When we apply to the paleolithic cultures of the rest of the world the names of the European culture sequence—Abbevillian, Acheulean, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian—we produce acrimonious argument and not much more. These terms are of no use in the rest of the world except as a description of types of tools. In parts of Africa, for example, Mousterian and Aurignacian objects are found together; in other parts, Mousterian and Solutrean. In the first case, the Aurignacian includes primitive pottery; in the second, Aurignacian is missing altogether.
[Illustration: _An archer drawn in the cave of Saltadora, Spain. (After Obermaier and Weinert, 1919.)_]
[Illustration: _An archer from Alpera, Spain. (After Obermaier and Weinert, 1919.)_]
Tied in with the mistake of setting up prehistory in Europe as a frame for prehistory elsewhere, lies the worse mistake of trying to read general time in terms of things and ideas which are purely local. The Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Stone Ages mean less than nothing as a dating machine for more than a single locality. “The Stone Age,” says Childe, “ended before 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia, about 1600 B.C. in Denmark, and A.D. 1800 in New Zealand.”[28] Postglacial means one thing in Germany and another in Sweden, one thing in Buffalo and another in Winnipeg.
_These extraordinary drawings of horses and a mammoth are a transcript of the art of primitive man found upon the walls of the cave of Font-de-Gaume. (After Capitan, Breuil, and Peyroni, 1910.)_]
The impossibility of measuring time and space together should be clear enough if you consider merely the matter of how the invention of writing in the Near East is related to written records in other parts of the world. Again we quote Childe: “In England they take us back to A.D. 40, in France to 60 B.C., in Italy a little beyond 500 B.C., in Greece before 700, but nowhere in our continent before 1000. In China written records are available as early as 1400 B.C., in Asia Minor to 1800, only in Egypt and Mesopotamia to 3000 B.C.”[29] Thus the use of writing would give us no time scale for the Old World. Fortunately, we have never tried to date the history of nations in terms of an Illiterate Age, a Writing Age, and a Printing Age.