coasts, stretched the brownish peoples of the
Heliolithic culture, the ancestors of the bulk of the living
inhabitants of the Mediterranean world, of the Berbers, the Egyptians
and of much of the population of South and Eastern Asia. This great
race had of course a number of varieties. The Iberian or Mediterranean
or “dark-white” race of the Atlantic and Mediterranean coast, the
“Hamitic” peoples which include the Berbers and Egyptians, the
Dravidians; the darker people of India, a multitude of East Indian
people, many Polynesian races and the Maoris are all divisions of
various value of this great main mass of humanity. Its western
varieties are whiter than its eastern.
In the forests of central and northern Europe a more blonde variety of
men with blue eyes was becoming distinguishable, branching off from the
main mass of brownish people, a variety which many people now speak of
as the Nordic race. In the more open regions of northeastern Asia was
another differentiation of this brownish humanity in the direction of a
type with more oblique eyes, high cheek-bones, a yellowish skin, and
very straight black hair, the Mongolian peoples. In South Africa,
Australia, in many tropical islands in the south of Asia were remains
of the early negroid peoples. The central parts of Africa were already
a region of racial intermixture. Nearly all the coloured races of
Africa to-day seem to be blends of the brownish peoples of the north
with a negroid substratum.
A Diagrammatic Summary of Current Ideas of the Relationship of Human
Races
We have to remember that human races can all interbreed freely and that
they separate, mingle and reunite as clouds do. Human races do not
branch out like trees with branches that never come together again. It
is a thing we need to bear constantly in mind, this remingling of races
at any opportunity. It will save us from many cruel delusions and
prejudices if we do so. People will use such a word as race in the
loosest manner, and base the most preposterous generalizations upon it.
They will speak of a “British” race or of a “European” race. But
nearly all the European nations are confused mixtures of brownish,
dark-white, white and Mongolian elements.
It was at the Neolithic phase of human development that peoples of the
Mongolian breed first made their way into America. Apparently they
came by way of Behring Straits and spread southward. They found
caribou, the American reindeer, in the north and great herds of bison
in the south. When they reached South America there were still living
the Glyptodon, a gigantic armadillo, and the Megatherium, a monstrous
clumsy sloth as high as an elephant. They probably exterminated the
latter beast, which was as helpless as it was big.
The greater portion of these American tribes never rose above a hunting
nomadic Neolithic life. They never discovered the use of iron, and
their chief metal possessions were native gold and copper. But in
Mexico, Yucatan and Peru conditions existed favourable to settled
cultivation, and here about 1000 B.C. or so arose very interesting
civilizations of a parallel but different type from the old-world
civilization. Like the much earlier primitive civilizations of the old
world these communities displayed a great development of human
sacrifice about the processes of seed time and harvest; but while in
the old world, as we shall see, these primary ideas were ultimately
mitigated, complicated and overlaid by others, in America they
developed and were elaborated, to a very high degree of intensity.
These American civilized countries were essentially priest-ruled
countries; their war chiefs and rulers were under a rigorous rule of
law and omen.
These priests carried astronomical science to a high level of accuracy.
They knew their year better than the Babylonians of whom we shall
presently tell. In Yucatan they had a kind of writing, the Maya
writing, of the most curious and elaborate character. So far as we
have been able to decipher it, it was used mainly for keeping the exact
and complicated calendars upon which the priests expended their
intelligence. The art of the Maya civilization came to a climax about
700 or 800 A.D. The sculptured work of these people amazes the modern
observer by its great plastic power and its frequent beauty, and
perplexes him by a grotesqueness and by a sort of insane
conventionality and intricacy outside the circle of his ideas. There
is nothing quite like it in the old world. The nearest approach, and
that is a remote one, is found in archaic Indian carvings. Everywhere
there are woven feathers and serpents twine in and out. Many Maya
inscriptions resemble a certain sort of elaborate drawing made by
lunatics in European asylums, more than any other old-world work. It
is as if the Maya mind had developed upon a different line from the
old-world mind, had a different twist to its ideas, was not, by
old-world standards, a rational mind at all.
This linking of these aberrant American civilizations to the idea of a
general mental aberration finds support in their extraordinary
obsession by the shedding of human blood. The Mexican civilization in
particular ran blood; it offered thousands of human victims yearly.
The cutting open of living victims, the tearing out of the still
beating heart, was an act that dominated the minds and lives of these
strange priesthoods. The public life, the national festivities all
turned on this fantastically horrible act.
NEOLITHIC WARRIOR
Modelled from drawing by Prof. Rutot
The ordinary existence of the common people in these communities was
very like the ordinary existence of any other barbaric peasantry.
Their pottery, weaving and dyeing was very good. The Maya writing was
not only carven on stone but written and painted upon skins and the
like. The European and American museums contain many enigmatical Maya
manuscripts of which at present little has been deciphered except the
dates. In Peru there were beginnings of a similar writing but they
were superseded by a method of keeping records by knotting cords. A
similar method of mnemonics was in use in China thousands of years ago.
In the old world before 4000 or 5000 B.C., that is to say three or four
thousand years earlier, there were primitive civilizations not unlike
these American civilizations; civilizations based upon a temple, having
a vast quantity of blood sacrifices and with an intensely astronomical
priesthood. But in the old world the primitive civilizations reacted
upon one another and developed towards the conditions of our own world.
In America these primitive civilizations never progressed beyond this
primitive stage. Each of them was in a little world of its own.
Mexico it seems knew little or nothing of Peru, until the Europeans
came to America. The potato, which was the principal food stuff in
Peru, was unknown in Mexico.
Age by age these peoples lived and marvelled at their gods and made
their sacrifices and died. Maya art rose to high levels of decorative
beauty. Men made love and tribes made war. Drought and plenty,
pestilence and health, followed one another. The priests elaborated
their calendar and their sacrificial ritual through long centuries, but
made little progress in other directions.