CHAPTER II

NEOLITHIC AND BRONZE AGE CULTURES

By John. L. Myres

I. THE HIGHLAND ZONE AND ALPINE MAN

WHAT then was going on, meanwhile, within the Highland Zone? For several reasons, evidence from this region is very scanty. Much of it is ill-explored from every point of view; still more—and especially in its best explored west-end where later periods are exceptionally well exhibited and have been carefully studied—is out of reach for the same reason as is so much the evidence for Interglacial man elsewhere; namely that the nearer we approach the centers of glaciation, the more completely do later glacial deposits cover the surfaces of the earlier; so that in Switzerland and south Germany, for example, human record hardly begins before the neolithic age. Further south-east the scale of accident is loaded the other way: for, in proportion as glacial action passes into pluvial, it is not excess of deposits but the wholesale removal of them by rain-fed torrents that limits observation. A very large proportion of the land surface of Asia Minor, for instance, has no surface deposits in the ordinary sense, at all; even in the greater valleys, which are themselves rare, the upper terrace gravels have been severely dissected; and the lower have been covered by alluvium, deposited often within historic times.

Consequently, it is almost exclusively by inference from other data, such as the distribution of racial types today, and certain indications of the course of events in immediately prehistoric times, that the prehistory of this great region must be reconstructed provisionally. Limiting conditions are supplied by the climate, vegetation, and consequent mode of existence imposed here upon man.

Like all other highlands this literally Alpine Zone has always had a cooler and moister climate than the lowlands north and south of it; and in periods when the submerged areas on its Mediterranean and Sarmatian flanks were extensive, this humidity was greatly accentuated, It must be inferred from this that the whole region has been predominantly and persistently a forest area. General changes of temperature would replace subtropical by temperate or subarctic species, but would not necessarily alter the forest area.

A period of general drought would draw the forest margin inwards and upwards among the foothills; a pluvial period would expand it into the plains; and a heavy snow-cap would devastate it among the peaks and ridges, and down the glaciated valleys. But none of these agencies would avail to destroy the forest regime altogether; that catastrophe was reserved for the hand of man; and even man has not devastated it wholly as yet.

It follows that the grassland and parkland fauna, whether African or Arctic, which is so widely associated elsewhere with the first signs of man's presence, did not pervade the Highland Zone at all generally. In alluvial valleys, and in the large interment plains and forelands, such as the Danube valley, which are characteristic of the region and were reserved to grassland by their mantle of interglacial loess, it was possible for small herds of elephants to wander, as they did still in north Syria in the twelfth century BC; and for the lion to maintain himself as he did in Palestine until, at least, the tenth century, in Macedon until the fifth, and in the Mesopotamian foothills until the present time. But these animals were never characteristic of the great mass of the highland: their place was taken by bear, wolf, and ruminants large and small

Man, hunting in the open, as he hunted in the lowlands of Western Europe, or on the great steppes and park-lands, had therefore no inducement to occupy the forest area: at most his mode of subsistence brought him along the larger rivers such as the Danube, and its tributaries. It is significant that all the earlier individuals whose remains have been found hitherto within the Highland Zone are of the Neanderthal type; that the only large group of Neanderthal men hitherto recorded is that from the Krapina cavern in the headwaters of the Save; and that almost all the Neanderthal men have been found along the western outliers of the highland core of Europe. To draw conclusions from the distribution of so few examples is risky, and the fragments from Kent's Cavern and one of the Gibraltar caves impose caution already; but there is another reason for expecting that the Neanderthal type may be found to represent an early forest man, differentiated by his surroundings, as well as by long descent, from his Aurignacian contemporaries on the grasslands and parklands outside. Whatever the relations of Neanderthal man to the Highland Zone, the Aurignacian stock at all events seems to have originated elsewhere, and to have only penetrated it locally and marginally. Here again, however, it is possible that Aurignacian relics scattered nearer its core may have been obliterated by the last outspread of glacial debris. And these last glacial deposits are sufficiently widely distributed to show that in the period which in western Europe is that of transition from palaeolithic to neolithic culture, practically the whole of the main highland was divested, not only of any human population it may have harbored interglacially, but of all save the most alpine vegetation. In any case we know enough about the changes of climate within the glacial period, to presume wide oscillation of contrasted types of man, as the forest spread or shrank again.

As the highland was surrounded from north-east to south-west by tundra and cold steppe, while southward and eastward its slopes were washed by Mediterranean and Pontic Seas, there was only one avenue by which, when the climate was mitigated finally, it could be reoccupied by that sequence of plants and animals which it exhibits now. This avenue is from the south-east, and consists of the long Asiatic continuation of the Highland Zone itself; for the Hellespont River, as Greek geography rightly named it, offered no real obstacle, and the occurrence of alpine flora in Crete and even in the larger Cyclades illustrates the regional continuity between the highland shores of the Archipelago itself.

We have therefore to conceive the Highland Zone as a single great region, peninsular and self-contained; thrust westward into the heart of Europe from its Armenian summit, where it joins, base to base, its twin eastward promontories, the north Persian ridges and the Zagros escarpment south-eastward, and the diminutive but vitally important southward causeway through Syria into south Palestine. North of the Armenian mountain knot, and intimately associated with it, in climate, flora and fauna, lay the transverse ridge of Caucasus, steep-fronted towards Sarmatian seas or their flatland bed.

Though we have no direct evidence yet as to the older human population, the modern inhabitants of this Highland Zone give an important clue, and the known course of events in the long neolithic and chalcolithic periods confirms that clue impressively. From end to end, the dominant type in historic times is distinct and characteristic; interrelated by well-marked broad-headedness and high-headedness; by wide and high orbits, set level or drooping outwards, with almost no trace of brow-ridges; by broad cheek­bones and palate; by a characteristic wide square jaw with its hinge-ends long, massive, and rising nearly at right angles with the plane of the teeth. It has broad shoulders and hips, broad hands and feet, with thick wrists and ankles, and a generally thickset build; dense parchment-like skin, sallow in the shade, and leathery under the weather; eyes hazel or brown, dark brown wavy hair, long in both sexes and very copious on the body, with profuse beard in the men. Its nearest affinities are with the other white-skinned and wavy-haired types, and with these it has formed numerous intermediate varieties within which its own bodily features appear to be in the Mendelian sense dominant, so that, once introduced into a region, it tends to persist and become accentuated with time. Its purer varieties are all found within the Highland Zone: its occurrences in north-west Africa, Spain, and the Canaries are not sufficient to establish the south-western origin formerly proposed; and the broad-headed strains which connect it north-eastward with the Mongoloid population of the Eurasiatic woodland,—whose other physical features are very different, may be attributed rather to admixture between independent types spreading in opposite directions, than to any propagation of such strains into the Highland. The Alpine type in fact may be regarded as essentially of Alpine origin.

On account of its great width, this type of skull was long classed with the Mongolian; but the general build and lofty proportions of the brain-case, and still more the peculiarities of the face and jaw should have precluded this; and the absence of skin pigment, the wavy hair, and the copious beard and body-hair, force the conclusion that we are dealing with a stock of quite other origin, more likely to be akin to the other white races, but nevertheless strongly contrasted with these, in its head-form and bodily build.

Moreover, between the highland home of Alpine man, and the still loftier plateaux, which we have seen reason to regard as the Mongoloid cradle the narrow but gigantic ridges of the Hindu Kush and Pamirs have been long and almost continuously glaciated, as we have already noticed; their flanks are dissected by ancient transverse gorges; and below ice-level there is vast extent of dense inhospitable forest, fed, like the snows above them, by wet monsoon winds. Such human elements as have worked their way round this vast ice-cap since its last contraction have moved wholly from west to east, not from the Mongolian habitat into the Alpine; and Mongol admixture in highlands west of the Hindu Kush can always be traced to another and quite recent origin, namely to nomad pastorals intruded transversely from the low-lying grasslands of Turkestan, which in all but the latest phases of the Sarmatian sea lay submerged and therefore as impassable as the snow-cap.

Enough seems to be known of the correlation between diet and the form of the jaw, and of the pull of the jaw-muscles on the temporal and parietal region of the skull, to warrant the suggestion that the peculiar combination of a short and massive jaw, suited rather for crushing than for cutting or tearing, with a musculature so feeble as to be accompanied by almost no lateral compression of the brain-case, points to a long-continued mode of subsistence quite different from that of the carnivorous hunters of the steppes and parklands of Eurafrica. And we have already seen that the Highland Zone has necessarily been at all periods more or less completely a forest area, ill-adapted to maintain the large land-animals of the parkland except quite locally and sporadically, but abounding in many kinds of trees and shrubs bearing fruits or nuts, from conifers to chestnut and walnut, and from cranberry, crab-apple and sloe, to the characteristic fleshy-fruited apricot and peach of Persia and Armenia, and the vine, mulberry, fig and olive which are common to the foothills of the forest zone and the ever­green flora of the Mediterranean region south of it. "We shall see reason also to suspect that the first domesticated grasses, wheat, barley, and millet belong to genera which inhabit this same marginal belt between the forest and the southern grasslands; and that they were cultivated by men of Alpine stock as far west as the Swiss lake-basins, and as early as we have any evidence of modern man in that section of the highland.

In this connection it is perhaps worth noting, that Greek ethnology, which so often formulates conclusions which it has been reserved to modern observers to substantiate, clearly distinguished between an earlier phase of subsistence, that of the nut-eating men, and a later meal-eating culture; and that, in a very ancient stratum of Greek myth and ritual, the Power to whom the gift of grain-food was ascribed was worshipped with sacrifice of the pig, a typical forest-ranger.

But within the Highland itself, the Alpine type varies, and the actual distribution of its principal varieties gives a clue to its probable cradle-land. Most accentuated is the Armenoid variety, of the Ararat mountain region, with a head characterized by very lofty vault and outward-drooping orbits, and so abruptly flattened behind, that it has been ascribed by some observers, both ancient and modern, to artificial deformation. This variety predominates throughout the central section of the Highland, and is also not uncommon throughout south-eastern and east-central Europe. Least peculiar in the two respects already noted and distinguished rather by its smoothly globular cranium, and by a jaw broad but not so angular, are the West European varieties, especially m Auvergne and Savoy, and the most easterly groups from north Persia to the Pamirs and beyond; and the general likeness between these remotest groups is in fact such as to suggest that they represent a quite early phase both of differentiation and of outward spread. Intermediate types, characteristic of east-central and south-eastern Europe, and commonly described as Dinaric show this globular head becoming more angular and cubical; and have their counterpart in Caucasus, western Persia, and along the southern margin of the highland thence towards the Dinaric area westward, with notable offshoots southwards through Syria. Their distribution suggests a later stage both of specialization and of dissemination, around the central area already described, where alone the development has attained to that extreme Armenoid phase whose distribution is least wide and also apparently least early.

The relative antiquity of these successive phases of growth and spread can be stated approximately; for the outermost westerns or Cevenole type made its appearance in the Alps and in France during the transition from late palaeolithic to neolithic culture. At Ofnet, in Bavaria, it made its appearance in the Azilian phase, mixed with Aurignacian people, and already interbreeding with them; eastward, on the other hand, the human remains from Anau show that no such Alpine type had reached the north margin of Persia until after the second desertion of this early settlement. Similarly the broad-headed intruders into Egypt at the beginning of the dynastic series, and into Crete and the Cyclades at the beginning of the Minoan Bronze Age, belong to the second phase, which may therefore be dated about 4000-35oo BC, and the first known occupants of Cyprus, and of Troy, in the earliest Bronze Age are of the same type. Fully developed Armenoid remains, on the other hand, do not seem to be found anywhere until the second millennium at earliest.

At present, therefore, it seems safe to regard this Alpine group of broad-headed types as representing phases of a special development within the Armenian mountain mass, or rather (since this region was certainly subjected to severe glaciation during the Ice Age) within the mountain-girt plateau of Asia Minor immediately west of it; large enough, isolated enough, and at all relevant periods habitable enough to become the cradle of such a sequence of varieties; sufficiently well connected with large similarly qualified regions eastward and westward and sufficiently liable from its geographical position to periodic changes of climate, to serve as a reservoir of population, like the highlands of Atlas and the Iberian peninsula in earlier times, and like the Arabian and Eurasian reservoirs later on.

FOREST CULTURE AND POLISHED IMPLEMENTS

Surprise has sometimes been expressed, that even considering how little scientific research there has been in this region, traces of palaeolithic culture are still so rare here, especially in view of the quite common occurrence of neolithic implements of polished stone in all parts of it. There is however good reason why flaked implements should be in any case rare in such a region. Though fairly well adapted for attacking wild animals, cutting up game, and dressing hides, and even for shaping and decorating implements of bone and antler, the flaked implement is comparatively ineffective for felling trees, splitting logs, dressing planks, or pounding roots, bark or nuts. Moreover, though a large part of the great flatlands consist of, or rest on, flint-bearing strata—cretaceous or derivative—and are as open country as they actually are, mainly because these limestone surfaces are inhospitable to tree in the highland zone, on the other hand, these beds are either absent—which accentuates its forest aspect, seeing how precarious is tree growth over limestone—or so distorted, or even deficient in flint and chert, that the supply of this material was scanty, and (what was worse) discontinuous. Collateral evidence is that in Egypt, where timber was rare and exotic, the flake-technique persisted and underwent cumulative refinement from Solutrean to chalcolithic times; and that in the kitchen-middens of norm-west Europe acquaintance with polished implements increases pari passu with the northward advance of oak-forest, displacing conifers, just as these and the dwarf-birch had previously invaded the cold steppe. A further point is, that even before acquaintance with the polished technique began, there is a complete revolution in the mode of employment of stone implements generally. The tapering pyramidal point for stabbing and the longitudinal edge for cutting or ripping, are supplemented, and eventually replaced in the more massive implements, by the transverse edge for hacking and clearing, under shock (rather than pressure) applied to the butt-end. This is conspicuous in the Campignian technique, which will be remembered as marking a last palaeolithic aggression in the moist forest-ridden west. The form of the butt-end, too, frequently suggests the use of some form of haft; and hafting itself presumes familiarity with wooden staves and clubs, and therefore with parkland at all events. Again, in any region where roots and tubers formed any considerable part of the food supply, the mere act of breaking the ground with pick or hoe, whether of wood, of bone or antler, or of hafted stone, automatically smooths the surfaces of the implement about the point or edge, and leads to a natural finish, familiar among the digging-hoes of shell which are used by some Pacific peoples, and among stone hoes from pre-Columbian sites in North America. From this it is but a single step to the artificial improvement of blunted or splintered edges by grinding, not by flaking; and certain implements from the Nile valley show every stage of this advance in technique, though they are always exceptional there, and late. On these grounds, the inference seems justified, that whatever other causes may have been in operation, forest life, and especially the hacking of timber and the grubbing-up of edible roots, favored the development of such types of stone implements, and methods of manufacture, as actually occur earliest and most persistently throughout the Highland Zone, and are least and latest represented in comparatively treeless regions such as the Nile valley and the wide flatland of north Africa. 

It would be premature to correlate in more than the most tentative way the polished-stone technique exhibited in this region, both by cutting, cleaving and grubbing implements, and by those for crushing and rubbing which so commonly accompany them, with the probability already noted, that the type of skull and jaw characteristic of Alpine man may result from long habituation to a diet of nuts, roots, and other vegetable foodstuffs needing steady mastication rather than the biting and tearing which meat requires, and so thoroughly received from the long highly-musculated jaw and prominent incisors and canines both of negro man and of the long-skulled Aurignacian hunters of Eurafrica and the north-west. But the coincidence is noteworthy, and the roughly concomitant spread of Neolithic culture and of Alpine types of man is more striking still.

That the earlier stages of such spread should be ill-represented is only what might be expected in view of the prolonged glaciation and widespread diluvial deposits of those western sections of the Highland Zone which alone are adequately explored. But it seems clear that the advanced stage of neolithic industry which is represented even in the earliest settlements around the Swiss and Italian lakes, which had an Alpine population, presupposes a long and homogeneous development; and the occasional introduction of implements in fairly advanced phases of this polished technique into the Danish kitchen-middens, which are the leavings of Aurignacian people, among a multitude of flaked implements of Campignian and other late palaeolithic makes, suggests that in north-western Europe at all events there was just such an overlap of the older and the newer industries, as is proved for the long-leaded and broad-headed stocks themselves by the mixed Azilian deposit at Ofnet in Bavaria, which is of sufficiently late date to invite comparison with the earliest broad-headed remains from Grenelle near Paris, and Furfooz in eastern Belgium, and with the earliest lake-dwellers among the Alps themselves.

II. CHARACTERISTICS OF NEOLITHIC CULTURE