Chapter VII: End of the Old Stone Age

We have now reached the end of the Old Stone Age, a period some 9,000 or 12,000 years ago. Certain new races entered Europe, and played a part in the downfall of the tall artists. Two new races found their way along the Danube, as revealed by the burials at Ofnet, in eastern Bavaria. One of these is broad-headed and apparently from central Asia, the other long-headed and perhaps of Mediterranean origin. These races had a relatively high brain development. The first of these is called the Furfooz-Grenelle race; the second was probably a Mediterranean race, not related to the Brunn. This latter race, or still another Mediterranean race, also entered Europe from north Africa, into Spain; it is distinguished by conventionalized art. There may have been another race, perhaps ancestral to the Teutonic, coming along the shores of the Baltic. These races correspond to the Azilian culture, which closed the Paleolithic Age. Its art is marked by numerous flattened and painted pebbles, whose use is problematical, in spite of many ingenious theories; the flints are a degenerate type of Magdalenean stonework. There are as yet no polished stone implements. The ceremonial burial at Ofnet is one of the strange exhibits of this period.

Here was found a ceremonial burial of thirty-three skulls of two distinct races, one short-headed, one long-headed, and neither related to the Cro-Magnons. Twenty-seven of these were embedded in ochre and arranged in a sort of nest, with the faces all looking westward. The inner skulls were crushed, as if the outer ones had been added from time to time. A yard away a nest of six more skulls was found, arranged in the same manner. The interment must have taken place just after death, for the lower jaws and some of the neck vertebrae were found with each skull. The heads had been severed from the necks by a sharp flint; its marks were visible on some of the vertebrae. These skulls were mainly of women and children; only four were adult males. Ingenious theories have been offered to explain this, ranging from cannibalism to captivity and blood sacrifice. But the presence of ornaments, and the novel arrangement of heads facing westward, indicate that these theories must be held in abeyance until further evidence is discovered.

This is the first burial in Europe (with the possible exception of Grimaldi) which presents two or more races.

The broad-headed race here is probably kin to the late Paleolithic race known as the Furfooz-Grenelle men. In 1867, in a cave near Furfooz, Belgium, sixteen skeletons were discovered. These were short-headed men. The Grenelle skulls, found near Paris, are probably Neolithic; but this is no reason for denying them kinship with the Furfooz race, whom they closely resemble. The bulk of the evidence points to their migration from central Asia.

The narrow-headed Mediterranean race is another matter; they probably came from the south. At about the same time, the retreat of the northern icefield permitted a migration along the shores of the Baltic, which may have been the advance wave of the Teutonic peoples. They are known today only by their industries; no skeletons have as yet been discovered. Their art was entirely unconventionalized, and much cruder than the Cro-Magnon art. It is probably contemporaneous with the Azilian culture in the south.

The brain capacity of these various races may be compared in a table:

TABLE OF BRAIN CAPACITIES

Brain Capacity c. cm. Recent European (average) 1400-1500 Ofnet race (short-headed) 1400 Ofnet race (long-headed) 1500 Cro-Magnon (average) 1800 Grimaldi race (negroid) 1580 Brunn race 1350 Neanderthal race 1296-1723 Piltdown race 1400 Trinil race (Ape-man) 950 Apes (maximum) 600

There is no evidence for the migration routes of the earlier races—although their cultures point to a southerly entrance, in the cases of the Trinil, Piltdown, Heidelberg, and Neanderthal men. Industrial evidence points to the north African route as the path of the Cro-Magnons; the Grimaldi negroids came from the same direction. The succeeding culture, the Solutrean, apparently came from the east, as did the Brunn race which followed. Toward the close of the Upper Old Stone Age we find another southerly or Mediterranean invasion; during the same period there is the Furfooz-Grenelle approach from the East, and perhaps the Baltic from the north.

Whether the Neolithic or polished stone workers suddenly appeared and overcame the chipped stone wielders, or whether these gradually filtered in, science cannot now with certainty answer. It is certain that the men using the polished stones appeared in France, then in the Swiss lake region, where they built their lake-dwellings on high piles driven into the lake-bed. Along with the disappearing chipped stone implements we find more and more made of polished stone. Agriculture began, together with implements for preparing the soil and harvesting the crops. Nomadic life began to be abandoned, in favor of more settled dwellings. Even more distinctive is the appearance of pottery, used first in the preparation and preservation of food. The art began over with crude naturalistic drawings. Man had entered upon another upward step in his slow progress from his lowly ancestry.

Thus we have seen the Old Stone Age in its entirety, its beginning, its height, and its decline. It has been read from the slow carving of vast natural forces, glaciers and seas, upon the ancient rocky skeleton of the earth; it has been deciphered from the scattered remains of tree apes and ground apes, from ape-men, dawn men, and true men; it has been pieced together from the rude implements fashioned out of this same stone by these early workers. Man has as yet read hardly the first page of the great Record of the Rocks. The fascinating task of perusing the rest of the record is still before us.

Transcriber’s notes

Hyphenation has been retained as it appears in the original publication, except for hyphenation when splitting words across two lines.

The author uses “Pithecanthropos” and “Eoanthropos” instead of “Pithecanthropus” and “Eoanthropus”. Since he is consistent in this, the spelling most likely isn’t a printing error and therefore maintained.

The table “TABLE OF IMPLEMENT CULTURE” is moved to a nearby space between paragraphs.

Corrections

Page 16 “In Belgium and elsewere” changed to “In Belgium and
elsewhere”;
Page 23 “the Piltdown man was a probable ancester” changed to “the
Piltdown man was a probable ancestor”;
Page 51 “with a cranial capacity avering” changed to “with a cranial
capacity averaging”;
Page 52 period changed to comma after “and succeeding ages range from
the primitive mammoth”;
Page 56 “the ancestors of the Basques conquered the Cro-Manons” changed
to “the ancestors of the Basques conquered the Cro-Magnons”;

Formatting conventions

Italic words have been indicated with underscore characters, for
example, “_word_”;