II
AMONG THE HERALDS OF MAN
Itwas during the Upper Miocene age that two or three big apes migrated into Europe, probably from Africa, and passed from explorers into colonists. One of them was the Dryopithecus, a creature almost as tall as a man, and closely allied to Hylobates. He illustrated that organic art of caricature in which young Dame Nature excelled, many of her experimental efforts having Gargantuan humour in their shapes and proportions.
When food was scarce the Dryopithecus became a nomad, a sort of four-handed Odysseus who was very well able to fight his own battles, whether he wielded a heavy stick, or hugged his foe, or from the shelter of a tree dropped missiles that cracked heads and made backbones exceedingly painful. Hugging seems to have been hisforte, after clawing and fierce blows had prepared the way for a close embrace; and by his expert ferocity in defence and in attack he earned for himself the right to be a forerunner of several entertaining creatures, notably the gorilla and the chimpanzee and primitive man. He was inquisitive enough to use every natural bridge put in his path by good fortune.
At first I see him on four sorts of natural bridge, andno fault can be found with his activity. He crawls along fallen trees over some torrents and chasms; across a flooded river here and there he leaps in a shambling, lopsided fashion, when stepping-stones and boulders rise above water-level; he roams into hilly districts where many a ledge of rock spans a dangerous gap; but he enjoys himself most of all when a suspension bridge of branches enables him to amble from tree to tree across a deep-lying river pent up between high cliffs.
In these four bridges, each of them generic, Nature has arrived at utility in her usual manner, by alternating growth and violence. The fallen tree, for instance, from which all timber bridges have been evolved by handicraft in a sequence of gradual improvements, belongs to the utility of Nature’s violent moods; and this applies also to the bridge of stepping-stones. Earthquakes and floods distributed boulders over the beds of rivers, and from these boulders handicraft has developed piers and abutments. On the other hand, a bridge of long boughs—and I have used many a one myself—is a symbol not merely of growth but of abundance, and also of endurance. But it is not to be looked upon as the only suspension bridge along which our arboreal ancestry capered, and from which primitive mankind took, and take, hints in bridge-building. Let us remember also the pendent bridge of lianes, and of other tough creeping plants, which in many warm countries grew, and grow, from tree to tree, forming strong cables. On such a high-swung bridge I can see the Dryopithecus, suspended by hishands, and learning tricks as a gymnast, while his mate squats between the fork of a branch and collects fleas from her baby.
When photographs of natural bridges lie around me on a table, there is another vision that comes before my mind in a succession of vivid pictures. I behold a shaggy little animal, partly an ape, partly a man, who stands upright on a fallen tree; below his feet a river in flood foams among rocks; and over there, beyond the peaked hills, a blood-red sunset makes a wondrous tragedy of colour. Somehow the little animal is awed by the flaming sky, and stares at it fascinated, his protruded mouth wide open, and his teeth gleaming. His arms are thin, sinewy, capable, hairy, and very long; they hang at full length, and their prehensile fingers grasp two sticks, one long and pointed, another short and knobbed. His breastbone looks weak as his shoulders droop forward, and horizontal lines of wrinkled skin run from each armpit across the narrow chest. His legs are short and somewhat arched; and their feet grip wood as a habit. The eyes, overhung by a ledge of bone, shimmer with a peculiar suspicion, an instinctive cunning, very vigilant and fierce, that protects even tired sleep with the alertness of a sentinel. The body is daubed with yellow ochre and iron ore, as if to rival the coloured life seen everywhere in Nature; but through this decoration much uneven hair is noticeable, and a coarse beard surrounds the face with a ruff rather similar to that which now gives pride to theCebus capucinus. The head isbecoming human, a real Pandora box, whence many banes and a few blessings will escape continually, and spread far and wide over the earth. At present this creature is a wild beast in the terrible nursery stage between apehood and savage manhood. Already he has lost the athletic ease and grace of his tree-top cousins. Not only is he out of joint with them, but his own lot is very perilous, a never-ending war against hardships and dangers. Beasts of prey know how weak he is; most animals outrun him; birds in their swift flight escape from his weapons, and he feels rage and jealousy when monkeys at play leap long distances from bough to bough. Out of his nature comes a pitiless hatred for all living creatures. Do you not see this earthling, this Adam of Evolution, part ape and part man, standing alone on a windfall bridge, with a river in flood below his feet, and the sun a radiant crescent, blood-red, dipping below that far horizon of peaked hills?
And yet this biped has been moved by the sunset, and also by an idea of his own, whose history can be read in deep lines of ploughed earth that run from the bridge to a wood over there, a hundred yards away. At this distance from the river a tall tree was blown down, and a tribe of ape-like men, guided by their leader, dragged it to the bank-side and put it across the waterway, taking long days over the wonderful task. Nature at last has discovered a mind that can think in imitation. Her tree-bridge has a rival.
At this moment the picture changes. A female creatureappears, accompanied by several children. She is uglier than the male, because she suffers much more; her family grows too fast, and for a long time its members are unfit to defend themselves. Never for an hour can she put aside her motherhood. Other animals are occasional parents, because their young are soon able to do their own business; while she, our Eve of Evolution, for ever anxious about her helpless little ones, is an incessant mother through the few brief years of her fertility. Perils encompass her and them, and in a short time she is worn into old age. But she loses her youth creatively; there is not a privation nor a pain that her constant motherhood fails to make into a spiritualising of the heart, into aVita Nuova, into the starting-point for a fresh development. So she is humanised by suffering and love-humanised in spirit, that is to say—long ages before her body has matured into womanhood. It is she who endows children with quickened minds and with social inclinations; and it is she who encounters with a yielding but tenacious courage the wild beast that male passions breed and perpetuate. Also—and this is very important—she is by temperament a practical worker, whereas the male is not; he thinks all the time of adventure, and his moods are incalculable. Even his paternity is coarse-handed, and subject to furious greeds and lusts. His brain is active enough to be awed by the strife of Nature and weak enough to be crippled by a little reason. His character threatens to check his evolution. Where the climate is hot, and food grows abundantly, hemakes no progress; bad times alone compel him to work, and to pass very slowly, with a dogged reluctance, from handicraft to handicraft. His higher education begins when he chips a stone into a pointed weapon and feels the rhythmical enjoyment that accompanies invention and manipulation. In fact, handicraft is the earliest public school, the first university; it helps motherhood to transform the brute male into a being somewhat better,[37]a primeval savage. Yet naturalists have confirmed themselves in three bad habits: they say too little about handicraft, they admire man far too much, and they patronise woman. When they do not bury Woman in the term Man, they glance at her with a condescending half-pity, as bibliophiles glance at second or third editions; and so it is worth while to do some justice to our primitive foremother, the Eve of Evolution.
With her incalculable partner, the irrational male, she and her family wander from district to district. At times they settle under a rock-shelter or in a cave, and make footpaths from it to watering-places and hunting-grounds. Here and there a river is crossed by stepping-stones, and more than one ravine is spanned by branches and by a fallen tree. What is their attitude to these things? The windfall tree-bridge, like every other gift from Nature, is abane to them as well as a boon, for it is a road open to dangerous animals; as such it is a thing to be guarded, and many a fight in its defence occurs, creating traditions of bravery which are long remembered.
Further, as time goes on, and the progenitors of man become more human, the pressure of competitive life draws ever more and more attention to the incompleteness of natural bridges. For example, stepping-stones may be useless when they are needed most of all, in wet seasons and after storms; and the tree-bridge is so narrow that warriors cross it only one by one, so their slow attack gives a terrible advantage to a brave defence. These hindrances, so obvious and so unpleasant, make appeal to the inventive faculty that a few men possess. Not much is required. From four or five seedling ideas a great many improvements will grow; and now is the moment for us to choose a vague tentative date for the beginning of this gradual development.
Most people are bored by prehistoric archæology, because its earlier periods are as undated as is the oblivion of coma. So a date in obscure history, however tentative it may be, is very helpful; the mind rests on it, somehow, anyhow, and feels that the lost legions of the dead years left some oases in the Saharas of ancient time. And this point is not the only one that concerns the general reader whodoesgenerally read. In recent years the antiquity of handicraft has been extended very much by a “find” of eagle-beaked flint implements, with other tools, below the Pliocene depositson the East Anglian Coast. The eagle-beaked flints are undoubtedly of human manufacture, and they carry back the ancient stone period of man to the Tertiary times. Sir Ray Lankester writes on this important subject, and his knowledge helps us a great deal, though we have to recover it from entangled sentences. Forexample[38]:—
“Evidence has been for twenty years or more in our possession (in the form of stone implements) of the existence of man in Europe in the warm period which preceded the Pleistocene, with its glacial clays and drifts and its gravels deposited on the sides of existing river valleys, sometimes 800 feet above the level of the bed to which the stream has now worn down its excavation, many miles wide. The discovery within the last four years of beautifully worked flint implements of the shape of an eagle’s beak (called ‘rostro-carinate’) and of other serviceable forms below the marine Pliocene shelly sands—known as the ‘Red Crag’ in Suffolk—separates the migrations and mixtures of human tribes and groups, of which we have any knowledge, by a huge chasm of geologic time from the date of the earliest European population. The best geologists have come to the conclusion that half a million years (and it may well be twice as many) separate us from the days before the Crag Sea laid down its shelly deposits on the East Anglian Coast. Yet there were skilful men—not mere ape-like creatures using sticks and roughly-broken stones, but men capable of making and admiring symmetrical, well-finished flint tools, and of using them to clean skins and to plane wood—living a human, creative, dominating life here in Western Europe in those immensely remote days. Probably enough, as great a period as separates those skilful men from us separated them from the earliest unskilful ‘commencing’ men of the tropical zone.”
“Evidence has been for twenty years or more in our possession (in the form of stone implements) of the existence of man in Europe in the warm period which preceded the Pleistocene, with its glacial clays and drifts and its gravels deposited on the sides of existing river valleys, sometimes 800 feet above the level of the bed to which the stream has now worn down its excavation, many miles wide. The discovery within the last four years of beautifully worked flint implements of the shape of an eagle’s beak (called ‘rostro-carinate’) and of other serviceable forms below the marine Pliocene shelly sands—known as the ‘Red Crag’ in Suffolk—separates the migrations and mixtures of human tribes and groups, of which we have any knowledge, by a huge chasm of geologic time from the date of the earliest European population. The best geologists have come to the conclusion that half a million years (and it may well be twice as many) separate us from the days before the Crag Sea laid down its shelly deposits on the East Anglian Coast. Yet there were skilful men—not mere ape-like creatures using sticks and roughly-broken stones, but men capable of making and admiring symmetrical, well-finished flint tools, and of using them to clean skins and to plane wood—living a human, creative, dominating life here in Western Europe in those immensely remote days. Probably enough, as great a period as separates those skilful men from us separated them from the earliest unskilful ‘commencing’ men of the tropical zone.”
BRIDGE AT VILLENEUVE-SUR-LOTGOTHIC BRIDGE AT VILLENEUVE-SUR-LOT, FRANCE
GOTHIC BRIDGE AT VILLENEUVE-SUR-LOT, FRANCE
Yes, probably enough, but yet we must not suppose that handicraft in Western Europe has ever had a standard of uniform merit. As our own work is very often inferior both to that of the Romans and to that of the Middle Ages, so the eagle-beaked tools may denote nothing more than a local industry which a man of genius had originated. No other implements have been dug up from Pliocene deposits in other European localities, hence students of art and architecture cannot accept the generalisation advocated by Sir Ray Lankester. As well suppose that the whole of Western Europe produced in the same age many painters equal to the Van Eycks, or many bridge-builders of a piece with Caius Julius Lacer, or the good Saint Bénézet. It is enough to believe that at a date to be known vaguely as 500,000B.C., a craftsman of genius lived and laboured in a district of Western Europe, now called the East Anglian Coast. How far his influence extended, or how long it lasted, we have no inkling yet; but it may have been the influence, not of a rare genius, but of a school tradition which migrating tribes had spread through many parts of Europe. Anyhow, the eagle-beaksare historic facts and their manipulative skill gives us the right to make reasonable inferences.
For example, we may infer that if the craftsman who made an eagle-beaked tool showed intelligence in some other useful ways, he did no more than common justice to his humanity. Suppose he cut down a tree with his flint axe, choosing one that grew aslant over a chasm or across a river; or suppose he piled stepping-stones together in the middle of a waterway, and then used this pier as a support for two tree-trunks whose far ends rested on the banksides. Neither of these ideas has more mother-wit than that which has enabled ants to bore tunnels under running water, and to make active bridges by clinging to each other in a suspension chain of their wee brave bodies. Not many human minds in any period of history have been as diligently rational as ants; but let us risk the conjecture that the first advance in bridge-making began among the rostro-carinate workmen probably more than half a million years ago.
To cut down a tree, in order to get a bridge at a chosen place, was a good idea in primitive enterprise, but it was not enough; it gave but little additional help in tribal wars, since it repeated the narrow footway, the main drawback of windfall tree-bridges. Two or three trees laid side by side were necessary, and at least two piles of stepping-stones to carry enough trees over a fairly wide river. Such were the first improvements that war and social life demanded from the wit of primitive mankind, and often they were demandedin vain for many long ages. Even at the present time there are tribesmen who feel well pleased with themselves when they make single and double tree-bridges. I am told, for instance, by Mr. T. Beddoes, a traveller and trader in Equatorial Africa, that often in his wanderings he has made and used a tree-bridge to cross a narrow creek, following a native method for the sake of its ready convenience. “The natives,” he writes, “cut down the tallest trees on a bank of the waterway that they intend to bridge, then they make a handrail with bush-rope fastened to short upright sticks which are placed about three feet apart. Bush-rope is made from creepers or from long cane vines. Sometimes an attempt is made to flatten the upper surface of the tree; but this work is uncommon, as African natives are lazy; they detest manual labour. There are trees that grow to an enormous height; one of them measured a hundred feet odd, so fairly wide creeks and streams can be bridged. But canoes are the favourite means of crossing rivers; they carry light loads well enough, and they need less labour than bridge-building.”
This peep into the aboriginal mind reveals a dire stagnation. But although no other thing in Nature is less uncommon than human initiative, yet the men of the eagle-beaked tools may have made tree-bridges, and also such stone bridges as the lintel-slabs at Wycollar (p.60). For this work required nothing more than imitation, while the eagle-beaks added some invention to a deft handicraft. Many an earthquake had made a slab-bridge, and othermodels were formed by the lava from volcanoes which hardened into a thick crust over many gaps in the land.
From these bridges—a tree cut down with a flint axe, and a single boulder or slab laid from bank to bank of a stream—came three lines of descent in very slow, yet fertile handicraft; and to the history of each a long book could be given. Let me name them one byone:—
1. The Slab-bridge with stone piers.2. The Tree-bridge with stone piers.3. The Tree-bridge with timber piles.
1. The Slab-bridge with stone piers.
2. The Tree-bridge with stone piers.
3. The Tree-bridge with timber piles.