In Search of the Earliest People

8/6/2019 In Search of the Earliest People

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In search of the earliest people (as viewed from 1924)

The following is my translation of an article called: Die ältesten

Menschen von Lutz Mäcken. It appeared in a German popular

science magazine, Kosmos Handweiser für Naturfreunde 1924,Heft 5, Seiten 127-129. The illustrations have been left out, but

you could try drawing some yourself. Some of the suggested dates

and now known to be wrong. I'm not aware of any previous

translation.

Trevor Dykes.

The earliest people by Lutz Mäcken

The history of people in Germany is known to use for about 2,000

years; in a few areas of Europe it reaches back about 1,000 years

further (Italy, Greece). Rare remains are also available from East

Asia (China), and richer sources of history flow from Asia Minor

and Egypt. But there too, the reliable dates stop at about 3,000 BC.

That which lies further back is the field of prehistory, and that can

be very late depending upon which land is under discussion. For

America, the border between history and prehistory is the

discovery voyage of Columbus -despite the Viking voyages and

Peruvian legends-, # and the Americanistic research into precolumbian America is strongly reminiscent of European

prehistory, with both having their common congresses. For other

unhistorical peoples, such as the Polar nations and Australians, the

research methods of prehistory are still the most relevant in the

present day.

The prehistoric provides no dates, no heroes, no dramatic or

national actions, but it does bring exact information about cultural

history. Today, we not only have the remains of Pompeii for our

knowledge of the early Roman Empire, but are not the books of

Linius or Tacitus just as important?

Whereas we can count history in terms of centuries, we must

reckon with millennia for prehistory. It was a painstaking



challenge to bring order to the chronology in all lands. As a

prehistory researcher, enquiries need reliable knowledge of

geology and pedantic exactness with regards to working methods.

Today, no skeleton may be removed from its finding place before

it has been photographed in its original position and location. Themost recent attempt to provide an overview of the history of these

faceless people was presented by the Director of the Stuttgarter

Sammlung väterlandische Altertümer ('Stuttgart Collection of

Fatherland Antiquities'), Dr. P Gößler*.

According to that, the earliest discovered remains of people date

from the Ice Age; this ended at about 20,000 to 25,000 years BC.

The question, as to whether people lived even earlier during theTertiary, is left open by Gößler. The oldest preserved human bones

are the lower jaw of Heidelberg Man (found in 1907) from the

beginning of the first Ice Age, and the skull lids of Neanderthal

people found near Düsseldorf in 1856.

Perhaps at the same time -a couple of thousand years are of no

consequence here- lived the person to whom the skull from Broken

Ridge in Rhodesia** belonged (Illustrations 1a and 1b). In any

case, the primate found on Java, Pithecanthropus erectus, belongsto a much later time. The illustrated group of ancient people from

Broken Hill (Illustration 1,5) is an image from the imagination.

What is certain, is only the shaped flint which the standing man

holds in his hand. Such flint stones, which have only been used by

Tasmanians in recent time, can also be seen in the depiction of the

Neanderthals. Illustration 2,5 already shows a simple sawing

implement, which was used spare the flat of the hand when

smoothing off other items. Otherwise, they are rather crude stonetools. The spear tip shape (Illustration 2,11) is from a later age.

(** Compare this with the relevant article in Kosmos

Handweiser 1922, p.130).



The oldest stage of the Stone Age ended about 10,000 BC in

Central Europe, the so called Paleolithic. The tundra landscape

(moss and marsh steppes) replaced the forest, and people could

only live on its edges. The person from Grimaldi comes from this

time, and they were found in 1895 in a grotto on the Riviera. Wehave landed in an age during which art arose. Illustration 3,6

allows strong hair to be recognised; Illustration 3,9 depicts a work

of relief cutting, and shows the preference of the artist for a rotund

female form, as does the contemporary (?) 'Venus of Willendorf'

(see Illustration 4). Further remains showing the execution of art

work are: A realistic twig (Ill. 3,7) and an imaginative ornament

(Ill. 3,8). Already then, impressionalism and expressionalism had

probably struggled with one another for contemporary favour. Atthe same time, we see a pronounced form of burial (Ill. 3,4),

another indication of culture, and soon -only 5,000 years later- pile

dwellings ( Pfahlbauten) appear in Alpine areas, dolmens in North

Germany, these are buildings which can be followed in the

research of Frobenius from the east coast of the Atlantic Ocean

across to West Africa. This gives grounds for assuming a culture,

whereas earlier finds show people isolated within their landscape.

Pottery and agriculture came into being, but it still lasted 3,000years until people in Central Europe learned how to process metal.

By that time, the Egyptian pyramids had been long built. Bronze

was followed by iron at around 1,000 BC, and this is known from

beautiful finds from Hallstadt and La Tène. We also soon meet the

peoples of this culture; it is the Celts, and they erected the large

ring dykes in southern Germany. They were pressured from the

northwest by Germans, from the southwest by Romans and, with

research into this migration of peoples (Völkenwanderungszeit )-which began a few centuries BC- historians and prehistorians

must work hand in hand, and supplement each other. However, on

the penultimate map, Gößler shows an area that brings

prehistorians relevance until deep into medieval Germany: The



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In Search of the Earliest People