The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

THE PRESENT PHASE OF HUMAN ASSOCIATION

peoples have got practically everything the later Paleolithic folk have. In addition they have carried their implement-making to a much higher and more polished level, they have domesticated and use a number of animals the Paleolithic people merely hunted and they practise a most elaborate and religious agriculture. How they attained to agriculture is one of the most fascinating riddles of human evolution. It may have been a very gradual process.

We can offer here only contributory considerations to the answering of that riddle. Certain salient facts have to be noted. First and most striking is the fact that everywhere there is the closest association of agriculture with sacrificial religion. To a modern mind that is very perplexing. The Neolithic cultivator did not simply prepare the ground with hoe or primitive plough and sow the seed. That was not enough. He also sacrificed one or more living beings and in the most primitive cases he made a human sacrifice. He made it with an elaborate ceremonial and the act was performed by a special person, the priest. The victim’s body was partly eaten and partly distributed over the ground to be cultivated. Seed-sowing and sacrifice seem to have been equally important in the mind of the Neolithic cultivator. Neither was much good without the other. The survivals and vestiges. of this seed-sowing sacrifice are found all over the world, wherever there are crops. That copious erudite work, Frazer’s Golden Bough, traces this connection. How did this association arise ? We may guess, but we cannot feel sure.

It is so much a matter of common knowledge now that the seed and its consequence, the plant, are connected, we are told of it so early in life, it is so woven now into the hackneyed metaphors of thought, that it is a little difficult for us to imagine intelligent adult Paleolithic Savages to whom the idea was unknown. But there must have been a stage when it was still as unknown as the science of electricity. There still exist to-day savage peoples who are unaware of the connection between the union of the sexes and the birth of children, and the connection of seed and plant is at least as remote. Maybe the predecessors of the first agriculturalists wandered after food and at certain places men died or were killed in hunt or combat, and were buried. Early man, some of the varieties of early man, may have had cannibal habits. They ate part of a body to share in its strength ; they buried the rest of the body if it was

the body of anyone they respected, with honour and with supplies of food, quantities of grain. The grain may also have been scattered about the dolmen, the tumulus they were making. They would return later and find an unusually dense crop of their grain-bearing plant upon the site. They might believe this to be a special bounty from the departed. There was nothing to direct their minds to the fact that scattering the seed was the essential thing to get such a crop ; it was not irrational for them to think the burial was the essential thing. “ Bury a body with proper respect,” they would reason, “ and you get a crop of grain.” It was not absurd for them to Suppose that if a well-treated youth or maiden was specially killed and buried, a crop of food would ensue.

Always we have to make great efforts before we can hope to approach the primitive Savage’s conceptions. It is not only in the case of seed and plant that we are obliged to clean out all our fundamental ideas, so to speak, before we can imagine the early savage’s thought-process. In regard to death we find our minds stored with the accumulation of ages of thought, speech and tradition.. But does an ape, did the early Hominide, know of death? You killed and you ate. Your companion was wounded and got better, or he was wounded and became immobile. Would he get up again? You left him and presently you saw him alarmingly in a dream. He was still alive, you inferred, but queer! Uncritical people, brought up with elaborate beliefs in immortality, are apt to say that the burial of the dead by various species of the Homo with their weapons and provisions and women, shows that these early people had a belief in “ immortality.”” It is, we suggest, much truer to say that they did not believe the deceased was altogether dead. They were left uneasy by his enigmatical behaviour. It was wiser to respect and consider him still. So in the case of chiefs and masterful people, you bewailed their loss, you implored them to aid you, you did not dare share out their weapons and treasures. You waked them and buried them with all that was by tabu untouchably theirs. And killing the sacrificial victim was not thought of as extinction ; he was simply released to work in a new way for his slayers.

These are matters of the purest guesswork and supposition, and so, too, are the mental processes by which men ceased to be hostile to many of the animals about thern. We are not stating proven facts

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