The New Stone Age in Northern Europe Part 6

Soon we find them buried in a crouching position, with knees and hands brought close to the chin. Sometimes we find rows of sh.e.l.ls, which may have been attached to cords or bands used to hold the body in this forced position. This mode of burial in a contracted or crouching position (_Hockerbestattung_) was usual in Europe in Neolithic time, but has been discovered in all continents, even in America and Australia.

Very different explanations of this peculiar custom have been offered by different observers, _e. g._, that it saved the labor of digging a larger grave, an excellent economic argument; that the dead was laid in its Mother Earth in the same position which as a foetus it had maintained in the maternal body, etc., etc. But the predominant thought appears to have been that the spirit remained in, with, or near the body, and that binding the body prevented the spirit from walking and returning to see the survivors. To the same end the most valuable possessions of the dead had been buried with him. This does not necessarily argue that there was no affection of the living for the departed, or no belief in their possible helpfulness. But the community generally felt that it was a wise precaution, and generally well to be on the safe side. This belief in the possible return of the dead in their bodily form and presence is still deeply imbedded in our modern minds, ready to spring up as a conscious belief; and the departed are still rarely expected to bring good tidings or benefits.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALIGNMENT, CARNAC, BRITTANY]

This mode of burial continued common through upper Paleolithic time; was very common, if not the rule during the Neolithic period in various parts of Europe. Pumpelly found at Anau children, and only children, buried under the floors of the houses, and notices that this custom was general throughout the life of the Kurgan.[91] He gives instances of this custom reported elsewhere. Whether this custom was as wide-spread as the pottery of Anau and Susa seems doubtful. I can find no reports of it. But conditions at Anau seem to have been unusually favorable to the preservation of these perishable remains. It is not impossible that we have here one of the ways in which the fear of the dead may have been gradually dispelled. May we not imagine that one of the first steps was the refusal of the mother to allow her dead child to be banished from the house? The evidence is too slight to allow of more than a guess.

As time went on and communities became more closely united leaders must have arisen for whom the people had only affection, in whose wisdom and willingness to help they had full confidence, and who were gratefully remembered as fathers, elders, and wise in counsel, and whose return would have been gladly welcomed. This thought seems to be the foundation of the wide-spread and ancient cult or wors.h.i.+p of ancestors. Such cases were certainly common at a somewhat later date, as in the Greek cities, where the bones of the dead leader or hero were guarded as the chief protection of the state. This feeling seems to find expression in the dolmen or house of the dead, with a carefully prepared opening in the door as if inviting the spirit to free egress. Anniversary feasts in honor of the departed were certainly common in ancient days. Close friends.h.i.+p and social relations were cultivated with the departed as knowledge and culture increased.

The Egyptian pyramids and mummies, the graves and older dolmens, seem to testify to a very close and dependent relation between spirit and body.

The spirit hovered around the body and returned to it, and where the mouldering bones lay there was the spirit's home. Its life was a very direct continuance of the life in the body. Hence also the food and libations and the rich burial gifts. But toward the close of the Neolithic period we find the great stone chamber giving place to a small cyst or vault, hardly more than a stone coffin, and entirely underground. At the same time the great stone circles seem at least to be changing from burial places to temples or centres of wors.h.i.+p. A new method of disposal of the dead has appeared in different parts of Europe, in Brittany, for example. Up to this time the body has been of great importance; it has been scrupulously preserved, and provision made in the grave for the supply of all bodily needs, though the burial gifts have steadily diminished in number and value. Now the body is burned immediately after death, as if its preservation were no longer of any importance but a clog and hindrance from which the spirit was to be set free as soon as possible. The custom of incineration gains ground in Europe until in the Bronze Age it is the rule and inhumation the exception. The old cra.s.s materialistic view has evidently given place to a far higher and more spiritual conception of life after death, and probably also before it. We here catch a fascinating glimpse of the steady bold working and tendency of the mind of Neolithic man. It is only a glimpse of one aspect of his thought and tendency. We lack the facts to enable us to widen or deepen it. But it is enough to promise a broad field of future discoveries.

But one fact leads us to hazard a question. Not very far in the Bronze Age the first great wave of Celtic migration seems to have broken into northern Europe, as the Achaeans had already found their way toward or into Greece. The Celts seem to have had their Vale of Avalon and Islands of the Blessed, whither the spirits of the departed migrated. We remember that when Ulysses went in search of the spirit of Achilles, and of other comrades in the war before Troy, he sought him in no underground world, but sailed far across the seas into the west. Such beliefs, and customs like incineration, are a slow growth, probably far older in origin than the Indo-European or Aryan migrations, of which some have thought them characteristic. May not this old and wide-spread belief be merely a continuance of views and conceptions already held by our Neolithic folk?

We have already noticed the wide distribution of these megalithic structures.[92] They stretch along the sh.o.r.e of the Baltic, North Sea, and Atlantic Ocean down to the Mediterranean. Here they form a band along the south sh.o.r.e. We find them also in Soudan. In Egypt and Greece a far more precocious culture made it possible to replace them by pyramids and "treasure-houses." We find them in Palestine and farther eastward, along the Black Sea, and in India. In Europe they follow the coast lines, and do not seem to have been erected by the dwellers in the valley of the Danube. Their distribution is very similar to that of the great Mediterranean race and its extensions, but they extend far beyond the boundaries of any one tribe or people. They are the expression of a certain thought or conception which spread widely. It might be more correct to say that the general underlying conception was practically universal, but found expression in this form in one area, while in other regions it could not find this expression because conditions were unfavorable.

It is exceedingly difficult to say just where the first dolmens were built. Opinions differ widely. They could have been built only in an area which had a fairly large and settled population who could unite in a large and difficult work, and had the means of carrying it out. The people were agriculturists who possessed no low grade of natural material or mental culture. Many such general considerations lead us to look for their first appearance somewhere in the region east of the Mediterranean, which was evidently the home of many other very ancient forms of culture.[93]

CHAPTER VII

NEOLITHIC INDUSTRIES

Our very hasty glance at different aspects of Neolithic culture has shown its marked diversity in different regions. Its essential and fundamental characteristic was the introduction of tillage and cattle-raising, gradually replacing the mere collecting stage of hunting life, and accompanying a steady growth of independence or control of nature's bounty or stinginess of food supply. This change increased rather than diminished the diversity of culture in different regions. In the rich soil of the loess country and the Danube valley there were genuine farms; in the north cattle and hog-raising probably prevailed, gradually shading over into hunting as one neared the forests. Along the Baltic and the great lakes of Sweden and on all the European rivers fis.h.i.+ng was an important source of food. Differences in size, form, and comfort of dwellings tell the same story. In the north we find half-underground huts, probably with shelters of logs or skins in or along the forests. At Grosgartach and in the lake-dwellings and elsewhere we find rectangular houses, veritable homes rather than mere shelters. Primitive man bound the body of his dead with thongs and buried it away in the earth. Then he deposited it in a small stone hut much like his shelter. He enlarged and improved it. Finally the great monument with its circle and alignments seems to have become a temple, and the body, placed in a small cyst or vault, is completely buried, or is burned. These marked changes in burial customs and rites in western and northern, not in eastern or central, Europe, must have been accompanied by changes in the conception of the after life, whether we can trace and interpret them or not.

The same must be said of all industrial products. Every one of them tells a story, if we can understand and interpret it. We are not surprised to find in the late Paleolithic (or early Neolithic) paintings at Cogul women dressed in waist and short skirt not unlike those worn to-day. The dress represented in the idols of southeastern Europe has persisted in the peasant dress of certain isolated regions, especially in Albania, almost or quite into the present.[94] We have noticed the spinning, weaving, and dyeing of the lake-dwellers, and a similar industry was spread all over Europe. The costume of the Bronze period has been preserved in the oak coffins of Scandinavia.[95] We do not know how much it had changed and improved since Neolithic times. The use of wool had doubtless increased greatly. Our northern Neolithic hunters were probably clad largely in skins and furs.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MODERN ALBANIAN PEASANTS IN NEOLITHIC GARMENTS]

Two manufactured articles are of especial interest to the archaeologist: the stone axes and the pottery. They occur in every settlement. Stone is imperishable, and clay well fired lasts almost as well. They vary according to age, place, fas.h.i.+on, and conditions, and form the foundation for all comparative, "typological" study.[96] Their remains play the same part in archaeology as the characteristic fossils, "_Leit-fossilien_," in paleontology, not only determining age but throwing light on the migrations, relations, life, and thought of their makers.

The Neolithic period gained its name from the polished stone implements which then appeared. Paleolithic man had learned by long experience the value of flint as the best material for his tools. He had learned to chip and flake it; first by blows, then by pressure, until the Solutrean lance-heads or "points" showed a beauty of form and finish unsurpa.s.sed by the best craftsmen of any later date. He had learned to give it a fair cutting edge by small "retouches." It seems never to have occurred to him to grind or whet the edge of his tools. If the axe thickened rapidly from the edge and was somewhat like a wedge, it was a good remedy against the brittleness of the flint, its great defect; and he put the more strength into the blow. The extreme hardness of flint made polis.h.i.+ng very difficult. Most utensils of daily use were not polished at all. Many of the beautiful daggers, genuine works of art, were finished by a uniform, fine flaking down to the close of the period. Flint implements were not polished in Italy, Greece, Spain, and large parts of eastern Europe;[97] they increase in abundance in Scandinavia and England. Other kinds of less brittle but somewhat softer rock were generally used for polished axes.

During the upper Paleolithic period, especially in the Magdalenian Epoch, daggers, lance-heads, awls, and needles were made of bone. For pointed implements, flint, while sometimes used, was far less suitable, except when the point was very short, as in engraving and carving tools.

These bone implements were sc.r.a.ped into shape and often well smoothed.

It seems but a step from smoothing a bone to polis.h.i.+ng the edge of an axe, if not of too hard rock. But the chipped flint axe was very good, and they were accustomed to it. Forrer thinks that the change must have been made where flint was scarce and pebbles abundant.[98]

In Scandinavia the kitchen-midden period was followed by an "arctic"

culture, so called because of its distribution in the far north. Here we find implements of slate or schist polished only along the edges. This seems like a very natural intermediate stage. We do not know just where those attempts were first made. They may have been made at different points in Asia and Europe and at different times, and thus there may have been several independent centres of discovery and of radiation.

The lake-dwellers used a variety of material; indeed, they seem to have been quite expert practical mineralogists. Characteristic is their use of certain rocks which combined great toughness and hardness, and were thus superior to flint; so chloromelanite, saussurite, nephrite, and jadeite. These minerals are rare, and the implements made of them were small chisel-like blades, rarely exceeding an inch in length. They were usually mounted in a socket of horn fastened into a wooden handle. We shall see that the source of these minerals is still anything but clear.

The axe of the kitchen-midden[99] is hardly more than a disk struck off from a flint nucleus, with two sides broken off and the top of the triangular remnant removed. The axe of later Neolithic time was at first nearly of the shape of a flattened almond, but gradually changed and took more of the form of a chisel. The stages in this process of change are of value in determining the chronology of the period, and will be discussed in the next chapter. These axes were rudely shaped by flaking and then ground and polished on large flat stones, which still show the grooves left by the implement as it was rubbed back and forth. The different steps in shaping and finis.h.i.+ng such axes are well shown by h.o.e.rnes in specimens selected from the rich collections made at Butmir, Bosnia.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AXES FROM LAKE-DWELLINGS SHOWING ATTACHMENT TO HANDLES]

The lake-dwellers followed a different and improved method. They selected from the bed of a stream a smooth pebble of somewhat flattened and elongated egg shape. With a flint flake or saw[100] and sand they cut a groove in the edge, and split the stone by a sharp blow, somewhat as a peanut or almond falls apart. The rounded surface of each half was nearly of the desired form, and only the flat surface required much shaping. A skilful workman now can finish an axe of this kind in half a day.[101]

We cannot trace the variety of axes characteristic of different times, places, and uses. One, which from its resemblance to a shoemaker's last has been called by the Germans the "_Schuhleistenbeil_," demands mention.[102] This is a heavy, thick, clumsy implement, with one end edged or pointed. The lower surface is flat or slightly concave, the upper nearly semi-circular in cross-section. It reminds us somewhat of the grub-hoe or mattock, and probably served a similar purpose--to break up the ground. It is very common in the loess regions of southeastern Europe, but in the more stony soils of the uplands was generally replaced by a pick made of a stout tine of deer's horn. Broader and flatter hoes are found, and stone ploughshares. We must clearly recognize the distinction between the mattock and a somewhat similar but lighter polished concave axe, with sharp transverse cutting edge, used along the Baltic and elsewhere for hollowing out boats. Adze and mattock are similar in general form, but the carpenter's tool is a much finer instrument than the agricultural implement, and serves a very different purpose.

Bone was still used for pointed tools and weapons. A bundle of sharp pointed ribs found at Robenhausen had probably been used for hackling flax, Horn was used for sockets for the smaller chisels, and for a variety of other purposes. Wooden bowls, scoops, and other articles occur among the remains of the lake-dwellings.

Flint held much the same place in Neolithic industry as iron or steel with us. Its quality varied greatly in different localities. Our Neolithic ancestors had discovered that it worked better when freshly mined than when long exposed and weathered. Hence a mine of flint of the best quality was as valuable as a field of iron ore or a gold mine to-day. The most celebrated source of flint in France was Grand Pressigny, near Tours, Department of Indre-et-Loire.[103] The color and texture of this flint enables us to recognize it wherever found. It was exported as far as Brittany, Normandy, Belgium, and western Switzerland.

At Spiennes, in Belgium, they sunk shafts sometimes to a depth of forty feet. Here horizontal galleries extended out into the layers of chalk containing the best quality of flint. Similar mines were located at Grimes Graves and at Cissbury, in England.[104] The flint was exported sometimes in blocks, sometimes as half or completely finished implements. Around Grand Pressigny workshops are numerous. But they are by no means limited to the immediate vicinity of the mines. In some localities the manufacture was almost limited to one particular article.

Here the product was exported in finished form.

During the Bronze period Halle was a seat of wealth, and the large amount of copper found here suggests that the production of salt had begun here before the close of Neolithic times. h.o.e.rnes says that the production of salt at Hallstadt, a source of great wealth and luxury during the earliest Iron Epoch, and of no small extent during the Bronze period, had its beginnings in Neolithic days. The value of salt in trade or barter can hardly be overestimated.

A very small amount of gold, mostly in the form of beads, has been found in the Neolithic monuments of France erected at the very close of this period. Occurring native in small nuggets in the beds of streams and rivers of many parts of Europe, its color and malleability must have attracted the notice of the searchers after new material for implements.

Large nuggets were found in Spain at a much later date with callais, a mineral resembling turquoise, which occurs from Portugal to Brittany.[105]

Objects of copper were found by Pumpelly at Anau contemporary with the appearance of turbary sheep, about 6000 B. C.[106] It appears in Egypt perhaps 1,000 years later. We find traces of it in the oldest city of Troy (Hissarlik). It may well have entered southeastern Europe by way of Troy, or northward from Greece through the Balkan Peninsula to the Danube valley. A more westerly route lay open through Italy, or the islands west of it, into Spain. Native metallic copper seems to fail in Europe proper, but mines for ore were opened in Tyrol, and probably elsewhere, before the end of the period.

Copper was very useful for ornaments, especially rings, armlets, and bracelets; for pointed objects like needles, pins, awls, and even daggers; to a certain extent for knives and razors. Copper axes were modelled at first after old stone patterns. This metal had one fatal defect, however; it would not hold an edge. Copper utensils were beautiful, but generally less useful than similar ones made of stone.

They were largely for display and luxury, though this may hardly be true of its use in Egypt and the Orient. In Europe it could not shake the hold of the old, established flint. When the copper ore contained impurities of antimony or zinc, the alloy was harder. Then we find a very small percentage of tin, which slowly increases. There must have been long searching and experimenting before the cla.s.sical recipe for bronze, ninety per cent copper and ten per cent tin, was established. We cannot well speak of a new copper culture or period. This began with the introduction of the harder and more beautiful, but always rare and expensive bronze. Still the great characteristic of the Bronze Age lay not so much in the introduction of a new metal as in the wider relations, communications, exchange of goods, and knowledge, and freer movements of individuals and peoples, which had brought it about. The discovery of metals, of salt, of minerals, and other materials useful for ornament and of the Baltic amber, was gradually furnis.h.i.+ng considerable material which could be readily exchanged for the products of other sometimes distant and more advanced provinces and lands. The centres of distribution were often at some or considerable distance from the sources of the raw material, so especially in the case of flint implements. The location of the seat of manufacture and distribution depends largely on freedom and ease of communication. This leads us to glance at trade and trade-routes during this period.

We must bear in mind that the means of transportation were few and inadequate. The wheeled cart appeared during the Bronze period, but we have no proof of its use earlier. The horse was not yet domesticated in Europe, and did not come into use in the Orient much before 2000 B.

C.[107] Cattle may have been used as beasts of burden at an early period, but of this we know nothing. Roads of a certain kind, often probably hardly more than mere trails, almost certainly existed, especially in the neighborhood of the great stone monuments and larger villages. The great bar to free communication was the forest. To avoid this almost impa.s.sable barrier the roads and trails seem usually to have kept to the uplands, especially those where the chalk prevented a heavy forest growth. Certain river valleys, like that of the Thames, were heavily forested almost or quite to the sh.o.r.e, and hardly inhabited at this time. But when the forest drew back somewhat from the water's edge there was a most attractive place for human settlement. The river bottoms were fertile and easy of cultivation.

There was gra.s.s for herds, wood for buildings and fuel. The rivers swarmed with fish down to recent times, and there was a great variety and abundance of smaller animal life. Such valleys formed natural routes of trade and migration.[108] We are not surprised to find that the earliest settlers of Sweden made their way from sh.o.r.e to interior along the rivers and lakes, whose sh.o.r.es are dotted with settlements of this age.[109] Dechelette tells us that this was true of the grouping of the Neolithic stations of France in three great provinces in the basins of the Seine, the Garonne, the Rhone, the Saone and the Loire. We remember the lake-dwellers. The valley of the Danube has been the great thoroughfare since the arrival of man in Europe. The great ancient civilizations of Egypt and Chaldea arose in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates.

We know that the people of the sh.e.l.l-heaps must have ventured some distance from sh.o.r.e, fis.h.i.+ng for cod. The transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic might almost be characterized as a time of change from a hunting life to one very largely of fis.h.i.+ng. Long before this emigrants, probably from Asia Minor, had sailed out into the Mediterranean and settled Crete. Here, before 3000 B. C., a veritable sea-power had arisen carrying on trade with Egypt and the sh.o.r.es of the aegean. The voyage of the Argonauts, a "much-sung" story and saga in Homer's time, may well have had a historical foundation in expeditions for trade and plunder along the sh.o.r.es of the Black Sea, up its rivers, and extending as far as distant Colchis. Hence the importance of Troy in ancient times and of Constantinople to-day.

Returning to the Baltic region,[110] we find that a cave on the island of Stora Karlso, close to the west sh.o.r.e of Gothland, contained Neolithic deposits nearly three metres thick. In the upper layers there were remains of domestic animals, in the lower only wild forms. This island lies some thirty miles from Oland, just off the east coast of Sweden. Montelius tells us that before the end of the Neolithic period there was communication between Sweden and Finland, as well as with Denmark and Germany; that trade between these regions was active, and that there is reason for thinking that there was communication between the west coast of Sweden and England. It seems highly probable that boats were creeping along the coast of Spain and France from harbor to harbor, although the evidence is here less clear and compelling.

Our knowledge of Neolithic boats is still very incomplete.[111] Those of the lake-dwellers seem to have been usually hardly more than dugouts hollowed by fire. One, however, from Lake Chalain (Jura) was about thirty feet long and two and one-half wide, made out of an oak-trunk.

Such boats served well for river navigation, but were too shallow and clumsy for the open sea. It would have been a comparatively easy matter to add one or two planks along each side of such a dugout and thus build up a fairly seaworthy craft. The rock-sculptures of Bohuslan, Sweden, which probably date from early in the Bronze Age, represent boats of fair size carrying as many as thirty men.[112]

The wares exchanged in this trade were limited in material and value.

Metals and metallic objects were still unknown, except as copper and gold came in before the end of the period. Still, there were many objects which met a fairly wide demand. We have already seen that different lake-dwellings differed markedly in their products. Some were almost purely agricultural. In others we find remains of pottery evidently manufactured on the spot in larger quant.i.ties than the village could use. Much of this must have been exported along the lake, perhaps farther. Schliz distinguished at Grosgartach a rude home-made pottery from a finer ware apparently brought from some centre of finer and more artistic work. The Neolithic housewife was probably very proud of this "china." The finer grades of cloth manufactured at Robenhausen and elsewhere were probably carried far and wide, but it is impossible to trace it. The flint mined at Grand Pressigny was transported to greater or less distances, as well as manufactured at the mouth of the mine. At the various workshops the implements were made in great numbers and still more widely disseminated. This was equally true of flint regions in other parts of Europe. Stone arm-rings, mace-heads and other fine articles found spa.r.s.ely in northern Europe may well have been copies of a few articles brought from Italy or even farther.[113]

The nephrite and jadeite of the lake-dwellings were long supposed to be imports from eastern Asia--until it was discovered that the material of many of those implements differed in microscopic structure from the Asiatic, and then were supposed to be of indigenous material. Probably both extreme views are untenable. A certain amount of communication with the Orient is shown by the occurrence of rings made of recent sh.e.l.ls of Tridacna or Spondylus in Egypt, throughout the Mediterranean region, in France, and occasionally in middle Europe. The material apparently came from the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean. The same is true of a sh.e.l.l of Meleagrinia found in a hut-foundation in Rivatella, Italy.[114]

Ornaments in the form of Mediterranean sh.e.l.ls strung as necklaces are not uncommon in France, and occur elsewhere. The Mediterranean lands were in close communication with Egypt and Asia Minor; Spain with Africa, which furnished ivory and carved ostrich egg-sh.e.l.ls carried farther north in rare instances. Stone palettes similar to those found in Egyptian graves occur in southern France and elsewhere. More careful search and study will doubtless greatly increase the number of similar ill.u.s.trations.

Scandinavia was already showing its appreciation of beauty of form and finish, which made its products unsurpa.s.sed during the Bronze period.

Its marvellous flint daggers and hammer-axes were widely distributed and excite our admiration to-day. But the product which it was later to export to Greece and Italy in payment for the metal and art-treasures of the south was amber, an admirable material for jewelry, easily cut, transparent, of various hues, and taking a brilliant polish. So Homer speaks of a royal necklace, "golden, adorned with amber, like a blazing sun." Far back in Neolithic times we find jars containing large quant.i.ties of amber in the form of rude beads. One such h.o.a.rd contained 4,000 articles, and weighed 17 pounds. The amber was evidently used for necklaces, and was common in the graves of the earlier epochs. It seems to have made its way slowly over North Germany. Amber beads occur very sparingly in the lake-dwellings. During the Bronze period it disappears largely in Scandinavian graves and is here less used for ornaments, but appears in Greece and Italy, where its beauty and possibilities could be properly appreciated. The value of amber in Scandinavia as an article of export rose to such an extent that the inhabitants largely gave up the use of it and exchanged it wholesale for the more attractive and useful metal. During this period there was a regular trade-route between the Baltic and the Mediterranean.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BOATS FROM ROCK CARVINGS IN BOHUSLAN, SWEDEN. (EARLY BRONZE AGE)]

As h.o.e.rnes[115] says, it was this new trade which brought with it the close of the Neolithic period in northern Europe. But the change from the age of stone to that of bronze was anything but abrupt or sudden; in fact, it extended over more than 1,000 years. It was apparently not brought about by the invasion of a conquering race, though it was accompanied and followed by marked change and s.h.i.+fting of the population of central Europe. First we find a few copper ornaments and implements stealing into France and southern Europe. Then the metal becomes more abundant as people increase in wealth and can afford luxuries. Then bronze comes in from southeast and south, and very slowly north of the Alps. It meets the current of amber from the north.

Thus the two most beautiful, precious, and desirable materials of the time have come together. Both are easy of transport. A trade which has long been preparing or proceeding on a small scale expands rapidly, perhaps suddenly, and ushers in a new period, which, after all, chiefly carries on or brings into prominence that which had begun or advanced during the preceding age.

More interesting and, perhaps, more important than exchange of flint axes and amber is the spread of patterns, methods, influences; of new ideas and stimuli from mind to mind and people to people. A new implement, like the mace-heads and arm-rings, of which we have spoken; a new form of axe or dagger; the form and ornament of pottery; the building of dolmens or the spread of immigration with the accompanying change of cult and thought--all these brought not only economic improvement but growth of mind. Sophus Muller, and Montelius in a less degree, may have been somewhat extreme in their emphasis on the importance of oriental and Mediterranean influences and leaders.h.i.+p, but their main thesis was correct.[116] Civilization and culture were far older in the Orient than in Europe, and far more advanced south than north of the Alps. These were the centres of radiation of ideas and stimuli as well as patterns, inventions, and discoveries.

This does not mean that northern Europe was a pa.s.sive recipient. It accepted and adopted whatever and only what it would, and probably refused many a valuable suggestion. In many cases it improved on the patterns or example of its teacher and inspirer. The art of polis.h.i.+ng stone implements and the use of bronze may not have been indigenous in Scandinavia; but here, as time went on, genuine works of art were produced superior to any in the world, far more artistic than the beautiful technique of the Egyptians. Prehistoric domestic animals were almost certainly introduced from the East. But the lake-dwellers usually improved the breed by intercrossing with forms derived from their own fauna. They increased the list of cultivated plants. The idea or conception pa.s.sed from tribe to tribe, but the new stimulus did its fermenting work differently, according to the mind or medium into which it fell. There was always readaptation and more or less change. To be a wide borrower and at the same time to usually improve on one's teacher requires something very close to genius, though the originality may be less obtrusive. We have no reason to be ashamed of our Neolithic ancestors.