The Faber Book of Science (18 page)

I was desirous to learn how far down the body blushes extend; and Sir J. Paget, who necessarily has frequent opportunities for observation, has kindly attended to this point for me during two or three years. He finds that with women who blush intensely on the face, ears, and nape of neck, the blush does not commonly extend any lower down the body. It is rare to see it as low down as the collar-bones and shoulder-blades; and he has never himself seen a single instance in which it extended below the upper part of the chest. He has also noticed that
blushes sometimes die away downwards, not gradually and insensibly, but by irregular ruddy blotches. Dr Langstaff has likewise observed for me several women whose bodies did not in the least redden while their faces were crimsoned with blushes. With the insane, some of whom appear to be particularly liable to blushing, Dr J. Crichton Browne has several times seen the blush extend as far down as the collar-bones, and in two instances to the breasts. He gives me the case of a married woman, aged twenty-seven, who suffered from epilepsy. On the morning after her arrival in the Asylum, Dr Browne, together with his assistants, visited her whilst she was in bed. The moment that he approached, she blushed deeply over her cheeks and temples; and the blush spread quickly to her ears. She was much agitated and tremulous. He unfastened the collar of her chemise in order to examine the state of her lungs; and then a brilliant blush rushed over her chest, in an arched line over the upper third of each breast, and extended downwards between the breasts nearly to the ensiform cartilage of the sternum. This case is interesting, as the blush did not thus extend downwards until it became intense by her attention being drawn to this part of her person. As the examination proceeded she became composed, and the blush disappeared; but on several subsequent occasions the same phenomena were observed.

The foregoing facts show that, as a general rule, with English women, blushing does not extend beneath the neck and upper part of the chest. Nevertheless Sir J. Paget informs me that he has lately heard of a case, on which he can fully rely, in which a little girl, shocked by what she imagined to be an act of indelicacy, blushed all over her abdomen and the upper parts of her legs. Moreau also relates, on the authority of a celebrated painter, that the chest, shoulders, arms, and whole body of a girl, who unwillingly consented to serve as a model, reddened when she was first divested of her clothes.

It is a rather curious question why, in most cases the face, ears, and neck alone redden, inasmuch as the whole surface of the body often tingles and grows hot. This seems to depend, chiefly, on the face and adjoining parts of the skin having been habitually exposed to the air, light, and alternations of temperature, by which the small arteries not only have acquired the habit of readily dilating and contracting, but appear to have become unusually developed in comparison with other parts of the surface … Nevertheless it may be doubted whether the habitual exposure of the skin of the face and neck, and its consequent
power of reaction under stimulants of all kinds, is by itself sufficient to account for the much greater tendency in English women of these parts than of others to blush; for the hands are well supplied with nerves and small vessels, and have been as much exposed to the air as the face or neck, and yet the hands rarely blush … Of all parts of the body, the face is most considered and regarded, as is natural from its being the chief seat of expression and the source of the voice. It is also the chief seat of beauty and of ugliness, and throughout the world is the most ornamented. The face, therefore, will have been subjected during many generations to much closer and more earnest self-attention than any other part of the body; and in accordance with the principle here advanced we can understand why it should be the most liable to blush.

In the course of the development of civilization man acquired a dominating position over his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom. Not content with this supremacy, however, he began to place a gulf between his nature and theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to himself he attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine descent which permitted him to break the bond of community between him and the animal kingdom. Curiously enough, this piece of arrogance is still foreign to children, just as it is to primitive and primaeval man. It is the result of a later, more pretentious stage of development. At the level of totemism primitive man had no repugnance to tracing his descent from an animal ancestor. In myths, which contain the precipitate of this ancient attitude of mind, the gods take animal shapes, and in the art of earliest times they are portrayed with animals' heads. A child can see no difference between his own nature and that of animals. He is not astonished at animals thinking and talking in fairy-tales; he will transfer an emotion of fear which he feels for his human father onto a dog or a horse, without intending any derogation of his father by it. Not until he is grown up does he become so far estranged from animals as to use their names in vilification of human beings.

We all know that little more than half a century ago the researches
of Charles Darwin and his collaborators and forerunners put an end to this presumption on the part of man. Man is not a being different from animals or superior to them; he himself is of animal descent, being more closely related to some species and more distantly to others. The acquisitions he has subsequently made have not succeeded in effacing the evidences, both in his physical structure and in his mental dispositions, of his parity with them. This was the second, the
biological
blow to human narcissism.

Surviving
objects
had a special power to help people grasp the past. But the buried relics in Rome and Greece simply documented a past familiar from sacred or classical literature. The discovery of prehistory through objects would reach back far beyond the written word and vastly extended the dimensions of human history.

A strange series of coincidences gave the leading role in this discovery to a Danish businessman, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865). Without the erudition of a Scaliger or the mathematical genius of a Newton, he was a man of superlative common sense, richly endowed with the virtues of the dedicated amateur. His passion for curious objects was matched by his talent for awakening the curiosity of the new museum public. Born in Copenhagen, the eldest of six sons of a prosperous shipowner, he was trained for business. He came to know the family of a Danish consul who had served in Paris during the French Revolution, and who had brought back collections purchased from the panicked aristocracy. When young Christian, still only fifteen, helped his friends unpack their treasures, they gave him a few old coins to begin his own collection, and by the time he was nineteen he was a respected numismatist. In 1807, when the British fleet bombarded Copenhagen harbor to keep the Danish fleet from Napoleon, buildings went up in flames, and Christian joined the emergency fire brigade. Working through the night, he rescued the coins of a leading numismatist whose house was hit, and carried them to safety with the Keeper of the Royal Cabinet of Antiquities.

Copenhagen’s newly established Royal Commission for the
Preservation
of Danish Antiquities was being flooded by miscellaneous
old objects sent in by public-spirited citizens. The aged secretary of the commission could not face the accumulating pile. It was time for a younger man – and an opportunity made to order for Thomsen, then twenty-seven and known for his own beautifully organized collection of coins. ‘Mr Thomsen is admittedly only a dilettante,’ the bishop on the commission conceded, ‘but a dilettante with a wide range of knowledge. He has no university degree, but in the present state of scientific knowledge I hardly consider that fact as being a
disqualification
.’ Accordingly, young Thomsen was honored with the post of unpaid nonvoting secretary. As it turned out, Thomsen’s lack of academic learning equipped him with the naïveté that archaeology needed at that moment.

The dusty shelves of the commission’s storerooms overflowed with unlabeled odd bundles. How could Thomsen put them in order? ‘I had no previous example on which to base the ordering of such a collection,’ Thomsen confessed, nor had he money to hire a professor to classify objects by academic categories. So he applied the commonsense procedures learned in his father’s shipping warehouse. Opening the parcels, first he separated them into objects of stone, of metal, and of pottery. Then he subdivided these according to their apparent use as weapons, tools, food containers, or religious objects. With no texts to guide him, he simply looked at the objects, then asked himself what questions would be asked by museum visitors who saw them for the first time.

When Thomsen opened his museum to the public in 1819, visitors saw the objects sorted into three cabinets. The first contained objects of stone; the second, objects of bronze; the third, objects of iron. This exercise in museum housekeeping led Thomsen to suspect that objects made of similar materials might be relics of the same era. To his amateur eye it seemed that the objects of stone might be older than similar metal objects, and that the bronze objects might be older than those of iron. He shared this elementary suggestion with learned antiquarians, to whom he later modestly gave credit for the idea.

His notion was not entirely novel, but the similar notions found in classical authors were fanciful and misleading. In the Beginning, according to Hesiod, Cronos created men of the Golden Age who never grew old. Labor, war, and injuries were unknown. They eventually became guardian spirits on earth. Then in the Silver Age, when men lost their reverence for the gods, Zeus punished them and
buried them among the dead. The Bronze Age, which followed (when even houses were made of bronze), was a time of endless strife. After the brief interlude of a Heroic Age of godlike leaders in their Isles of the Blessed, came Hesiod’s own unfortunate Iron Age. Yet worse was still in store for mankind, a future of men born senile, and of universal decay.

Thomsen was not well enough educated to try to fit his museum objects into this appealing literary scheme. He was more interested in objects than in words. There were already ‘too many books,’ he complained, and he was not eager to add his own. But finally, in 1836, he produced his practical
Guide
to
Scandinavian
Antiquities,
which outlined his famous Three-Age System. This, his only book, translated into English, French, and German, and spread across Europe, was an invitation to ‘Pre-History.’

It was hard for European scholars at the time to imagine that human experience before writing could have been divided into the epochs that Thomsen suggested. It seemed more logical to assume that stone tools were always used by the poor, while their betters always used bronze or iron. Thomsen’s commonsense scheme did not please the pedants. If there was a Stone Age, they scoffed, then why not also an Age of Crockery, a Glass Age, and a Bone Age? Thomsen’s scheme, refined but not abandoned by scholars in the next century, proved to be more than an exercise in museum management. It carried the plain message that human history had somehow developed in homogeneous stages that reached across the world. And he arranged the objects in his museum according to his ‘principle of progressive culture.’

Thomsen showed how much was to be learned, not only from those ancient sculptures that embodied Winckelmann’s ideal of beauty but even from the simple tools and crude weapons of anonymous prehistoric man. Opening his collections free to everybody, Thomsen offered lively talks about the everyday experience of people in the remote past. A deft lecturer, he would hide some interesting little object behind his coattails, then suddenly produce it at the point in his story when that kind of object – a bronze utensil or an iron weapon – first appeared in history.

Following Thomsen’s hints, archaeologists discovered and explored the trash heaps of the past. Their paths into history no longer ran only through the gold-laden tombs of ancient kings, but also through the buried kitchen middens (‘middens,’ from an Old Scandinavian word
for muck or dung-hill). The first excavation of these unlikely sources was the work mainly of Thomsen’s disciple Jens Jacob Worsaae (1821–85). At the age of fifteen he had become Thomsen’s museum assistant and during the next four years spent his holidays digging into the ancient barrows of Jutland with the aid of two laborers paid by his parents. With his athletic temperament and his outdoor enthusiasms he was the ideal complement to the museum-oriented Thomsen. In 1840, when he was only nineteen, using stratigraphy and the field evidence from Danish barrows and peat bogs, he published an article confirming Thomsen’s Three-Age theory and assigning prehistoric objects to a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, or an Iron Age. He, too, was suggesting latitudes of time, throughout Denmark and beyond. A dozen years later, in 1853, the Swiss archaeologist Ferdinand Keller (1800–81), when exploring the lake dwellings of Lake Zurich, concluded that ‘in Switzerland the three ages of stone, bronze, and iron, are quite as well represented as in Scandinavia.’

Some obvious difficulties plagued these prophets of prehistory. How could you stretch human experience to fill the thousands of years of the past opened by Buffon and the geologists? How much neater to fit all pre-Christian history into the comfortable 4004 years
BC
defined by Archbishop Ussher! And then there were new problems created by the geologists, who now revealed that northern Europe had been covered by ice when Stone Age men were living in caves in southern France. To correlate all these facts required a still more sophisticated approach to the early human past. If the Stone Age people of southern Europe advanced northward only after the retreat of the glaciers, then the three universal stages were reached at different times in different places.

To make the Three-Age scheme fit the whole human past in Europe was not easy. The so-called Age of Stone in Thomsen’s museum was represented by polished stone artifacts of the kind people would be tempted to send in as curios. Meanwhile, Worsaae, out in the field, was hinting that the Age of Stone was far more extensive and more ancient than was suggested by these skillfully polished stone implements. On the digging sites each object unearthed could be studied not as an isolated curio but among all the remains of a Stone Age community. And these too might provide clues to other Stone Age communities across the world.

Worsaae’s opportunity came in 1849, when a wealthy Dane named
Olsen was trying to improve his large estate called Meilgaard on the northeast coast of Jutland. Building a road, he sent his workmen in search of gravel for surfacing material. When they dug into a bank a half-mile from the shore, they found no gravel but luckily hit an
eight-foot
layer of oyster-shells, which was even better for their purpose. Mixed with the shells they found pieces of flint and animal bones. One small bone object two and a half inches long caught their attention. Shaped like a four-fingered hand, it was plainly the work of human craft. Perhaps it had been made for a comb.

Olsen, the proprietor, sharing the popular interest in antiquities which had been stimulated by Thomsen, sent the object to the museum in Copenhagen, where Worsaae’s curiosity was aroused. Shell heaps recently turned up elsewhere in Denmark had brought to light flaked flint, odd pottery fragments, and crude stone objects similar to the Meilgaard comb. Perhaps this mound of oyster shells ‘had been a sort of eating-place for the people of the neighborhood in the earliest prehistoric times. This would account for the ashes, the bones, the flints and the potsherds.’ Perhaps here, at long last, modern man might visit an authentic Stone Age community. And actually imagine Stone Age men and women at their everyday meals. Worsaae observed that the shells had all been opened, which would not have been the case if they were merely washed up from the shore.

When other scholars disagreed, each with his own theory, the Danish Academy of Sciences appointed a commission. Worsaae, with a zoologist and a geologist, was assigned to interpret these shell heaps found along the ancient Danish shore. These ‘shell middens,’ the commission concluded, were really kitchen middens, which meant that now for the first time the historian could enter into the daily life of ancient peoples. Trash heaps might be gateways to prehistory. Such a discovery could not have been made indoors in a museum, but only on the spot in the field. Since the crudely crafted artifacts of the kitchen middens were never polished, unlike the polished stone artifacts of a later Stone Age, they were not likely to be noticed by laymen or sent to a museum. The kitchen middens opened another vast epoch of human prehistory – an early Stone Age, which extended behind the later Stone Age of polished stonework.

Thomsen and his museum collaborators had done their work of publicizing archaeology so well that the question now raised – whether the Stone Age really should be divided into two clearly defined stages –
was no longer an arcane conundrum for university professors. The issue was hotly debated in the public proceedings of the Danish Academy. Worsaae’s opponents insisted that the shell heaps were only the picnic sites of the Stone Age visitors who had left their best implements elsewhere. The king of Denmark, Frederick VII, who shared the growing interest in antiquities, had excavated middens on his own estate and even wrote a monograph with his interpretation. In 1861, to ‘settle’ the issue, he summoned the leading scholars to a
full-dress
public meeting at Meilgaard, where he would preside. This royal conclave, no routine academic conference, would be celebrated with the panoply of a coronation. Besides hearing a debate, all those invited would witness the ritual excavation of a new portion of the mound. In the mid-June heat, archaeologists dug into the celebrated mound from eight in the morning till six in the evening, wearing their official ‘archaeologist’s’ uniform out of respect for the King. When King Frederick had appointed Worsaae curator of his private collection of antiquities in 1858, he had playfully designated this archaeologist’s uniform (high collar and tight-fitting jacket, topped off by a pillbox hat), which was now de rigueur at the diggings.

The lords of surrounding estates entertained the King and his party with banquets and dancing to band music every night. In honor of their royal visitor the neighbors created triumphal arches, and the King was accompanied everywhere by his mounted guard in full livery. A royal welcome to the Old Stone Age!

Early in the meeting it was agreed that Worsaae had won his scholarly point, which now would be proclaimed in royal company and for the whole nation. ‘I had the especial satisfaction,’ Worsaae wrote, ‘of seeing that, among the many hundred stone implements discovered among the oysters, not a single specimen was found with any traces of polishing or of superior culture.’ And he reported with relish how a human fillip was added to the formal splendor. ‘Only at the last minute, after we had frequently remarked on this fact, did two polished axes turn up, of a completely different type, which some practical joker had inserted in the heap to cheat us.’ The practical joker, it was widely assumed, was King Frederick himself.

Seldom has so drab an epoch of history been so splendidly inaugurated. But now, to the royal Danish imprimatur was added the near-unanimous agreement of scholars across Europe. What came to be called the Culture of Kitchen Middens (
c.
4000–
c
. 2000
BC
) was
discovered in due course across the northern European coasts, and in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and North Africa. In southern Africa, northern Japan, in the islands of the Pacific, and in the coastal regions of both Americas, Kitchen Middens cultures seemed to have persisted into a later era. Once identified and placed in the chronicle of human development, the middens provided revealing latitudes of time – and a new vividness for the prehistoric past.