The nearest type which we can now conceive of to the Drift-Folk of Europe’s post-glacial era is the Esquimaux. It is even possible that, like them, they may have occupied winter snow-huts; and only retreated to their cave-dwellings during the brief heat of a semi-arctic summer. Among a people so situated the industrial arts are called into utmost requisition, alike for clothing and tools; and the simplest experience of the hunter directs him to the produce of the chase for the most easy supply of both. The pointed horn of the deer furnishes the ready-made dagger, lance-head, and harpoon; the incisor tooth of the larger rodents supplies a more delicately edged chisel than primitive art could devise; and the very process of fracturing the bones of the larger mammalia in order to obtain the prized marrow, produces the splinters and pointed fragments which an easy manipulation converts into bodkins, hair-pins, and needles. The ivory of walrus, narwhal, or elephant is more readily wrought into many desirable forms, and is less liable to fracture, than the intractable flint or stone; and all those materials are abundant in the most rigorous winters, when flint and stone are sealed up under the frozen soil. Tools and weapons of bone and ivory may therefore be assumed to have preceded all but the rudest stone implements; and although, owing to the indestructible nature of their material, it is from the latter that our ideas of earliest post-glacial art are chiefly derived, enough has been found in contemporary cave-deposits to confirm this inference from the analogous hyperborean arts of our own day.
Flint, indeed, though so widely used as the primitive tool-maker’s material, is unknown in many localities. We are familiar with regions at the present time, where man not only subsists, but supplies himself with implements and weapons adapted to his need, though neither flint nor stone is available. This fact has been practically ignored in the accepted terminology of the science. As now reduced to system, it proceeds in retrospective order thus:—Historic, prehistoric, neolithic, palæolithic, with a possible protolithic period of still older geological epochs. An awkward misnomer inevitably results from this assumption of stone as the sole basis of primitive art: as where the archæologist speaks of palæolithic bone implements, or neolithic pottery. I have therefore substituted here the more comprehensive terms palæotechnic and neotechnic. They suffice equally for the classification of implements and personal ornaments of flint, stone, bone, ivory, or even of metal: as in the neotechnic gold and bronze work; and also for those made from marine shells. Many of the latter have been recovered under circumstances which establish their claim to be classed with other examples of primitive art; and even find illustration among the rarer disclosures of the ancient cave-drift. In the great Archipelago of the Caribbean Sea, as well as in widely scattered islands of the Pacific Ocean, the primeval stage of native art might indeed be more correctly designated a shell period; for until their discovery by Europeans, the large shells which the mollusca of the neighbouring oceans produce in great abundance, furnished to the native artificers the most convenient and easily wrought material. For the natives of the coral islands of the Pacific especially, marine shells supplied the want not only of copper and iron, but of flint and stone; and left them at little disadvantage when compared, for example, with the Indians of the copper regions of Lake Superior.