PRIMITIVE MAN.

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXVII, Issue 5558, 8 April 1905, Page 10

PRIMITIVE MAN.

THE MEANING OF THE COLOSSAL STONE RECORD, (BY PROFESSOR MACMILLAN BROWN.) [All Rights Reserved.] No. 11. At most points along Ilio mogaliUiic tracks there is a. local explanation of tho singular monuments. Now it is the gods or tho fairies who have erected thorn; again it is tho giants. Here 'they are tho work of a long-vanished people, liko tho Tchudcs along tho Northern Asiatic track; there they are tho work of a people still existent like the Kelts in Britain and Brittany, or tho Polynesians in Tonga. Sometimes they aro recognised as tombs; again they aro taken as altars and temples, in one placo they aro for marking the seasons, in another, they commemorate Borao ovonb in history; at Atcaimiri, in' Now Zealand, ono tribe take thorn as ■memorials of a cannibal feast in which fifty chiefs of a hostile tribe were oaten , tho other tribe tell the same story, but interchange the banqueters and the banquet. There is no limit to what imagination can do with such a mystery to explain. The myth-making faculty , 'Could not rest in presence' ol such striking memorials of the past. Wo may reject as fiction most of these local legends unless they assign them to tho neolithic people who early developed tho desire and art of preserving ' their dead. They aro in their origin mortuary monuments, not memorials, but houses of tho dead, whatever other purpose they may afterwards have eorvod. Keen the cave-dwellers of the European palaeolithic or chipped-stone ago must have, liko most primitive 'peoples, believed in the existence after death, and made some vague connection between the departed spirit and the body that remained. They must ■■■‘ have feared the power of the dead to retaliate tor neglect, and ultimately come to worship their kin who had passed away. Hence the anccstor-wor- , ship which is at tho root of all primitive religions, if not of all religions. As soon aa this reverence and tear of tho dead became rooted, tho placo where the death occurred came to have attached to it ,a certain awe and ulu,'mately sacredness. It was sot apart as the peculiar possession of tho departed spirit, where ho could visit his hocty when ho chose. In the West, and especially around the Mediterranean, caves are known to have been the primitive ■ dwelling-places of palaeolithic man, rr ■ not of neolithic. And as tho saoredness wf the dead and of the placo of death grew, the practice would arise of aban- - Honing the cavo to those who died in it. And in order to secure tho remains from the attacks of wild beasts, the mouth would he built up, only to be ... opened when some other of the kin luid to be deposited therein. Hence it is that in tho Western world at least eaves have been tho open, book of the palaeolithic anthropologist. In them he finds tho skulls and bones, the weapons iiid implements of early stono man. Bub in some countries the supply of natural caves is limited, as is also tho opportunity of making artificial caves, though in a less degrees Yet to preserve the bodies of tho dead kin would be tho primary duty of primitive man. If he did not ma'-e provision for their preservation for all time, how could ho avoid the revengeful visits of their spirits? , He set himself, therefore, to manufacture caves, oven where there were no steep hillsides to build against. Ho chiselled out by long and patient toil, with his imperfect flint tools, aided by fire and water, great blocks of r undressed stone, blocks such as ho had freon accustomed to close the mouths ""'.‘ of oaves with, or build up artificial eaves with, against precipitous faces. )And he dragged these out far into tho open heaths and plateaus on which he ■'■ '■ lived. 'He made inclined planes of ' " earth, and drawing the huge monoliths up the slope tilted them over tho steep sides into the holes in the earth ' ; which were prepared for them. Having ' made his giant circle of ellipse, his Xocrbanglo or square of these titanic blocks, she dragged over them other broad slabs to form a roof. Then ho covered the chamber completely with V earth. And here could he lay his dead and feel that they we to safe for all time. The mouth of his chamber ho narrowed to a low gallery or aperture, ’which could be easily closed and, when this was covered with earth on which the grass grew, no beast could approach 'the sacred remains to mutilate .them, i, no enemy could find tho secret of the entrance. He could leave his revered dead within their artificial hill and 'wander away over the face of the earth feeling that they were secure. But. lest he himself should forget the secret approach, he erected a stono column in front of it or placed at a certain angle two or three columns, or made an avenue of colossal stones leading to it, or surrounded the mound with a circle of stones, leaving a grip opposite the entrance. In some cases tho mound disappeared under “Time’s effacing .fingers,” and the great chamber or the colossal "stones alone remained. And at last progressive man learned to build ' the stono sepulchre without tile enveloping earth, or to make his stono chamber beneath the surface of the earth and raise only a monolith or circle or avenue of stone columns above ft. And ber© •gain the anthropologist has found his undecaying library of the old stono «ges. 1 * Another development of this sacred ’ l ' monument was to use it as an altar or temple. The offerings to the dead had usually been placed within the chamber beside the remains. But it was natural that offerings should be placed upon the ■*' tomb as well. Henoe, what are called dolmens or table-like megalithio erections. But tho most elaborate combine > lion of altar and tomb is the truncated ■■■ pyramid, which appears in places so far apart on the route as Manchuria, Java, 'A the valley of the Tain, Tonga, Tahiti, Peru, and Central America. ‘Wherever tho colossal monolith was likely to be unstable, either from the tropical -ains i v _ and tho friable nature of the soil, or from the frequency of earthquakes, it * * was natural for the megalithio people to got height by raising pyramids with 1 ' sides, at first during construction smooth, but afterwards terraced into steps. It was easy to drag the huge blocks up the smooth slopes to their - “position, and nothing would ever remove them or ruin tho monument. And when tho ancestor-worship developed the idea of sacrifices it was natural to leave tho pyramid unpointed so that on the flat or truncated top tho offerings •‘"’lind sacrifices might be laid. Those of

Egypt belong to historical times, although .some thousands of years before our era: but, they were meant to be memorials of individual raonarchs; they were therefore pointed, and were not intended as altars or temples. It is different with (hose, in the Kast, in Polynesia, and on the Pacific coast of America. They aro all truncated, and .nose of Polynesia and America, even drum to historical or quasi-bistorical times, were used as altars. In Mauritania the step-pyramid i.s found, as all the other types of colossal stone structures aro fount!, the dolmen, tho avenue, and the circle, the underground chamber barrow with horizontal or vortical monolith, and the gateway liko tho trilithou of Tonga and tho carved stono door near Liko Titicaca on the Audi®.

Hero and there tlic art of hewing and erecting these enormous stones has been preserved to our own time or close to our own time. But it is always in isolation, whither the echo of tho march of civilisation cannot reach, far amongst tho . mountains, as in the Khasi Kills in Assam, or in solitary islands of tho Pacific like Raster Island, v.-hero it is conjee lured by some that tho mailing of the colossal busts was continued up till about tbo eighteenth century. At most points on tbo route tho art has been lost in prehistoric times, probably in neolithic times before either bronze or iron tools were thought of. It is not unlikely that the discovery of the metals led to its abandonment. With the lino edge that tbo new implements would take, mou could afford to cub smaller and more manageable blocks, and graves as well as houses could bo more easily built without the aid of great masses of workmen. When there were no wheeled vehicles or draught animals, these megalithio structures meant vast masses of labour, disciplined like slaves, to drag the. great stones long distances and to set them erect in the earth. For some of them weighed between three and four hundred tons, and stand fifty or sixty feet above tho ground. And most of them are at least several tons in weight and a dozen feet in height.

Tho iron age takes us back only aboutthree thousand years’in tho Old World; there was no iron ago in tho New till tho Spaniards came.. But the bronze and copper ages must reach at least twice as far into tho past. In some of the barrows of Europe and tho kurgans of Itussia. and Siberia both of these metals are to bo found. But tho habit of burying in these graves must have continued down to the beginning of the iron age. And, again, on some of the monoliths in Western and Northern, Europe, in North Africa, in. Northern India, and amongst the Khasi and the Naga Hills there are hieroglyphic and mysterious markings which may he taken as inscriptions. But, though tho uso of tho alphabet cannot go farther back than ten thousand years, and tiiat only in the valleys . of the Euphrates and Tigris, there were tho beginnings of writing long before in totem and tribal marks, such as we find, for example, in our own day in the Maori signatures of tho treaty of Waitangi, amongst a people that never had any writing. And many of these monoliths must have been used by later peoples to commemorate events of their own history or customs or rites of their own religion. Upon giant stones erected on the Siberian kurgans there are sometimes inscriptions that are manifestly Buddhist, and these could not have been engraved long before our era. Carvings are also not infrequent on these colossal stones in North Africa, Brittany, and on tho Pacific coast of America. And these might well have been tho work of the people who erected the stones. For carving on bone and ivory and wood was by no means inartistic ewen with tho rough chipped stone implements of the old stone ago. And tho wanderful Maya carvings of Central America and those on the titanic stones near Lake Titicaca wo know were all produced without tho use of metals. It is no rash conclusion then to infer vast migrations of men from the Mediterranean region along the Atlantic coast and across the North of Europe' and Asia, and again across the South of 1 Asia, to tiro Pacific Ocean, ages before tho Egyptian or Babylonian civilisation appeared, ages before the metals weroi dug or hammered or moulded ; into weapons, ages that may be measured by tens of thousands of years. ; Nor is it rash to infer that these migrations were in such flense masses as to be able to drag vast distances and erect these colossal monuments, or at least to bo ablo to subdue slave labour enough to accomplish tlds. That they were of the. Caucasian division of humanity may be! taken tor granted. Neither the Negroid nor tho Mongoloid has ever been a sea migrant, whilst their land migrar tions have never covered great dis-' tanoes, except in the case, of the prehistoric Mongoloid entrance into America by Behring’s Straits and the historic armed Mongoloid invasions of Europe. And then they brought no megalithio habit with them. There arc no colossal stone erections either through the centre of Europe, a route the Huns and Magyars took, or north to Behring’s Straits, or southwards thence to Central America. The megalithio peoples clung, to tho coasts in Europe, and after they had crossed broad continents, when they struck the ocean again, they took to maritime pursuits not only on the northern hut on the southern route. Prom Korea they voyaged all over the, Pacific; and from the southern terminus in Indonesia they sailed as far as' Madagascar, for in that island we have huge stone monuments to tell of their arrival. We need have no hesitation in saying that Caucasian migrations from Europe tens of thousands of years ago found their way into Micronesia and Polynesia, and thenoe to the Pacific coast of South and Central America, before the Mongol division of mankind had begun to feel the pressure of population from the gradual rise of the Central Asiatic plateau, or to move outwards, west, north and east. We may also say without hesitation that they were neither black nor yellow. Doubtless they wore of tho olive complexion that prevails about tho Mediterranean, though it is not unlikely that the fairhaired and blue-eyed typo was already evolved in Northern Europe and around tho Baltic Sea and the German Ocean, and that some of them may have been of this type. That these neolithic migrants were long-headed like the Mediterranean peoples and the North-European of to-day has been ascertained from tho skulls found in the chambers of these colossal monuments. It is tlie same long head we find all over Polynesia, though the colour has deepened. . The most constant mark of a race is the shape of the head. On that chiefly do anthropologists rely for the differentiation of sections of mankind. It is this that has enabled them to overturn the old idea that tho Jew is tho purest typo of man in the world. Though his face-form does not vary much, his head-form varies almost with^

every nation in which he is found. There is no distinctive Jewish head, although tho features ore ever recognisable. It is tho feminine imagination of tho race that keeps tho ideal face true through hundreds of generations; as a rule, if left to itself, it will accept in marriage only the humanity that comes nearest to that. But the head-form is not the subject of amorous choice, concealed a.s it is beneath hair, and in most circumstances hat. It is one of tbo last results of anthropology, therefore, to prove that tho Jew ha* always mingled with the people amongst whom, he is settled. Now. though through the mountainous centre of Europe there is a wedge of broad-headed people, the general mark of tho Caucasian and European is tho long head. That mountaineering race doubtless c-imo in from the East, and, like the Finns and Magyars and even tho Turks, have taken on European features and fair skin, whilst they have retained the head-form they brought with them. The negro, it is true, has also a long head. But his cast of features marks him off from tho Caucasian, not only in the living faco, but in ihc skull wliein be is dead; tbo latter lias in the average plenty of hair, both on faco and bead, and that generally wavy, light complexion, small cheekbones that never project laterally, narrow' straight noso, and lips full and well-shaped. Wherever wo find tho long head with most of these characteristics, w© may ho sure that we have come across a people that has Caucasian elements in it. If they are also maritime and long-voyaging, there is little doubt that wo have a true mark of Mediterranean origin. Some peoples have become continental and nnmaritime, even though they are largely Cancasianised. This is due sometimes to their absorption by a continental people, sometimes to their being driven far inland, sometimes, if thoy live on tho coast, to the lack of timber for building sea-going boats, sometimes to the complete lack of sheltered havens on tho coast which they inhabit.