15.SUMERIA, EARLY EGYPT AND WRITING | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS
15.SUMERIA, EARLY EGYPT AND WRITING

The old world is a wider, more varied stage than the new. By 6000 or 7000 B.C. there were already quasi-civilized communities almost at the Peruvian level, appearing in various fertile regions of Asia and in the Nile valley. At that time north Persia and western Turkestan and south Arabia were all more fertile than they are now, and there are traces of very early communities in these regions. It is in lower Mesopotamia however and in Egypt that there first appear cities, temples, systematic irrigation, and evidences of a social organization rising above the level of a mere barbaric village-town. In those days the Euphrates and Tigris flowed by separate mouths into the Persian Gulf, and it was in the country between them that the Sumerians built their first cities. About the same time, for chronology is still vague, the great history of Egypt was beginning.

These Sumerians appear to have been a brownish people with prominent

noses. They employed a sort of writing that has been deciphered, and

their language is now known. They had discovered the use of bronze and

they built great tower-like temples of sun-dried brick. The clay of

this country is very fine; they used it to write upon, and so it is

that their inscriptions have been preserved to us. They had cattle,

sheep, goats and asses, but no horses. They fought on foot, in close

formation, carrying spears and shields of skin. Their clothing was of

wool and they shaved their heads.

Each of the Sumerian cities seems generally to have been an independent

state with a god of its own and priests of its own. But sometimes one

city would establish an ascendancy over others and exact tribute from

their population. A very ancient inscription at Nippur records the

“empire,” the first recorded empire, of the Sumerian city of Erech.

Its god and its priest-king claimed an authority from the Persian Gulf

to the Red Sea.

BRICK OF HAMMURABI, KING OF BABYLON ABOUT 2200 B.C.

BRICK OF HAMMURABI, KING OF BABYLON ABOUT 2200 B.C.

Note the cuneiform characters of the inscription, which records the

building of a temple to a Sun God

At first writing was merely an abbreviated method of pictorial record.

Even before Neolithic times men were beginning to write. The Azilian

rock pictures to which we have already referred show the beginning of

the process. Many of them record hunts and expeditions, and in most of

these the human figures are plainly drawn. But in some the painter

would not bother with head and limbs; he just indicated men by a

vertical and one or two transverse strokes. From this to a

conventional condensed picture writing was an easy transition. In

Sumeria, where the writing was done on clay with a stick, the dabs of

the characters soon became unrecognizably unlike the things they stood

for, but in Egypt where men painted on walls and on strips of the

papyrus reed (the first paper) the likeness to the thing imitated

remained. From the fact that the wooden styles used in Sumeria made

wedge-shaped marks, the Sumerian writing is called cuneiform (=

wedge-shaped).

EBONY CYLINDER SEALS OF FIRST EGYPTIAN DYNASTY

EBONY CYLINDER SEALS OF FIRST EGYPTIAN DYNASTY

Recovered from the Tombs at Abydos in 1921 by the British School of

Archæology. They give evidence of early form of block printing

An important step towards writing was made when pictures were used to

indicate not the thing represented but some similar thing. In the

rebus dear to children of a suitable age, this is still done to-day.

We draw a camp with tents and a bell, and the child is delighted to

guess that this is the Scotch name Campbell. The Sumerian language was

a language made up of accumulated syllables rather like some

contemporary Amerindian languages, and it lent itself very readily to

this syllabic method of writing words expressing ideas that could not

be conveyed by pictures directly. Egyptian writing underwent parallel

developments. Later on, when foreign peoples with less distinctly

syllabled methods of speech were to learn and use these picture scripts

they were to make those further modifications and simplifications that

developed at last into alphabetical writing. All the true alphabets of

the later world derived from a mixture of the Sumerian cuneiform and

the Egyptian hieroglyphic (priest writing). Later in China there was

to develop a conventionalized picture writing, but in China it never

got to the alphabetical stage.

The invention of writing was of very great importance in the

development of human societies. It put agreements, laws, commandments

on record. It made the growth of states larger than the old city

states possible. It made a continuous historical consciousness

possible. The command of the priest or king and his seal could go far

beyond his sight and voice and could survive his death. It is

interesting to note that in ancient Sumeria seals were greatly used. A

king or a nobleman or a merchant would have his seal often very

artistically carved, and would impress it on any clay document he

wished to authorize. So close had civilization got to printing six

thousand years ago. Then the clay was dried hard and became permanent.

For the reader must remember that in the land of Mesopotamia for

countless years, letters, records and accounts were all written on

comparatively indestructible tiles. To that fact we owe a great wealth

of recovered knowledge.

Bronze, copper, gold, silver and, as a precious rarity, meteoric iron

were known in both Sumeria and Egypt at a very early stage.

Daily life in those first city lands of the old world must have been

very similar in both Egypt and Sumeria. And except for the asses and

cattle in the streets it must have been not unlike the life in the Maya

cities of America three or four thousand years later. Most of the

people in peace time were busy with irrigation and cultivation—except

on days of religious festivity. They had no money and no need for it.

They managed their small occasional trades by barter. The princes and

rulers who alone had more than a few possessions used gold and silver

bars and precious stones for any incidental act of trade. The temple

dominated life; in Sumeria it was a great towering temple that went up

to a roof from which the stars were observed; in Egypt it was a massive

building with only a ground floor. In Sumeria the priest ruler was the

greatest, most splendid of beings. In Egypt however there was one who

was raised above the priests; he was the living incarnation of the

chief god of the land, the Pharaoh, the god king.

There were few changes in the world in those days; men’s days were

sunny, toilsome and conventional. Few strangers came into the land and

such as did fared uncomfortably. The priest directed life according to

immemorial rules and watched the stars for seed time and marked the

omens of the sacrifices and interpreted the warnings of dreams. Men

worked and loved and died, not unhappily, forgetful of the savage past

of their race and heedless of its future. Sometimes the ruler was

benign. Such was Pepi II, who reigned in Egypt for ninety years.

Sometimes he was ambitious and took men’s sons to be soldiers and sent

them against neighbouring city states to war and plunder, or he made

them toil to build great buildings. Such were Cheops and Chephren and

Mycerinus, who built those vast sepulchral piles, the pyramids at

Gizeh. The largest of these is 450 feet high and the weight of stone in

it is 4,883,000 tons. All this was brought down the Nile in boats and

lugged into place chiefly by human muscle. Its erection must have

exhausted Egypt more than a great war would have done.

14.PRIMITIVE NEOLITHIC CIVILIZATIONS | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

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.

13.THE BEGINNINGS OF CULTIVATION | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

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.”

12. PRIMITIVE THOUGHT | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

12. PRIMITIVE THOUGHT

And now let us indulge in a very interesting speculation; how did it feel to be a man in those early days of the human adventure? How did men think and what did they think in those remote days of hunting and wandering four hundred centuries ago before seed time and harvest began. Those were days long before the written record of any human impressions, and we are left almost entirely to inference and guesswork in our answers to these questions.

The sources to which scientific men have gone in their attempts to

reconstruct that primitive mentality are very various. Recently the

science of psycho-analysis, which analyzes the way in which the

egotistic and passionate impulses of the child are restrained,

suppressed, modified or overlaid, to adapt them to the needs of social

life, seems to have thrown a considerable amount of light upon the

history of primitive society; and another fruitful source of suggestion

has been the study of the ideas and customs of such contemporary

savages as still survive. Again there is a sort of mental

fossilization which we find in folk-lore and the deep-lying irrational

superstitions and prejudices that still survive among modern civilized

people. And finally we have in the increasingly numerous pictures,

statues, carvings, symbols and the like, as we draw near to our own

time, clearer and clearer indications of what man found interesting and

worthy of record and representation.

Primitive man probably thought very much as a child thinks, that is to

say in a series of imaginative pictures. He conjured up images or

images presented themselves to his mind, and he acted in accordance

with the emotions they aroused. So a child or an uneducated person

does to-day. Systematic thinking is apparently a comparatively late

development in human experience; it has not played any great part in

human life until within the last three thousand years. And even to-day

those who really control and order their thoughts are but a small

minority of mankind. Most of the world still lives by imagination and

passion.

Probably the earliest human societies, in the opening stages of the

true human story, were small family groups. Just as the flocks and

herds of the earlier mammals arose out of families which remained

together and multiplied, so probably did the earliest tribes. But

before this could happen a certain restraint upon the primitive

egotisms of the individual had to be established. The fear of the

father and respect for the mother had to be extended into adult life,

and the natural jealousy of the old man of the group for the younger

males as they grew up had to be mitigated. The mother on the other

hand was the natural adviser and protector of the young. Human social

life grew up out of the reaction between the crude instinct of the

young to go off and pair by themselves as they grew up, on the one

hand, and the dangers and disadvantages of separation on the other. An

anthropological writer of great genius, J. J. Atkinson, in his _Primal

Law_, has shown how much of the customary law of savages, the _Tabus_,

that are so remarkable a fact in tribal life, can be ascribed to such a

mental adjustment of the needs of the primitive human animal to a

developing social life, and the later work of the psycho- analysts has

done much to confirm his interpretation of these possibilities.

Some speculative writers would have us believe that respect and fear of

the Old Man and the emotional reaction of the primitive savage to older

protective women, exaggerated in dreams and enriched by fanciful mental

play, played a large part in the beginnings of primitive religion and

in the conception of gods and goddesses. Associated with this respect

for powerful or helpful personalities was a dread and exaltation of

such personages after their deaths, due to their reappearance in

dreams. It was easy to believe they were not truly dead but only

fantastically transferred to a remoteness of greater power.

The dreams, imaginations and fears of a child are far more vivid and

real than those of a modern adult, and primitive man was always

something of a child. He was nearer to the animals also, and he could

suppose them to have motives and reactions like his own. He could

imagine animal helpers, animal enemies, animal gods. One needs to have

been an imaginative child oneself to realize again how important,

significant, portentous or friendly, strangely shaped rocks, lumps of

wood, exceptional trees or the like may have appeared to the men of the

Old Stone Age, and how dream and fancy would create stories and legends

about such things that would become credible as they told them. Some

of these stories would be good enough to remember and tell again. The

women would tell them to the children and so establish a tradition. To

this day most imaginative children invent long stories in which some

favourite doll or animal or some fantastic semi-human being figures as

the hero, and primitive man probably did the same—with a much stronger

disposition to believe his hero real.

For the very earliest of the true men that we know of were probably

quite talkative beings. In that way they have differed from the

Neanderthalers and had an advantage over them. The Neanderthaler may

have been a dumb animal. Of course the primitive human speech was

probably a very scanty collection of names, and may have been eked out

with gestures and signs.

There is no sort of savage so low as not to have a kind of science of

cause and effect. But primitive man was not very critical in his

associations of cause with effect; he very easily connected an effect

with something quite wrong as its cause. “You do so and so,” he said,

“and so and so happens.” You give a child a poisonous berry and it

dies. You eat the heart of a valiant enemy and you become strong.

There we have two bits of cause and effect association, one true one

false. We call the system of cause and effect in the mind of a savage,

Fetish; but Fetish is simply savage science. It differs from modern

science in that it is totally unsystematic and uncritical and so more

frequently wrong.

In many cases it is not difficult to link cause and effect, in many

others erroneous ideas were soon corrected by experience; but there was

a large series of issues of very great importance to primitive man,

where he sought persistently for causes and found explanations that

were wrong but not sufficiently wrong nor so obviously wrong as to be

detected. It was a matter of great importance to him that game should

be abundant or fish plentiful and easily caught, and no doubt he tried

and believed in a thousand charms, incantations and omens to determine

these desirable results. Another great concern of his was illness and

death. Occasionally infections crept through the land and men died of

them. Occasionally men were stricken by illness and died or were

enfeebled without any manifest cause. This too must have given the

hasty, emotional mind of primitive man much feverish exercise. Dreams

and fantastic guesses made him blame this, or appeal for help to that

man or beast or thing. He had the child’s aptitude for fear and panic.

Quite early in the little human tribe, older, steadier minds sharing

the fears, sharing the imaginations, but a little more forceful than

the others, must have asserted themselves, to advise, to prescribe, to

command. This they declared unpropitious and that imperative, this an

omen of good and that an omen of evil. The expert in Fetish, the

Medicine Man, was the first priest. He exhorted, he interpreted

dreams, he warned, he performed the complicated hocus pocus that

brought luck or averted calamity. Primitive religion was not so much

what we now call religion as practice and observance, and the early

priest dictated what was indeed an arbitrary primitive practical

science.

11.THE FIRST TRUE MEN | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

11.THE FIRST TRUE MEN

The earliest signs and traces at present known to science, of a humanity which is indisputably kindred with ourselves, have been found in western Europe and particularly in France and Spain. Bones, weapons, scratchings upon bone and rock, carved fragments of bone, and paintings in caves and upon rock surfaces dating. it is supposed. from 30,000 years ago or more, have been discovered in both these countries. Spain is at present the richest country in the world in these first relics of our real human ancestors.

Of course our present collections of these things are the merest

beginnings of the accumulations we may hope for in the future, when

there are searchers enough to make a thorough examination of all

possible sources and when other countries in the world, now

inaccessible to archæologists, have been explored in some detail. The

greater part of Africa and Asia has never even been traversed yet by a

trained observer interested in these matters and free to explore, and

we must be very careful therefore not to conclude that the early true

men were distinctively inhabitants of western Europe or that they first

appeared in that region.

In Asia or Africa or submerged beneath the sea of to-day there may be

richer and much earlier deposits of real human remains than anything

that has yet come to light. I write in Asia or Africa, and I do not

mention America because so far there have been no finds at all of any

of the higher Primates, either of great apes, sub-men, Neanderthalers

nor early true men. This development of life seems to have been an

exclusively old world development, and it was only apparently at the

end of the Old Stone Age that human beings first made their way across

the land connexion that is now cut by Behring Straits, into the

American continent.

The Walls of the Caves are covered in these representations of Bulls,

etc., painted in the soft tones of red shaded to black. They may be

fifteen or twenty thousand years old

These first real human beings we know of in Europe appear already to

have belonged to one or other of at least two very distinct races. One

of these races was of a very high type indeed; it was tall and big

brained. One of the women’s skulls found exceeds in capacity that of

the average man of to-day. One of the men’s skeletons is over six feet

in height. The physical type resembled that of the North American

Indian. From the Cro-Magnon cave in which the first skeletons were

found these people have been called Cro-Magnards. They were savages,

but savages of a high order. The second race, the race of the Grimaldi

cave remains, was distinctly negroid in its characters. Its nearest

living affinities are the Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa. It

is interesting to find at the very outset of the known human story,

that mankind was already racially divided into at least two main

varieties; and one is tempted to such unwarrantable guesses as that the

former race was probably brownish rather than black and that it came

from the East or North, and that the latter was blackish rather than

brown and came from the equatorial south.

And these savages of perhaps forty thousand years ago were so human

that they pierced shells to make necklaces, painted themselves, carved

images of bone and stone, scratched figures on rocks and bones, and

painted rude but often very able sketches of beasts and the like upon

the smooth walls of caves and upon inviting rock surfaces. They made a

great variety of implements, much smaller in scale and finer than those

of the Neanderthal men. We have now in our museums great quantities of

their implements, their statuettes, their rock drawings and the like.

The earliest of them were hunters. Their chief pursuit was the wild

horse, the little bearded pony of that time. They followed it as it

moved after pasture. And also they followed the bison. They knew the

mammoth, because they have left us strikingly effective pictures of

that creature. To judge by one rather ambiguous drawing they trapped

and killed it.

They hunted with spears and throwing stones. They do not seem to have

had the bow, and it is doubtful if they had yet learnt to tame any

animals. They had no dogs. There is one carving of a horse’s head and

one or two drawings that suggest a bridled horse, with a twisted skin

or tendon round it. But the little horses of that age and region could

not have carried a man, and if the horse was domesticated it was used

as a led horse. It is doubtful and improbable that they had yet learnt

the rather unnatural use of animal’s milk as food.

They do not seem to have erected any buildings though they may have had

tents of skins, and though they made clay figures they never rose to

the making of pottery. Since they had no cooking implements their

cookery must have been rudimentary or nonexistent. They knew nothing

of cultivation and nothing of any sort of basket work or woven cloth.

Except for their robes of skin or fur they were naked painted savages.

These earliest known men hunted the open steppes of Europe for a

hundred centuries perhaps, and then slowly drifted and changed before a

change of climate. Europe, century by century, was growing milder and

damper. Reindeer receded northward and eastward, and bison and horse

followed. The steppes gave way to forests, and red deer took the place

of horse and bison. There is a change in the character of the

implements with this change in their application. River and lake

fishing becomes of great importance to men, and fine implements of bone

increased. “The bone needles of this age,” says de Mortillet, “are

much superior to those of later, even historical times, down to the

Renaissance. The Romans, for example, never had needles comparable to

those of this epoch.”

Almost fifteen or twelve thousand years ago a fresh people drifted into

the south of Spain, and left very remarkable drawings of themselves

upon exposed rock faces there. These were the Azilians (named from the

Mas d’Azil cave). They had the bow; they seem to have worn feather

headdresses; they drew vividly; but also they had reduced their

drawings to a sort of symbolism—a man for instance would be represented

by a vertical dab with two or three horizontal dabs—that suggest the

dawn of the writing idea. Against hunting sketches there are often

marks like tallies. One drawing shows two men smoking out a bees’ nest.

FIGHT OF BOWMEN

Among the most recent discoveries of Palæolithic Art are these

specimens found in 1920 in Spain. They are probably ten or twelve

thousand years old

These are the latest of the men that we call Palæolithic (Old Stone

Age) because they had only chipped implements. By ten or twelve

thousand years a new sort of life has dawned in Europe, men have learnt

not only to chip but to polish and grind stone implements, and they

have begun cultivation. The Neolithic Age (New Stone Age) was

beginning.

It is interesting to note that less than a century ago there still

survived in a remote part of the world, in Tasmania, a race of human

beings at a lower level of physical and intellectual development than

any of these earliest races of mankind who have left traces in Europe.

These people had long ago been cut off by geographical changes from the

rest of the species, and from stimulation and improvement. They seem

to have degenerated rather than developed. They lived a base life

subsisting upon shellfish and small game. They had no habitations but

only squatting places. They were real men of our species, but they had

neither the manual dexterity nor the artistic powers of the first true

men.

10.THE NEANDERTHALER AND THE RHODESIAN MAN | A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD | H. G. WELLS

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD

BY

H. G. WELLS

10.THE NEANDERTHALER AND THE RHODESIAN MAN

About fifty or sixty thousand years ago, before the climax of the Fourth Glacial Age, there lived a creature on earth so like a man that until a few years ago its remains were considered to be altogether human. We have skulls and bones of it and a great accumulation of the large implements it made and used. It made fires. It sheltered in caves from the cold. It probably dressed skins roughly and wore them. It was right-handed as men are.

Yet now the ethnologists tell us these creatures were not true men.

They were of a different species of the same genus. They had heavy

protruding jaws and great brow ridges above the eyes and very low

foreheads. Their thumbs were not opposable to the fingers as men’s

are; their necks were so poised that they could not turn back their

heads and look up to the sky. They probably slouched along, head down

and forward. Their chinless jaw-bones resemble the Heidelberg jaw-bone

and are markedly unlike human jaw-bones. And there were great

differences from the human pattern in their teeth. Their cheek teeth

were more complicated in structure than ours, more complicated and not

less so; they had not the long fangs of our cheek teeth; and also these

quasi-men had not the marked canines (dog teeth) of an ordinary human

being. The capacity of their skulls was quite human, but the brain was

bigger behind and lower in front than the human brain. Their

intellectual faculties were differently arranged. They were not

ancestral to the human line. Mentally and physically they were upon a

different line from the human line.

Skulls and bones of this extinct species of man were found at

Neanderthal among other places, and from that place these strange

proto-men have been christened Neanderthal Men, or Neanderthalers. They

must have endured in Europe for many hundreds or even thousands of

years.

THE NEANDERTHALER, ACCORDING TO PROF. RUTOT

THE NEANDERTHALER, ACCORDING TO PROF. RUTOT

At that time the climate and geography of our world was very different

from what they are at the present time. Europe for example was covered

with ice reaching as far south as the Thames and into Central Germany

and Russia; there was no Channel separating Britain from France; the

Mediterranean and the Red Sea were great valleys, with perhaps a chain

of lakes in their deeper portions, and a great inland sea spread from

the present Black Sea across South Russia and far into Central Asia.

Spain and all of Europe not actually under ice consisted of bleak

uplands under a harder climate than that of Labrador, and it was only

when North Africa was reached that one would have found a temperate

climate. Across the cold steppes of Southern Europe with its sparse

arctic vegetation, drifted such hardy creatures as the woolly mammoth,

and woolly rhinoceros, great oxen and reindeer, no doubt following the

vegetation northward in spring and southward in autumn.

Map: Possible Outline of Europe and Western Asia at the Maximum of the

Fourth Ice Age (about 50,000 years ago)

Such was the scene through which the Neanderthaler wandered, gathering

such subsistence as he could from small game or fruits and berries and

roots. Possibly he was mainly a vegetarian, chewing twigs and roots.

His level elaborate teeth suggest a largely vegetarian dietary. But we

also find the long marrow bones of great animals in his caves, cracked

to extract the marrow. His weapons could not have been of much avail

in open conflict with great beasts, but it is supposed that he attacked

them with spears at difficult river crossings and even constructed

pitfalls for them. Possibly he followed the herds and preyed upon any

dead that were killed in fights, and perhaps he played the part of

jackal to the sabre-toothed tiger which still survived in his day.

Possibly in the bitter hardships of the Glacial Ages this creature had

taken to attacking animals after long ages of vegetarian adaptation.

We cannot guess what this Neanderthal man looked like. He may have been

very hairy and very unhuman-looking indeed. It is even doubtful if he

went erect. He may have used his knuckles as well as his feet to hold

himself up. Probably he went about alone or in small family groups. It

is inferred from the structure of his jaw that he was incapable of

speech as we understand it.

For thousands of years these Neanderthalers were the highest animals

that the European area had ever seen; and then some thirty or

thirty-five thousand years ago as the climate grew warmer a race of

kindred beings, more intelligent, knowing more, talking and

co-operating together, came drifting into the Neanderthaler’s world

from the south. They ousted the Neanderthalers from their caves and

squatting places; they hunted the same food; they probably made war

upon their grisly predecessors and killed them off. These newcomers

from the south or the east—for at present we do not know their region

of origin—who at last drove the Neanderthalers out of existence

altogether, were beings of our own blood and kin, the first True Men.

Their brain-cases and thumbs and necks and teeth were anatomically the

same as our own. In a cave at Cro-Magnon and in another at Grimaldi, a

number of skeletons have been found, the earliest truly human remains

that are so far known.

So it is our race comes into the Record of the Rocks, and the story of

mankind begins.

The world was growing liker our own in those days though the climate

was still austere. The glaciers of the Ice Age were receding in

Europe; the reindeer of France and Spain presently gave way to great

herds of horses as grass increased upon the steppes, and the mammoth

became more and more rare in southern Europe and finally receded

northward altogether ....

We do not know where the True Men first originated. But in the summer

of 1921, an extremely interesting skull was found together with pieces

of a skeleton at Broken Hill in South Africa, which seems to be a relic

of a third sort of man, intermediate in its characteristics between the

Neanderthaler and the human being. The brain-case indicates a brain

bigger in front and smaller behind than the Neanderthaler’s, and the

skull was poised erect upon the backbone in a quite human way. The

teeth also and the bones are quite human. But the face must have been

ape-like with enormous brow ridges and a ridge along the middle of the

skull. The creature was indeed a true man, so to speak, with an ape-

like, Neanderthaler face. This Rhodesian Man is evidently still closer

to real men than the Neanderthal Man.

This Rhodesian skull is probably only the second of what in the end may

prove to be a long list of finds of sub-human species which lived on

the earth in the vast interval of time between the beginnings of the

Ice Age and the appearance of their common heir, and perhaps their

common exterminator, the True Man. The Rhodesian skull itself may not

be very ancient. Up to the time of publishing this book there has been

no exact determination of its probable age. It may be that this

sub-human creature survived in South Africa until quite recent times.