PRIMITIVE MAN.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1732, 10 May 1905, Page 70 (Supplement)

PRIMITIVE MAN.

(BY PROFESSOR J. MACMILLAN BROWN.)

No. V.

[All Rights Reserved.]

WHEN DID THE CAUCASIANS MIGRATE INTO THE PACIFIC; AND WHEN WAS THE PACIFIC CLOSED?

The usual method of fixing the period of some prehistoric people or movement is to find the relics of it in the earth, and to calculate the layers of humus above them. Thus the age of the people .of the Danish shell-mounds was roughly defined, and thus the times of the Swiss lake-dwellers. PREHISTORIC MOVEMENTS OF CAUCASIANS AND MONGOLS, AND jl iiEIR CAUSES.

Blit another method can be applied to the East, and especially to the Pacific, and that is the method of inference from historical movements to prehistoric. If, for example, we can fix approximately the period when the Mongols began to migrate out of the central Asiatic plateau, we oan define the time after which no great Caucasion migration could have made its way across lie Northern great stone route to the Pacific. As soon as the Turks and Finns began to move away from the head-waters of the Yenesei and the Irtish into the steppes on the Asiatic side of the Ural Mountains the way xvas barred from Europe to the East; it was no longer an open route for the megalithic peoples from the west or south-west. It had been a migration road for displaced Mediterranean peoples during tens oi thousands of years, in fact, during early palaeolithic times and the retreat of the mammoth into subarctic regions; for the rude palaeolithic chipped xveapons of man have been found alongside the remains of this huge animal in Southern Siberia. It became a high-road when one of the advances, probably the last, of the ice-sheet in the glacial age had begun to relax its grip on southern lands. The peoples driven by the northern blondes from the Mediterranean would naturally croAvd the southern ■route to the East, as long as the glacial cold made the northern part of Central Asia uninhabitable. But a& it receded they would find a way to the northeast, either by the north or the south of the Black Sea. It is not unlikely that at first an inland sea or inland seas filled the depression to the south of the Urals, and stretched far to the north, and the east. But this xvould make, instead of an obstacle to these originallymaritime peoples, an easier route and an inducement for them to pioneer in their boats till they struck the mountains again. But, as the sea dried up. and the central plateau rose and grexv less inhabitable, the route from the soutli-xvest would close first, the Mongols would press doxvn primarily into the richer and more habitable lands to the east, south and south-xvest. Tne pressure of population on the narroxving means of sustenance up on the Mongol plateau xvould be relieved earliest on its southern boundaries. And hence the primitixm Mongol elements in India and Indo-China, and the Akkaaia and Hittite empires in the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris, and near the coast of the Mediterranean. These latter, along with the nomad people in the steppes to the north-east, would make the migration of the Mediterranean races oast and north-east difiioult, if not impossible. The northern route, when once it was opened after the final recession of the ice-sheet, would remain open much later. The northern Mongols xvould be the last to move north-east, north and north-xvest, because of the lack of rich countries and tribes to tempt them. Hence the evidences of blue-eyed peoples all along the north of Central Asia to the Pacific, and the rapid blanching of the Turks and the Finns by the conquest and absorption of Caucasians as they moved xvestwards. But tneso blonde Caucasians must have been an upper laxver superimposed upon a darker stratum of longheads, and must have migrated eastxvards in comparatively recent times, only a fexx r hundreds or thousands of years before the Turki-Finn movement. If, then, xve can fix approximately the period xvlien one of tlio southern or eastern Mongol migrations took place, xve may fix approximately, too, the time when the northern route xvas finally closed to Europeans. AN ANCIENT MONGOLOID EMPIRE: IN MESOPOTAMIA. Noxv the ancient race that xve know most of is the Akkadian, whose cuneiform inscriptions xx'ore unearthed on the site of Babylon during the latter half of the ■nineteenth century; their decipherment has thrown a flood of light on prehistoric times. And it is generally'agreed that their civilisation xvas in full bloom in Mesopotamia between five and six thousand years before our era; and tlieir development of writing, literature, science, and art at that early period implies at least a thousand years of preparation for such a climax; whilst in their religion these Akkadians looked to the highlands on the north-east, “the Father of Countries/ - ’ and “the abode of the gods” as the paradise to xvhich their spirits xvould return. In these mountains they must have been settled as a people for at J east another thousand years and

mingled with the Caucasian drift from the Mediterranean; for the paradise of a primitive people in the home of their forefathers; and the busts of these Akkadians that have been unearthed show not only the flattened face and high cheek bones that mark the Mongol, but, long before the Semites from the south mingled with them, the xvavy hair and often the full eyes of the Caucasian. They, in fact, illustrate the law of crossbreeding, that it evolves the new competitive types that ever go to produce a new advance in civilisation.

COPPER DEFINES THE TIME VAGUELY. It Is not improbable that the Mongols were beginning to rnox-e West and South nearly ten thousand years before our era. Their eastern movement into China may not have been long after.. But their northward migrations must have been considerably later; the northern route remained open longer for the megalithic peoples from the West; for some of them reached the Pacific without copper, and afterwards, when forced off the coasts, reached Polynesia xvithout any trace of that metal. And the age of copper in Northern AALa goes back four or five thousand years before our era; it xvas early there, because the Uralaltai region was one of the great sources of the primitive xvorld’s copper. - But copper, next to the precious metals, is the most uncertain for defining a period. The tools or xveapons made out of it are soft, and turn before the task of cutting .or hewing. They are not to be compared, for efficiency to the flint or obsidian knives and axes of the stone period. Primitive man did not seize on it with avidity. A copper age exists with any definiteness only in a fexv regions, and even there has bxit vague limits. But before the megalithic drift eastwards nad. stopped on the northern route, that metal had come into use; for it is found m the kurgans or mound-graves of the Tchudes, that mythical people to whom the N orthern Mongols _ attribute everything they cannot explain the origin of.

BRONZE DEFINES TIME BETTER. Bronze is different. It is as ornamental as copper, and it takes a much keener edge. It was sought after more eagerly by the neighbours of those primitive civilisations that discovered it. Many an experiment must have been made before an aiioy could be found to remedy the defects of copper. But, lvhen found, it spread rapidly amongst civilised peoples, so that we find the bronze ages over the Old World much nearer being contemporaneous in their beginnings. That of the north-east and east of Asia seems to have started in the fourth millennium before our era. And, according to a vague tradition, there came into the South Island of Japan about 1240 B.C. a cultured race xvith finely-formed weapons of bronze, as xveli as of stone, and drove tire Amos north. The legendary founder of the Japanese empire, Jinimu Tenno, is placed only in the seventh century before our era. But the gradual migration from Corea and the struggle xvith the aborigines must have gone on for many centuries before the evolution of such ,a political unity. Their bronze and beautiful stone xveapons must have gix'en them a great superiority over those xvhom they call in their annals Ebisu or barbarians, a name that stands for the “hairy Ainu,” and over those primitive peopies, xvlio built the huge burial mounds, and the People of the Hollows, who lived in dxveliings liaif-underground. It is not improbable that this may date the beginning of ■one of the sea-migrations of tfie megaiithic people doxvn into the islands of the Pacific, if so, they did not profit by the xveapons of their enemies, for no bronze has ever been found in these islands, except a Tamil ship-bell in Nexv Zealand. Of course, the pressure of the Mongols from behind must have begun long before this; must hax-e begun, in fact, xvhen they started north-east towards Behring’s Straits and found their xvay into America during some temporary elex'ation of the temperature in the North Pacific. Evidence for this is found in the fact that the Ainos once occupied the coast of Corea and Manchuria, and xvere driven into the archipelago. And xvhen they crossed they must have displaced the earlier aborigines of Japan that their traditions speak of. Bpt the greatest impulse to migration over the sea, both north and south, must have come xvhen the Mongols arrived and took to founding an empire. The millennium just before our era doubtless saxv vast transferences of the megalithic people in ocean-going canoes into the island-xvorld to the south, and of smaller migrations north aiong tne Kurile and Aleutian groups into British Columbia in coasthuggiug canoes.

Of one thing xve may be sure, that migration into Polynesia ceased from Japan at the foundation of the empire in the south of it during the seventh century before our era. Else bronze xveaand tools and ornaments would have xvith the emigrants into the nexv lands.

11l ON GIVES THE, MOST DEFINITE

TIME,

A still stronger proof of tlie final closing of Polynesia to tlie peoples .of the north-east of Asia is the complete absence of iron from that island-region. When the Polynesians realised what a sharp edge the new metal introduced by the European!?, would take, they seized on it with aviditv. They would give their dearest possessions for a hatchet, or even a piece of hoop-iron or a nail. It is this passion for iron that makes the beginning of its age aIL over the Old World so nearly contemporaneous. Its use <?pread with extraordinary rapidity through Europe, Asia and Africa. And we may say roughly that its age has its backward limit in tlie earlier iiart of the millennium before our era. It is this metal that, when introduced into a region, finally closes its stone age. Tho sharpest and hardest of stone tools and weapons., even obsidian and greenstone, are not to be compared with it in incisive efficiency. Tho tribe equipped wk.. iron weapons soon masters the users of «tone spear-heads. The iron hatchet gives them their houses and canoes in a fraction of the time and with half the trouble that the old stone axe gave them.

And, if timber abounds on the continent, the xvooden house takes the place of the mound house or the stone house, and, if on the coast or on islands, the canoe becomes tmiversal. The beginning of the iron age in any country is also the close of its megalithic age. For iron tools so quicken the process of stone-cutting that people can afford the time to quarry small blocks that do not need vast masses of labour to move them. The stone tomb raised by a single family takes the place of, that xvhich needed a xvhole tribe or nation to manipulate it. And timber, noxv so easily cut, takes the place of stone in most burial monuments. In the Pacific the colossal stonebuilding habit continued except xvhere forests abounded, as in Nexv Zealand and the old volcanic islands; and there the canoe and its carving taught the people to use timber for their dwellings and tombs. Obsidian and greenstone tools made the cutting of wood more rapid than tlio old flint or basalt. NOT SINGE OUR ERA HAS THERE BEEN ANY IMMIGRATION INTOPOLYNESIA.

But the absence of iron from Polynesia xvould seem to have closed it to all immigration for nearly three thousand years. And this conflicts xvith the traditions and genealogies of the islands. For, if the latter are to be trusted iu chronology, there seems to have been a drift into them from Indonesia about the beginning of our era. But the contradiction is removed xvhen xve remember that the iron age did not start in that region till about the same period, and that it folloxved there straight on the stone age, as in Africa. The xvords in Malay for copper and bronze are all of Sanskrit origin; and these txvo metals xvere brought into the Malay Archipelago by tlie Buddhists from India xvhen they established their empire and built their colossal temples in Jax r a. Iron took the place, not of copper or bronze, but >(>f stone, and that it never came farther east than the west of New Guinea till the Europeans arrived shows the fallacy of the ide* that the Malays ever mastered Polynesia by their influence, language or customs, or had ever had even a trade route into it. Whatever there is in common betxveen the Polynesian dialects and the Malay (and there is much) is due *to the absorption of primitive, elements in Indonesia. Language is never a safe test of race or origin. Had tlie Malays ever ventured as traders or conquerors into Polynesia, iron xvould have come with them. Its complete absence prox r es that there xvas neither immigration nor trade route into that island-world from he southern coasts of Asia during our era, and none from the eastern coasts for at least a thousand years before it. Had even chance metal xveapons or tools found their xvay into the islands W 8 should have seen them cherished as amulets or objects of xvorship.