Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1922-10-28

being made To begin with, perhaps, he just
let his voice loose one may hear Italian
peasants now behind their poWs singing
songs without words. After dark in the win
ter he sat in his house and talked and sang
and made implements by touch rather than
sight
His lighting must have been poor, and
chiefly freight, but there was probably al
ways some fire in the village, summer or
winter. Fire was too troublesome to make
for men to be willing to let it out readily.
Sometimes a great disaster happened to
those pile villages, the fire got free, and
they were burned out. The Swiss deposits
contain clear evidenc, of such catastrophes
All this we gather from the remains of
the Swiss pile dwellings, and such was the
character of the human life that spread over
Europe, coming from the south and from the
east with the forests as, 10000 or $4,000
years ago, the reindeer and the Reindeer
men passed away.
From Hunter to Herdsman
It is evident that we have here way of
life already separated by a great gap Of thou
sands of years of invention from its original
Palaeolithic stage. The steps by which it
rose from that condition we can only guess
at. From being hunter lowering upon the
outskirts of flocks and herds of wild cattlu
and sheep, and from being a co-hunter with
the dog, man by insensible degrees may have
developed a sense of proprietorship in the
beasts and struck up a friendship with his
canine competitor.
He learned to turn the cattle when they
wandered too far; he brought his better
brain to bear to guide them to fresh pasture.
He hemmed the beasts into valleys and in
closures where he could be sure to find
them again. He fed them when they starved,
and so slowly he tanned them. Perhaps his
agriculture began with the storage of fod-
der. He reaped, no doubt, before he sowed.
The Palaeolithic ancestor away in that IN
known land of origin to the southeast first
supplemented the precarious meat supply OF
the hunter by eating roots and fruits and
wild grains. Man storing graminiferous
grasses for his cattle might easily come to
beat out the grain for himself.
All these early beginnings must have
taken place far back in time and in regions
Of the world that have still to be effectively
explored by the archaeologists. They were
probably going on in Asia or Africa, in what
is now the bed of the Mediterranean, or in
the region of the Indian Ocean, while the
Reindeer man was developing his art in
Europe
The Neolithic men who drifted over Eu-
rope and western Asia $4,000 or 10000
years ago were long past these beginnings
they were already close, few thousand
years, to the dawn of written tradition and
the remembered history of mankind. With
out any very great shock or break, bronze
came at last into human life, giving a great
! advantage in warfare to those tribes who
| first obtained it, Written history had al
ready begun before weapons of iron came
into Europe to supersede bronze.
Primitive Trade
| Already in those days a sort Of primitive
! trade had sprung Up. Bronze and bronze
| weapons and such rare and hard stones as
| jade, gold because of its plastic and orna-
| mental possibilities, and skins and flax-net
| and cloth, were being swapped and stolen
and passed from hand to hand over reat
| stretches of country.
| Salt also was probably being traded. On
a meat dietary men can live without salt,
but grain-consuming people need it just as
! herbivorous animals need it. Hopf says
| that bitter tribal wars have been carried on
| by the desert tribes of the Soudan in re-
| cent years for the possession of the salt de-
rosits between Fezzan and Murzuk. To be-
| gin with, barter, blacksmith, tribute, and
robbery by violence passed into each other
by insensible degrees. Men, &c what they
| wanted by such means as they could.
Copyright, 1929
ITO RE COHITTNTJFD)