Fossil Men and their Modern Representatives. An attempt to illustrate the characters and condition of prehistoric men in Europe, by those of the American races

Front matter

Stanford* GaajfEattib1. LES ROCHES PERC EES. A solitary rruass of sandstone-, left by d£/ujAcdum, in Lh? plains west of Manitoba^ and regarded with, reference by th& Indians as &> special placeof residence, of the, Great Spirit & )u.s ctitetidam Marutoue FOSSIL MEN AND THEIR MODERN REPRESENTATIVES. AN ATTEMPT TO ILLUSTRATE THE CHARACTERS AND CONDITION OF PRE-HISTORIC MEN IN EUROPE, BY THOSE OF THE AMERICAN RACES. BY J. W. DAWSON, LL.D., F.R.S., F.G.S., Principal of McGill College and University, Montreal; A ut /tor of " Tlte Story of t/ie Earth and Man," " The Origin of the World" etc. JSTonbon : HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 27, PATERNOSTER ROW. MDCCCLXXX. Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.

Preface

. No subject of Geological investigation is perhaps in a more unsatisfactory state than that which relates to the connection of the modern or human period with preceding epochs. Difficult and complex problems, yet unsolved, and even imperfectly understood in their data and conditions, encompass the history of that remarkable Glacial Age which seems to have preceded the advent of man and the modern mammalia in the Northern Hemisphere. Much uncertainty and liability to error attach to the study of the superficial deposits which alone contain the remains of man and his works. Further, the Geologist, the Archæologist, and the Historian, the Philologist and the Anthropo logist, approaching this obscure region from different directions, all claim to be heard, and often vie with each other in dogmatic assertions respecting facts and inferences of the most uncertain character. The present work is intended as a popular exposi tion of some of the more important topics, from the

PREFACE.

. point of view of thc Geologist and Naturalist, and to that principle of referring to modern causes for the explanation of ancient effects, which is the basis of theoretical geology, the principal modern facts relied on being those furnished by the aboriginal tribes of America. It cannot pretend to be exhaustive of a department of inquiry yet in its infancy ; but may claim the merit of being suggestive. The substance of this work appeared in a series of papers in the Leisure Hour, entitled " The New World and the Old," but has been considerably ex tended and in some parts re-written. J. W. D. McGill College, Montreal. Jan. 1880. CONTENTS. Chapter I. PiGB Explanatory and Introductory 1 Chapter II. An Old Story of the New World 18 Chapter III. Glimpses of Pre-historic Times 45 Chapter IV. The Remains of Cities of the Stone Age .... 70 Chapter V. Implements and Weapons of the Stone Age . . .

Ill Chapter VI. Lost Arts of Primitive Races 14*0 Chapter VII. Physical Characteristics of Pre-historic Man . . 177 Chapter VIII. Antiquity of Man .... VI CONTENTS. Chapter IX. riCF. Primitive Ideas of Religion, the Idea of God . . . 250 Chapter X. Primitive Ideas of Religion, the Instinct of Immortality . 282 Chapter XI. Unity and Continuity 307 Appendix LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGB Les Roches Perce'es Frontispiece. Implements of Chipped Stone, Europe . . . .12 Implements op Chipped Stone, North America . . 13 Implements of Polished Stone, Europe . . . .14 Implements of Polished Stone, North America . . 15 Ornaments, etc., of a Red Indian of Newfoundland . 21 Section of the Stockade or Wall of Hochelaga . . 38 Plan of Hochelaga 39 The Town of Hochelaga 41 Sketch-map Showing the Probable Lines of Migration and Distribution of the American Tribes . . 48 Alleghan, Toltecan, Peruvian, and Modern Crow Heads 54 Modern Mandan, and Ancient Aztec Heads . . .55 Copper Axes, Spears, and Knife op the Alleghans . 58 Copper Bracelet, Disc, Bead, and Buttons of Alleghans 59 Mode of Suspending Earthen Pots . . . . 72, 73 Fragment of Earthen Vessel, Hochelaga . . .75 Earthen Pot 77 Head from an Earthen Pot 79 Head in Pottery 81 Plan of Hochelagan House for Five Families . . 83 Earthen Pot found on the Upper Ottawa . . .87 Fragments of Pottery ........ 91 Earthen Pipes, Hochelaga 94 Red Pipestone Pipe 95 Stone Arrow-Heads, Modern 123 Bone Needle and Spears, Hochelaga ....

ILLUSTRATIONS. VIII PAGE Bone Harpoons 137 Shell and Terra Cotta Beads, Hochelaga . . . 141 Grotesque Figure, Queen Charlotte Islands . . 148 Pipe Carved out of Hard Porphyritic Stone . . 150 Group of Huron Women 156 Grooved Hammer ........ 171 Outlines of Three Pre-iiistoric European Skulls compared with one prom Hochelaga .... 194 Outline of a Cro-magnon Skull as seen in Front, and Hochelagan Skull on a Smaller Scale . . 195 Front View of Another Hochelagan Skull of a Similar Type 196 Profile View of Same Skull 197 Chippewa Chiefs, from Photographs .... 253 Totems of Chiefs of the Penobscot Indians . . . 265 Totems of Families of the Reindeer Age in France . 267 Pictograph on a Piece of Reindeer Horn from a Cave in the Dordogne 269 American Pictograph from Schoolcraft . . . 270 Totems Sculptured on the Roches Percles . . . 272 Adjedatig, or Grave-post of Wabojeegse, the " White FisnER" . . * 289 CuirPEWA Graves and Mourners

Chapter I

explanatory and introductory. Somewhere in the past, the long ages of the prehuman geologic record join and merge into the human period. The day when the first man stood erect upon the earth and gazed upon a world which had been shaped for him by the preceding periods of the creative work, was the definite beginning of the Modern Period in Geology. If that day could be fixed in the world's calendar, on reaching it the geologist might lay down his hammer and yield the field to the antiquarian and the historian. On that day a world, for long ages the abode of brute creatures, became for the first time the habitation of a rational soul. On it the old and unvarying machinery of nature first became amenable to the action of a conscious, independent earthly agent. On it a new and marvellous power — that of human will — was introduced upon our planet.

No wonder, then, that in our critical and sceptical time, when men are no longer satisfied with traditions, or even with sacred history, questions as to this mysterious meet ing-place of the past and present should be agitated B with an engrossing interest, and that all our varied stores of scientific and historical knowledge should be broug-ht to bear on it. Nor need we wonder that obscurity still rests upon the subject when regarded from the standpoint of science and secular history. It is connected, in so far as geology is concerned, with difficult and controverted questions of the Glacial period and its close, and in the domain of archæology with the darkness that antedates the beginning of literature. It thus forms an appropriate battle ground for active spirits eager to reach new truths.

The evolutionist searches in its obscurity for the tran sition from apes to men. The geologist painfully gathers the faint traces of forgotten tribes preserved in caves and gravels, and the archæologist joins him in his quest. The result has been the accumulation of a great mass of facts, of which, however, many are doubtful in their import, the initiation of many controversies, and the production of a general vague impression that science has unsettled all our previous views as to the origin and antiquity of man. While popular writers have boldly asserted this last conclusion as established beyond dispute, the more cautious, and those who have the best opportunities of weighing the evidence, are well aware of its doubtful and uncertain character • and the attempt recently made by one of the greatest and most judicial minds among English geologists to sum up the actual results,* * Lyell, "Antiquity of Man," fourth edition. while it startles the reader with the magnitude and o strangeness of the questions suggested, appals him with their complexity and difficulty.

To those who, like the writer of these pages, have long been familiar with the manners of the American aborigines and with the antiquities of America, the facts detailed in such publications as Lyell's "Antiquity of Man," Christie and Lartet's " Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ," Morlot's Memoirs on the Swiss Lake Habitations, and Dupont's on the Belgian Caves, appear like a new edition of a familiar story ; and as Dr. Wilson has well shown in his " Pre-historic Man," existing humanity, as it appears in the native American, is little else than a survival of primeval man in Europe. In short, the early voyagers who first met the American tribes really held conference with their own ancestors, or with men among whom still lived manners and customs extinct in Europe before the dawn of history. Why, then, should not that method of reasoning from existing causes to explain ancient facts, by which geology has achieved its greatest triumphs, be applied to the extinct tribes of the old world ?

Why should not the enormous mass of existing information as to rude man in America be employed to illustrate and explain conditions long since passed away in the eastern continent ? To attain successfully such a result requires some thing more than the desultory and imperfect refer ences which have been casually made by writers on European archæology. It requires that large and systematic views of the culture of the American nations should be placed beside the results of European research, and that such comparisons shall not be over loaded with details, but shall be given in a distinct and pictorial form. It has occurred to me that this may best be done by taking up our position on the antiquities of one tribe or locality, connecting the others with this, so as to show the homogeneous nature of the American culture, and then applying the whole to European facts and difficulties.

I shall therefore take as my first starting-point the primitive town of Hochelaga, the predecessor of the fair city of Montreal, and shall present to the reader American and European prehistoric times as they would appear to an inhabitant of that ancient town. We shall thus at least obtain a novel insight, remote from that of the ordinary geologist or archæologist, and which may aid us in interpreting some things which from his point of view are most difficult to understand. We shall, I hope, find that such change of base in our attack on prehistoric times may afford advantages of a peculiar character, and may enable us to correct some of the fanciful and enthusiastic impressions of those who look back on prehistoric times in Europe from the, perhaps, too elevated standpoint of a mature civilization, to which the rude hunter, with his weapons of stone and bone, seems a creature almost too remote to have approached within thousands of years, and rather to be pushed back into the mists of an archaic and forgotten antiquity, to consort with the mythical anthropoid apes from which the evolutionist proposes to derive our species.

Since, however, in the following chapters we shall be occupied almost exclusively with American facts, and must refer from them to the discoveries made in Europe, and as the reader may not be familiar with the aspects of pre-historic time to European geologists and antiquarians, I may here shortly explain the usually received views with reference to those times anterior to history, and the terms by which they are designated. We have the misfortune, according to archæologists, to live in the " Iron Age," a fact of which we are also reminded by our roads and ships, and by the too great prevalence of a cold, dead materialism, to which all that is not iron and steel, or their equivalent in money, is mere superstition, and which derides the beliefs of the world's earlier times. This Iron Age represents, in Europe at least, the period of written history, for even in Greece the earliest literature goes back merely to the time when the Iron Age of that country was beginning.

In the East a far earlier literature exists, but this also does not go beyond the earlier age of iron in that part of the world — tho Iron Age of the East having apparently antedated the Iron Age of Europe, much as the latter did that of America. The date of the beginning of the Iron Age is a point altogether indefinite. In Asia Tubal- Cain may have inaugurated it before the Deluge. In America it is making its way to-day in direct conflict with the age of Stone among the more remote tribes. When we speak, therefore, of the Iron, Bronze, and Stone Ages, it is useless, if we wish to attach any definite meaning to our language, to extend its ap plication beyond the temperate latitudes of Western Europe. Copper, and bronze, the alloy of copper and tin, were in prevalent use before iron* ; and bronze, with its ingredients well proportioned, was no bad substitute for the most useful of metals, having the advantage besides of not perishing by rust, and of being easily molten into any required shape.

The Bronze Age precedes the date of written history in Western Europe, though in the East it is coeval with the early Bible history, and in Greece it reaches to the Trojan war. It attained its acme before the Roman legions had swept over the European plains, when the civilising element was mainly represented by Phœnician traders visiting the coasts, and when the rude primeval tribes were shaping themselves into nations, and acquiring the arts of life from the more cultivated peoples of the south and east. As in the case of the Iron Age, we can attach no definite limits to its * It would seem that in Africa and elsewhere iron may have been used as early as or earlier than bronze, in consequence ofthe occurrence of iron ores easily reduced. For this reason, Virchow, quoted with approval by Tylor in an address delivered at the Sheffield meeting of the British Association, has proposed to merge the Bronze and Iron Ages in a " Metal Ace." beginning or to its end.

There must have been a time when the Iron Age was fully established on the shores of the Mediterranean, while yet in the inland and northern nations the Age of Bronze coexisted with the earlier Age of Stone, and in some places the Iron Age must have come abruptly into conflict with that of Stone, without the intervention of the Age of Bronze, as it has done in America. This last Age, that of Stone, in the South of Europe, antedates all written history. In the many-sided East, however, we find cutting instruments of stone in use in Egypt and Syria long after the dawn of lite rature, and intruding themselves into Europe in some of the detachments which joined the army of Xerxes ; while in remote corners of the North of Europe some uses of stone weapons reached almost into the Middle Ages. The earlier Stone folk are known to us only by their graves, and remains of their habitations and implements.

The ancient barrows and cromlechs of Britain and France, and the gallery tombs of Scandinavia, contain the bones of the name less warriors of this Age buried with their flint arrows and stone hatchets. The curious lake habitations of Switzerland, built by unknown tribes on piles over the water, also afford their remains, though some of these strange dwellings reach up to the time of Bronze and Iron. The shell-heaps of the primitive fishermen of the coast of Denmark, and the peat-bogs of various districts of Europe, afford additional remains of the people of this Age. Wilson may furnish us with a specimen of a monument of this period, which is everywhere in Europe known to us only by monuments, and not by written history. It is the mount called Knock Maraidhe, or Hill of the Sailors or Sea-rovers, standing till 1838 in the Phœnix Park, Dublin, in the midst of modern civilisation.

It was of no mean size, being fifteen feet high, and one hundred and twenty in diameter, but no history tells its origin or the cause of its name. It had to be levelled, and then it appeared that it had been built by human hands. Under the centre was a massive stone tomb, or cromlech, holding the remains of two male skeletons in a sitting or crouching posture, and other bones, possibly of a dog. Shells of the common Littorina, perforated for stringing, lay beside the skulls, and a stone arrow-head and a pin or hair-support of bone. Around the margin of the tumulus were stone cists, each containing a small vase and calcined bones, the remains of offerings to the dead. This, as we shall see in the sequel, is an almost precise counterpart of some of the oldest American interments in those remarkable mounds of the river valleys of the West, which, though some of them are of great antiquity, undoubtedly represent a mode of burial pursued up to the time of the European discoveiy.

Here is another picture. It is a " Gallery grave " in Sweden, as described by Nilsson. The walls con sist of flat slabs of granite or gneiss, carefully joined together, forming a chamber from twenty to thirty feet long, and five to six feet high, which is roofed over with flat slabs of gneiss. In the centre of the long side, fronting the south, is a door leading out ward through a gallery, also of stone, sixteen to twenty feet long, three feet high, and two to three feet broad. Around the sides of the chamber are stalls or niches, separated by partitions of wood or stone, and in these are the skeletons of the old people, seated with their legs bent under their bodies, or with the bones fallen together in a heap and the skull on top, and beside them their stone weapons and orna ments of shell and amber.

The whole structure is buried under a mound or tumulus of earth. This, again, is the style of the family sepulchres of the modern Esquimaux, and is apparently borrowed from the plan of their ordinary dwellings, as the existing plan of a Lapland house is thought to represent that of the ancient gallery graves of Sweden. These in stances represent the absolute Stone period of Europe before the use of bronze; but they belong to what has been called the Neolithic or later Stone period, in which stone implements of the most perfect kind existed, and in which the physical features and animal inhabitants of Europe were the same as at present. In an earlier part of the Stone Age, animals now locally or wholly extinct still survived, and there were climatal and geographical conditions somewhat different from those of the present time.

In France and Belgium, for example, there are indications that the reindeer, now confined to Lapland, and not known in Germany since the time of Cæsar, while there is no written record of its former existence in Gaul, afforded a large part of the food of the inhabitants. There is even evidence that these earlier Stone people hunted the now extinct mammoth and its contemporaries. We may take as an example the cave of Bruniquel in the south of France. It has apparently been used both as a house and as a place of sepulture, and since its occupation a layer of hard stalagmite has accumulated over the earth and carbonaceous matter of its floor. Professor Owen, who examined the bones obtained in it, estimated the number of reindeer re presented in his collections at 1000.* There were also numerous bones of a species of horse.

With these were remains of ten human beings, abundance of flint flakes, and numerous bone implements, including harpoons exactly like those now used by the Esqui maux. On many of the bones were carved figures of animals. Portions of four implements made of mam moth ivory, and needles and pins of bone, were also found, and sea-shells both from the Mediterranean and Atlantic, some at least of which must have been used as ornaments merely. At the time when these and similar earlier Flint folk lived, France would seem to have been in part overgrown with dense forests, and in part connected with great steppes or prairies ex tending over all central Europe; its climate must have been cool enough for the reindeer, and possibly the * " Transactions of the Royal Society." mammoth or extinct European elephant may not have disappeared.

But a still earlier Stone period, that more properly named the Palæolithic, appears to be indicated by quantities of roughly-shaped flint implements found in the valley of the Somme, at Hoxne in Suffolk, and many other places, imbedded in clays and gravels of the river-beds, and in the earth and stalagmite of caverns along with remains of extinct mammals ; * but as yet without any human bones. If these remains truly indicate a primitive Stone period of rough imple ments only, then man must have inhabited Europe before some of the later changes in its physical geo graphy, at a time when the European land was more extensive than now, when many large mammals now extinct still lived, and before the great movements of subsidence which have brought the European continent to its present form. For reasons to be stated in the sequel, however, it is doubtful if there really was a distinct Palæolithic period, properly so called.

Many of the so-called im plements are probably natural, and the manner in which they are found renders it possible that those actually fabricated by man belonged merely to special stations of tribes who may have had other and better implements elsewhere. Still there seems to be evidence of the existence of the earlier Flint folk before the disappearance of the great Post-pliocene mammals now extinct, and before the last great subsidence or * " Story of the Earth and Man," 1873. diluvian catastrophe of the northern continents. The men of this early age, if not properly " Palæolithic," were at least possibly antediluvian. Penetrating beyond the so-called Palæolithic period, we find ourselves in the Post-pliocene or Glacial age of geology, in the later part of which it seems evident Fig. 1.— Implements op Chipped Stone, Eueope.

(After Nilsson and others.) that nearly all the European land was under the sea, and the islands which remained were subject to a climate almost arctic in its character. Here we lose all traces of man ; and if he existed in this period, it must have been in some of those portions of the world to which the subsidence and cold climate of the Glacial age did not extend. It is true that the supposed Palæolithic men are often called Post-pliocene, but when this term is used in a strict sense, as it is by Sir C. Lyell, it is with the limitation that human re mains occur only at the close of the Post-pliocene ; or the beginning of the modern period. Fig. 2.— Implements of Chipped Stone, North America. (After Squier.) Whatever dates we may assign to these several stages of prehistoric man, and whatever value we may attach to such classifications, or whatever new light subsequent research may throw upon them, American facts enable us to attain to absolute certainty on some material points.

Of these, one is that the oldest populations known to us in Europe were not inferior FOSSIL MLN. either in physical character or the arts of life to the aborigines of America at the time of its discovery. Another is, that in their rude manufactures, their habits of life, their social institutions, and their religious beliefs, they must have resembled the Ame- Fig. 3.— Implements of Polished Stone, Eueope. (After Nilsson.) ricans in the closest and most precise manner. These two great leading truths it will be my province to establish and illustrate in the following pages. In the meantime I may appeal to the eye by a few woodcut illustrations of implements and weapons of the Stone Age in Europe and America. In figure 1, are given, from Nilsson and others, tracings of some common forms of arrow and spear heads of the best and Fig. 4.— Implements of Polished Stone, Noeth America.

(Partly after Sguter.) the rudest styles of chipped flint, one of them being a weapon of the ancient Amiens type. In figure 2 are some similar tracings from Squier's memoir on the FOSSIL MEN. ancient natives of the Mississippi Valley. I have selected these as belonging to one of the most cultivated of the primitive populations of America, who were agriculturists, weavers, and skilful potters and workers in metal, yet used flint implements exactly similar to those of the ruder tribes. Figure 3 shows a group of polished stone implements from Nilsson, all European and of the so-called later Stone Age. In figure 4 are similar stone implements used in America by the same peoples who used those in figure 1, and at the same time. These, let it be observed, are not obtained by arbitrai-y selection of a few similar things out of many dissimilar.

On the contrary, it would be possible to fill pages with such illustrations, showing that the handiwork of the red man, from Terra del Fuego to Baffin's Bay, is of similar character to that of pre-historic man in Europe. I cannot dwell here on all that is implied in such resemblance. To those who know the uses of such implements, every one of them tells, not of a fancied instinct to make things of one form as birds make their nests, but of a wide range of similar wants and habits leading to similar contrivances. Take, for instance, the hollow chisel or gouge in figure 4, used by the American Indian to tap the maple-tree, to extract its saccharine juice in spring, and also to hollow out wooden troughs to hold it ; and consider all that is implied in the fact that precisely the same sort of chisel is found abundantly in Scandinavia, as represented in figure 3.

Or, take the grooved axes in figures 3 and 4, and consider how much of experience in woodcraft is implied in the construction, handling, and use of such an implement, and with how many possible industries in wood it connects itself. Or take the rudely-chipped flint implements of " Palæolithic " type from the gravels of the Somme, in connection with the fact that an implement of somewhat similar style used by the semi-civilised mound-builders of the Mississippi Valley is held with much probability by some American antiquaries to have been an agricultural hoe, and what strange revelations may we have of the primitive farmers who possibly cultivated the alluvial flats of the Somme Valley with such tools, while they, perhaps, built their towns on hills beyond the reach of inundations. Such comparisons will grow and multiply on us as we proceed, and I must not anticipate them here.

In following out these comparisons, moreover, I do not wish to restrict myself to the mere similarity of implements and other remains, but to present such pictures of the actual life of the American Indian as may enable us to place ourselves in his position, and to view things from his standpoint. By thus sitting at the feet of the red man, we may chance to discover some truths which the learned archæologists of the old world have not yet attained ; and in any case may hope to present some interesting and instructive pictures of primitive man in the old world and the new. c

Chapter II. An Old Story Of The New World

Nothing can be more interesting than the narratives which remain to us of the first contact of Europeans with the Indian tribes of the West ; and perhaps no such narrative is more touching than the unvarnished yet circumstantial story of the old Breton navigator of St. Malo, who first entered the St. Lawrence and held intercourse with the tribes of Canada. In the spring and summer of 1534, Jacques Cartier, following on the track of Cabot and of the Breton and Basque fishermen, who even at this early date visited the coast and banks of Newfoundland, the " Island of Baccalaos," — had entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence by the Strait of Belleisle ; and in search of a way to the Indies, coasted along the south side of Labrador, and visited the Magdalen Islands, and the coast of New Brunswick. He then passed up the deep Baie des Chaleurs, so named by him because of the hot summer sun which beat fiercely on its forestclad shores, and finally took refuge from the fogs and storms of autumn in the lovely Bay of Gaspe.

On the coast of Labrador, which, he quaintly says, from its barren and forbidding aspect, must have been the land that God gave to Cain, he found a tribe of AN OLD STORY OF THE NEW WORLD. 19 Americans, the first that he saw. They were large, well-built people, with their skins painted red, clothed in furs, their hair tied up in a knot, secured with a bone pin, and ornamented with feathers. They used canoes of birch bark, and were hunting seals, in search of which they gave the French navigator to under stand they had come from a country farther to the south. There can be little doubt that they were the Red Indians or Bœotics of Newfoundland, a race now extinct, mercilessly exterminated by the European settlers of that island, and by the Micmacs of Nova Scotia, but who were of old most extensive hunters of the reindeer, the seal, and the walrus, and skilful carvers of ivory and fabricators of bone implements, and who, in respect to their physical character, food, and mode of life, were very like the men of the so called Reindeer Age in France itself, subsisting like them very much on the carriboo, or American reindeer, then abundant in the interior of Newfoundland.