The Swastika
Similar Prehistoric Art...
One of the great puzzles for archæologists has been the prehistoric jade implements found in both countries. The raw material of which these were made has never been found in sufficient quantities to justify anyone in saying that it is indigenous to one hemisphere and not to the other. But of this we have no evidence except the discovery in both of implements made of the same material. This material is dense and hard. It is extremely difficult to work, yet the operations of sawing, drilling, carving, and polishing appear to have been conducted in both hemispheres with such similarity as that the result is practically the same.
Prehistoric flint-chipping was also carried on in both hemispheres with such similarity of results, even when performing the most difficult and delicate operations, as to convince one that there must have been some communication between the two peoples who performed them.
The bow and arrow is fairly good evidence of prehistoric migration, because of the singularities of the form and the intricacies of the machinery, and because it is probably the earliest specimen of a machine of two separate parts, by the use of which a missile could be sent at a greater distance and with greater force than if thrown by hand. It is possible that the sling was invented as early as the bow and arrow, although both were prehistoric and their origin unknown.
The bow and arrow was the greatest of all human inventions --- greatest in that it marked man's first step in mechanics, greatest in adaptation of means to the end, and as an invented machine it manifested in the most practical and marked manner the intellectual and reasoning power of man and his superiority over the brute creation. It, more than any other weapon, demonstrated the triumph of man over the brute, recognizing the limitations of human physical capacity in contests with the brute. With this machine, man first successfully made up for his deficiency in his contests with his enemies and the capture of his game. It is useless to ask anything of history about the beginnings of the bow and arrow; wherever history appears it records the prior existence, the almost universal presence, and the perfected use of the bow and arrow as a weapon. Yet this machine, so strange and curious, of such intricacy of manufacture and difficulty of successful performance, had with all its similarities and likeness extended in prehistoric times almost throughout the then inhabited globe. It is useless to specify the time, for the bow and arrow existed earlier than any time of which we know; it is useless for us to specify places, for it was in use throughout the world whereever the world was occupied by Neolithic man.
Imitative creature as was man, and slow and painful as were his steps in progress and in invention during hid infancy on earth, when he knew nothing and had everything yet to learn, it is sufficiently wonderful that he should have invented the bow and arrow as a projectile machine for his weapons; but it becomes doubly and trebly improbable that he should have made duplicate and independent inventions thereof in the different hemispheres. If we are to suppose this, why should we be restricted to a separate invention for each hemisphere, and why may we not suppose that he made a separate invention for each country or each distant tribe within the hemisphere? Yet we are met with the astonishing but, nevertheless, true proposition that throughout the entire world the bow and arrow existed in the early times mentioned, and was substantially the same machine, made in the same way, and serving the same purpose.
The Argument in this paper on the migration of arts or symbols, and with them peoples in prehistoric times, is not intended to be exhaustive. At best is is only suggestive.
There is no direct evidence available by which the migration of symbols, arts, or peoples in prehistoric times can be proved, because the events are beyond the pale of history. Therefore we are, everybody is, driven to the secondary evidence of the similarity of conditions and products, and we can only subject them to our reason and at last determine the truth from the probabilities. In proportion as the probabilities of migration increase, it more nearly becomes a demonstrated fact. It appears to the author that the probabilities of the migration of the Swastika to America from the Old World is infinitely greater than that it was an independent invention.
The Swastika is found in America in such widely separated places, among such different civilizations, as much separated by time as by space, that if we have to depend on the theory of separate inventions to explain its introduction into America we must also depend upon the same theory for its introduction into widely separated parts of America. The Swastika of the ancient mound builders of Ohio and Tennessee is similar in every respect, except material, to that of the modern Navajo and Pueblo Indian. Yet the Swastikas of Mississippi and Tennessee belong to the oldest civilization we know in America, while the Navajo and Pueblo Swastikas wee made by men still living. A consideration of the conditions bring out these two curious facts: [1] That the Swastika had an existence in America prior to any historic knowledge we have of communication between the two hemispheres; but [2] we find it continued in America and used at the present day, while the knowledge of it had long since died out in Europe.
The author is not unaware of the new theories concerning the parallelism of human development by which it is contended that absolute uniformity of man's thoughts and actions, aims and methods, is produced when he is in the same degree of development, no matter in what country or in what epoch he lives. This theory has been pushed
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