CHAPTER I

PRIMITIVE MAN IN GEOLOGICAL TIME

By John. L. Myres

Hilda Bryzenski's Hakea Microcarpa

I.THE SETTING OF THE STAGE

HISTORY, in its common and more popular sense, is the study of Man's dealings with other men, and the adjustment of working relations between human groups. But there is a larger sense, in which Human History merges in Natural History, and studies the dealings of Man with Nature; and it may be observed that it has been only by slow degrees that any human group has attained to such vision of the unity of mankind, or of civilization, as might constrain it to regard other human groups as more than a peculiarly intractable element in its own natural surroundings. An austere conception of War—that under certain circumstances Right has no court of appeal but Might—survives to remind us that Man has not yet wholly rid himself of this confusion between things and alien persons; and the most modern conception of international right so far accepts this fact of an alienation between the higher functions of human groups, however reasonable, as to take differences of language—of the medium, that is, for interchange and reconciliation of ideas,—as the best guide when and where, for the present, it is safer to keep human groups apart, and let them manage their affairs as far as possible each in their own way.

History, in the narrowest sense of all, as the interpretation of written evidence for arrangements made for right living within a human group, or between such groups, accepts implicitly the same criterion, and stops short where such evidence is not available. Linguistic paleontology goes a little further back in the study of the distribution of intercommunicant groups and of such relations between them as loan-words, or structural likenesses in the speech, may suggest. But the spoken word does not fall to the ground, like the spent missile or the broken vessel, to be its own memorial of human achievement: it vanishes in air, so that the philologist deals not with originals, but at best with the reminiscence of an echo. To recover, therefore, what men were doing, or making, still more what they were thinking or desiring, before the dawn of history, the sole available method is that of the archaeologist, merging as it does in that of the geologist: since these alone handle and interpret original creations of men's thought and will, and contemporary elements of the physical surroundings of those men. Where the tree falls, there shall it lie, and where the lost implement or shattered potsherd, or worn-out man fell, there have they lain, for all that any one cared then, or knows now. It is the carelessness (in the literal sense) of the river as to the gravel which it carried, and an equal carelessness of those men as to what happened to their leaving, that justify such a hypothesis of the credibility of these data, and make prehistoric times at least a penumbra of  history.

John Brickell, The Natural History of North-Carolina, with an Account of the Trade, Manners, and Customs of the Christian and Indian Inhabitants (Dublin: James Carson, 1737)

Nor are we compelled any longer by prejudice or authority to regard those times as catastrophically short, any more than we must believe that Rome was built in a day. Man’s prehistory merges in the pageant of the animal world, and of the planet-wide arena on which it has been in progress. Mountain and sea-basin too have their history. Their geographical distribution has varied in immemorial years; the faith that can remove mountains is the same in kind as that in which the historian brings together armies and frontiers, “bone to his bone”, showing “all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time”. Such historical geography and historical ethnology are a proper prelude to the history of the ancient world; and much, even within that history, cannot fully be understood without them. Ancient peoples come upon the stage of history, not all together, but in a certain order, and by their proper entrances; each with a character and make-up congruous with the part they will play. The pageant—or is it the drama?—of history presupposes the formation of that character, and its equipment, in the green-room of the remoter past; and the sketch of the growth of initial cultures, which follows now, is intended, like the hypothesis of a Greek play, to describe how men came by those qualities of build and temperament, those aims in life, and the means wherewith they were attempting to achieve them. For, to the student of prehistory, a culture is nothing more or less than this—the total equipment with which each generation of men starts on its career, in whatever external conditions; to the archaeologist, no less, it is literally that equipment which the men of each generation were discarding, when they and it respectively ceased to be of significant use.

To see how the stage itself was set for this pageant, we must look back beyond the moment when the first characters enter it. For it has been Nature, rather than Man, hitherto, in almost every scene, that has determined where the action shall lie. Only at a comparatively late phase of that action does Man in some measure shift the scenery for himself.

And by Nature and Man are here meant neither supernatural force nor superhuman design, altering the arrangement of us and our surroundings like chessmen on a board. Nature, adopted in our speech, from Latin natura, an unlucky mistranslation of Greek PHYSIS, stands as a common and inclusive term for all “physical” events that happen; its Greek original being a verbal substantive signifying the fact of growth, the “way things grow”, the mere processes of a world as apprehended by a mind. It has nothing to do, as its Latin antecedents might suggest, either with birth or any sort of coming-into-being; nor with any question what shall it be in the end thereof. These are matters outside natural history and human history alike. All history is the mere study of processes, of the “way things grow” in the old Greek sense; for to this, modern thought has laboriously but unequivocally reverted, after long preoccupation with beginnings and endings, with cosmogony and eschatology of all kinds, in the centuries between Greek science and our own.

Within this Nature, so presented as a process or coherent sequence of occurrences, and so far as we know (by inference of me and you, each from experience of the rest of us corporeally participant in what goes on) a part of this Nature, stands Man, perceiving what goes on, learning what that is, conceiving it as alterable by inventive effort, and striving accordingly, with experience of what we call results, great or small, of that strife.

By Man, then, in what follows, is meant the collective total of such perceiving, learning, inventing, striving and experiencing “selves”, myself and yours and theirs. By races of men, are meant groups and sequences of such selves linked by corporeal similarities propagated by natural process within each group: by peoples or nations, groups of selves exhibiting peculiarities of interpretation, invention, and effort sufficiently similar for their results to be cumulative and coherent; and by cultures or civilizations the accumulated and coherent results of such similarities in the activity of selves like you and me.

II. PRE-GLACIAL GEOGRAPHY