The aggregate of achievements in this period was less than in that which followed; but in its relations to the sum of human progress it was very great. It includes the domestication of animals in the Eastern hemisphere, which introduced in time a permanent meat and milk subsistence, and ultimately field agriculture; and also inaugurated those experiments with the native metals which resulted in producing bronze,[35] as well as prepared the way for the higher process of smelting iron ore. In the Western hemisphere it was signalized by the discovery and treatment of the native metals, which resulted in the production independently of bronze; by the introduction of irrigation in the cultivation of maize and plants, and by the use of adobe-brick and stone in the construction of great joint tenement houses in the nature of fortresses.
Resuming the retrospect and entering the Older Period of barbarism, let us next remove from human acquisitions the confederacy, based upon gentes, phratries and tribes under the government of a council of chiefs which gave a more highly organized state of society than before that had been known. Also the discovery and cultivation of maize and the bean, squash and tobacco, in the Western hemisphere, together with a knowledge of farinaceous food; finger weaving with warp and woof; the kilt, moccasin and leggin of tanned deer-skin; the blow-gun for bird shooting; the village stockade for defense; tribal games; element worship, with a vague recognition of the Great Spirit; cannibalism in time of war; and lastly, the art of pottery.
As we ascend in the order of time and of development, but descend in the scale of human advancement, inventions become more simple, and more direct in their relations to primary wants; and institutions approach nearer and nearer to the elementary form of a gens composed of consanguinei, under a chief of their own election, and to the tribe composed of kindred gentes, under the government of a council of chiefs. The condition of Asiatic and European tribes in this period, (for the Aryan and Semitic families did not probably then exist), is substantially lost. It is represented by the remains of ancient art between the invention of pottery and the domestication of animals; and includes the people who formed the shell-heaps on the coast of the Baltic, who seem to have domesticated the dog, but no other animals.