Anthropology | Page 8

last word in anthropology is: Know thyself.
CHAPTER II
ANTIQUITY OF MAN
History, in the narrower sense of the word, depends on written records. As we follow back history to the point at which our written records grow hazy, and the immediate ancestors or predecessors of the peoples who appear in history are disclosed in legend that needs much eking out by the help of the spade, we pass into proto-history. At the back of that, again, beyond the point at which written records are of any avail at all, comes pre-history.
How, then, you may well inquire, does the pre-historian get to work? What is his method of linking facts together? And what are the sources of his information?
First, as to his method. Suppose a number of boys are in a field playing football, whose superfluous garments are lying about everywhere in heaps; and suppose you want, for some reason, to find out in what order the boys arrived on the ground. How would you set about the business? Surely you would go to one of the heaps of discarded clothes, and take note of the fact that this boy's jacket lay under that boy's waistcoat. Moving on to other heaps you might discover that in some cases a boy had thrown down his hat on one heap, his tie on another, and so on. This would help you all the more to make out the general series of arrivals. Yes, but what if some of the heaps showed signs of having been upset? Well, you must make allowances for these disturbances in your calculations. Of course, if some one had deliberately made hay with the lot, you would be nonplussed. The chances are, however, that, given enough heaps of clothes, and bar intentional and systematic wrecking of them, you would be able to make out pretty well which boy preceded which; though you could hardly go on to say with any precision whether Tom preceded Dick by half a minute or half an hour.
Such is the method of pre-history. It is called the stratigraphical method, because it is based on the description of strata, or layers.
Let me give a simple example of how strata tell their own tale. It is no very remarkable instance, but happens to be one that I have examined for myself. They were digging out a place for a gas-holder in a meadow in the town of St. Helier, Jersey, and carried their borings down to bed rock at about thirty feet, which roughly coincides with the present mean sea-level. The modern meadow-soil went down about five feet. Then came a bed of moss-peat, one to three feet thick. There had been a bog here at a time which, to judge by similar finds in other places, was just before the beginning of the bronze-age. Underneath the moss-peat came two or three feet of silt with sea-shells in it. Clearly the island of Jersey underwent in those days some sort of submergence. Below this stratum came a great peat-bed, five to seven feet thick, with large tree-trunks in it, the remains of a fine forest that must have needed more or less elevated land on which to grow. In the peat was a weapon of polished stone, and at the bottom were two pieces of pottery, one of them decorated with little pitted marks. These fragments of evidence are enough to show that the foresters belonged to the early neolithic period, as it is called. Next occurred about four feet of silt with sea-shells, marking another advance of the sea. Below that, again, was a mass, six to eight feet deep, of the characteristic yellow clay with far-carried fragments of rock in it that is associated with the great floods of the ice-age. The land must have been above the reach of the tide for the glacial drift to settle on it. Finally, three or four feet of blue clay resting immediately on bed-rock were such as might be produced by the sea, and thus probably betokened its presence at this level in the still remoter past.
Here the strata are mostly geological. Man only comes in at one point. I might have taken a far more striking case--the best I know--from St. Acheul, a suburb of Amiens in the north of France. Here M. Commont found human implements of distinct types in about eight out of eleven or twelve successive geological layers. But the story would take too long to tell. However, it is well to start with an example that is primarily geological. For it is the geologist who provides the pre-historic chronometer. Pre-historians have to reckon in geological time--that is to say, not in years, but in ages of indefinite extent corresponding to marked changes in the condition of the earth's surface. It takes the plain