III. THE NEOLITHIC AND BRONZE AGES About 7,000 B.C. we enter an entirely new period in the history of man, the Neolithic or New Stone Age, when the flint implements were polished and not merely chipped. Early as is this date in European culture, we are not far from the beginnings of an elaborate civilization in parts of Asia and Egypt. The earliest organized governments, so far as our present knowledge goes, were Egypt and Sumer. Chinese civilization at the other end of Asia is later, but mystery still shrouds its origin and its connection, if any, with the Mesopotamian city-states. The solution probably lies in the central region of the Syr Darya and future excavations in those regions may uncover very early cultures. Balkh, the ancient Bactra, the mother of cities, is located where the trade routes between China, India and Mesopotamia converged and it is in this neighborhood that careful and thorough excavations will probably find their greatest reward.
However, we are not dealing with Asia but with Europe only and our knowledge is confined to the fact that the various cultural advances at the end of the Paleolithic and the beginning of the Neolithic correspond with the arrival of new races.
The transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic was formerly considered as revolutionary, an abrupt change of both race and culture, but a period more or less transitory, known as the Campignian, now appears to bridge over this gap. This is only what should be expected, since in human archaeology as in geology the more detailed our knowledge becomes the more gradually we find one period or horizon merges into its successor.
For a long time after the opening of the Neolithic the old-fashioned chipped weapons and implements remain the predominant type and the polished flints so characteristic of the Neolithic appear at first only sporadically, then increase in number until finally .they entirely replace the rougher designs of the preceding Old Stone Age.
So in their turn these Neolithic polished stone implements, which ultimately became both varied and effective as weapons and tools, continued in use long after metallurgy developed. In the Bronze Period metal armor and weapons were for ages of the greatest value. So they were necessarily in the possession of the military and ruling classes only, while the unfortunate serf or common soldier who followed his master to war did the best he could with leather shield and stone weapons. In the ring that clustered around Harold for the last stand on Senlac Hill many of the English thanes died with their Saxon king, armed solely with the stone battle-axes of their ancestors.
In Italy also there was a long period known to the Italian archaeologists as the Eneolithic Period when good flint tools existed side by side with very poor copper and bronze implements; so that, while the Neolithic lasted in western Europe four or five thousand years, it is, at its commencement, without clear definition from the preceding Paleolithic and at its end it merges gradually into the succeeding ages of metals.
After the opening Campignian phase there followed a long period typical of the Neolithic, known as the Robenhausian or Age of the Swiss Lake Dwellers, which reached its height after 5000 B.C. The lake dwellings seem to have been the work chiefly of the round skull Alpine races and are found in numbers throughout the region of the Alps and their foothills and along the valley of the Danube.
These Robenhausian pile built villages were the earliest known form of fixed habitation in Europe and the culture found in association with them was a great advance over that of the preceding Paleolithic. This type of permanent habitation flourished through the entire Upper Neolithic and the succeeding Bronze Age. Pile villages end in Switzerland with the first appearance of iron but elsewhere, as on the upper Danube, they still existed in the days of Herodotus.
Pottery is found together with domesticated animals and agriculture, which appear during the Robenhausian for the first time. The chase, supplemented by trapping and fishing, was still common but it probably was more for clothing than for food. A permanent site is not alone the basis of an agricultural community, but it also involves at least a partial abandonment of the chase, because only nomads can follow the game in its seasonal migrations and hunted animals soon leave the neighborhood of settlements.
The Terramara Period of northern Italy was a later phase of culture contemporaneous with the Upper Robenhausian and was typical of the Bronze Age. During the Terramara Period fortified and moated stations in swamps or close to the banks of rivers became the favorite resorts instead of pile villages built in lakes. The first traces of copper are found during this period. The earliest human remains in the Terramara deposits are long skulled, but round skulls soon appear in association with bronze implements. This indicates an original population of Mediterranean affinities overwhelmed later by Alpines.
Neolithic culture also flourished in the north of Europe and particularly in Scandinavia now free from ice. The coasts of the Baltic were apparently occupied for the first time at the very beginning of this period, as no trace of Paleolithic industry has been found there, other than the Maglemose, which represents only the very latest phase of the Old Stone Age. The kitchen middens, or refuse heaps, of Sweden and more particularly of Denmark date from the early Neolithic and thus are somewhat earlier than the lake dwellers. Rough pottery occurs in them for the first time, but no traces of agriculture have been found and, as said, the dog seems to have been the only domesticated animal.
From these two centres, the Alps and the North, an elaborate and variegated Neolithic culture spread through western Europe and an autochthonous development took place, comparatively little influenced by trade intercourse with Asia after the first immigrations of the new races.
We may assume that the distribution of races in Europe during the Neolithic was roughly as follows.
The Mediterranean basin and western Europe, including Spain, Italy, Gaul, Britain and parts of western Germany, were populated by Mediterranean long heads. In Britain the Paleolithic population must have been very small and the Neolithic Mediterraneans were the first effectively to open up the country. Even they kept to the open moorlands and avoided the heavily wooded and swampy valleys which to-day are the main centres of population. Before metal and especially iron tools were in use forests were an almost complete barrier to the expansion of an agricultural population.
The Alps and the territories immediately adjacent, with Central Gaul and much of the Balkans, were inhabited by Alpine types. These Alpines extended northward until they came in touch in eastern Germany and Poland with the southernmost Nordics, but as the Carpathians at a much later date, namely, from the fourth to the eighth century A. D., were the centre of radiation of the Alpine Slavs, it is very possible that during the Neolithic the early Nordics lay farther north and east.
North of the Alpines and occupying the shores of the Baltic and Scandinavia, together with eastern Germany, Poland and Russia, were located the Nordics. At the very base of the Neolithic and perhaps still earlier, this race occupied Scandinavia, and Sweden became the nursery of what has been generally called the Teutonic subdivision of the Nordic race. It was in that country that the peculiar characters of stature and blondness became most accentuated and it is there that we find them to-day in their greatest purity.
During the Neolithic the remnants of early Paleolithic man must have been numerous, but later they were either exterminated or absorbed by the existing European races.
During all this Neolithic Period Mesopotamia and Egypt were thousands of years in advance of Europe, but only a small amount of culture from these sources seems to have trickled westward up the valley of the Danube, then and long afterward the main route of intercourse between western Asia and the heart of Europe. Some trade also passed from the Black Sea up the Russian rivers to the Baltic coasts. Along these latter routes there came from the north to the Mediterranean world the amber of the Baltic, a fossil resin greatly prized by early man for its magic electrical qualities.
Gold was probably the first metal to attract the attention of primitive man, but could only be used for purposes of ornamentation. Copper, which is often found in a pure state, was also one of the earliest metals known and probably came first either from the mines of Cyprus or of the Sinai Peninsula. These latter mines are known to have been worked before 3400 B.C. by systematic mining operations and much earlier "the metal must have been obtained by primitive methods from surface ore." It is, therefore, probable that copper was known and used, at first for ornament and later for implements, in Egypt before 4000 B.C. and possibly even earlier in the Mesopotamian regions.
We now reach the confines of recorded history and the first absolutely fixed date, 4241 B. C, is established for lower Egypt by the oldest known calendar. The earliest date as yet for Mesopotamia is somewhat later, but these two countries supply the basis of the chronology of the ancient world until a few centuries before Christ.
With the use of copper the Neolithic fades to its end and the Bronze Age commences soon thereafter. This next step in advance was made apparently before 3000 B.C. when some unknown genius discovered that an amalgam of nine parts of copper to one part of tin would produce the metal we now call bronze, which has a texture and hardness suitable for weapons and tools. The discovery revolutionized the world. The new knowledge was a long time spreading and weapons of this material were of fabulous value, especially in countries where there were no native mines and where spears and swords could only be obtained through trade or conquest. The esteem in which these bronze weapons, and still more the later weapons of iron, were held, is indicated by the innumerable legends and myths concerning magic swords and armor, the possession of which made the owner well-nigh invulnerable and invincible.
The necessity of obtaining tin for this amalgam led to the early voyages of the Phoenicians, who from the cities of Tyre and Sidon and their daughter Carthage traversed the entire length of the Mediterranean, founded colonies in Spain to work the Spanish tin mines, passed the Pillars of Hercules and finally voyaged through the stormy Atlantic to the Cassiterides, the Tin Isles of Ultima Thule. There, on the coasts of Cornwall, they traded with the native British of kindred Mediterranean race for the precious tin. These dangerous and costly voyages become explicable only if the value of this metal for the composition of bronze be taken into consideration.
After these bronze weapons were elaborated in Egypt the knowledge of their manufacture and use was extended through conquest into Palestine, and northward into Asia Minor.
The effect of the possession of these new weapons on the Alpine populations of western Asia was magical and resulted in an intensive and final expansion of round skulls into Europe. This invasion came through Asia Minor, the Balkans and the valley of the Danube, poured into Italy from the north, introduced bronze among the earlier Alpine lake dwellers of Switzerland and among the Mediterraneans of the Terramara stations of the valley of the Po and at a later date reached as far west as Britain and as far north as Holland and Norway, where its traces are still to be found among the living population.
The simultaneous appearance of bronze about 3000 or 2800 B.C. in the south as well as in the north of Italy may possibly be attributed to a lateral wave of this same invasion which, passing through Egypt, where it left behind the so-called Gizeh round skulls, reached Tunis and Sicily. In southern Italy bronze may have been introduced from Crete. With the first knowledge of metals begins the Eneolithic Period of the Italians.
The close resemblance in design and technique among the implements of the Bronze Age in widely separated localities is so great that we can infer a relatively simultaneous introduction.
With the introduction of bronze the custom of incineration of the dead also appears and replaces the typical Neolithic custom of inhumation.
The introduction of bronze into England and into Scandinavia may be safely dated about one thousand years later, after 1800 B.C. The fact that the Alpines only barely reached Ireland indicates that at this time that island was severed from England and that the land connection between England and France had been broken. The computation of the foregoing dates, of course, is somewhat hypothetical, but the fixed fact remains that this last expansion of the Alpines brought the knowledge of bronze to western and northern Europe and to the Mediterranean and Nordic peoples living there.
The effect of the introduction of bronze in the areas occupied chiefly by the Mediterranean race along the Atlantic coast and in Britain, as well as in north Africa from Tunis to Morocco, is seen in the construction and in the wide distribution of the megalithic funeral monuments, which appear to have been erected, not by Alpines but by the dolichocephs. The occurrence of bronze tools and weapons in the interments shows clearly that the megaliths of the south of France date from the beginning of the Bronze Age. The absence of bronze from the dolmens of Brittany may indicate an earlier age. It is, however, more likely that the opening Bronze Age in the South was contemporary with the late Neolithic in the North. The construction and use of these monuments continued at least until the very earliest trace of iron appears and in fact mound burials among the Vikings were common until the introduction of Christianity.
Although there is evidence of very early use of iron in Egypt the knowledge of this metal as well as of bronze in Europe centres around the area occupied by the Alpines in the eastern Alps and its earliest phase is known as the Hallstatt culture, from a little town in the Tyrol where it was first discovered. This Hallstatt iron culture appeared about 1500 B.C. The Alpine Hittites in northeast Asia Minor were probably the first to mine and smelt iron and they introduced it to the Alpines of eastern Europe, but it was the Nordics who benefited by its use. Bronze weapons and the later iron ones proved in the hands of these Northern barbarians to be of terrible effectiveness. With these metal swords in their grasp, the Nordics conquered the Alpines of central Europe and then suddenly entered the ancient world as raiders and destroyers of cities. The classic civilizations of the northern coasts of the Mediterranean Sea fell, one after another, before the "Furor Normanorum," just as two thousand years later the provinces of Rome were devastated by the last great flood of the Nordics from beyond the Alps.
The first Nordics to appear in European history are tribes speaking Aryan tongues in the form of the various Celtic and related dialects in the West, of Umbrian in Italy and of Thracian in the Balkans. These barbarians, pouring down from the North, swept with them large numbers of Alpines whom they had already thoroughly Nordicized. The process of conquering and assimilating the Alpines must have gone on for long centuries before our first historic records and the work was so thoroughly done that the very existence of this Alpine race as a separate subspecies of man was actually forgotten for many centuries by themselves and by the world at large until it was revealed in our own day by the science of skull measurements.
The Hallstatt iron culture did not extend into western Europe and the smelting and extensive use of this metal in southern Britain and northwestern Europe are of much later date and occur in what is called the La Tene Period, usually assigned to the fifth and fourth century B.C.
Iron weapons were, however, known sporadically in England much earlier, perhaps as far back as 800 B. C, but were very rare and were probably importations from the Continent.
"Hallstatt relics have only been found in the northeast or centre of France and it appears that the Bronze Age continued in the remainder of that country until about 700 B.C."
The spread of this La Tene culture is associated with the Nordic Cymry, who constituted the last wave of Celtic-speaking invaders into western Europe, while the earlier Nordic Gauls and Goidels had arrived in Gaul and Britain equipped with bronze only.
In Roman times, following the La Tene Period, the main races of Europe occupied the relative positions which they had held during the whole Neolithic Period and which they hold to-day, with the exception that the Nordic subspecies was less extensively represented in western Europe than when, a few hundred years later, the so-called Teutonic tribes overran these countries; but on the other hand, the Nordics occupied large areas in eastern Germany, Hungary, Poland and Russia now mainly occupied by the Slavs of Alpine race.
Many countries in central Europe were in Roman times inhabited by fair haired, blue eyed barbarians, where now the population is preponderantly brunet and becoming yearly more so.
Chronological Table: Metals / Neolithic / Upper Paleolithic / Middle Paleolithic / Lower Paleolithic / Eolithic (After Henry Fairfield Osborn, 1915