The following is my translation of an article called: Die ältesten Menschen von Lutz Mäcken. It appeared in a German popular science magazine, Kosmos Handweiser für Naturfreunde 1924, Heft 5, Seiten 127-129. The illustrations have been left out, but you could try drawing some yourself. Some of the suggested dates and now known to be wrong. I'm not aware of any previous translation.
Trevor Dykes.

The earliest people by Lutz Mäcken
The history of people in Germany is known to use for about 2,000 years; in a few areas of Europe it reaches back about 1,000 years further (Italy, Greece). Rare remains are also available from East Asia (China), and richer sources of history flow from Asia Minor and Egypt. But there too, the reliable dates stop at about 3,000 BC. That which lies further back is the field of prehistory, and that can be very late depending upon which land is under discussion. For America, the border between history and prehistory is the discovery voyage of Columbus -despite the Viking voyages and Peruvian legends-, # and the Americanistic research into precolumbian America is strongly reminiscent of European prehistory, with both having their common congresses. For other unhistorical peoples, such as the Polar nations and Australians, the research methods of prehistory are still the most relevant in the present day.

The prehistoric provides no dates, no heroes, no dramatic or national actions, but it does bring exact information about cultural history. Today, we not only have the remains of Pompeii for our knowledge of the early Roman Empire, but are not the books of Linius or Tacitus just as important?

Whereas we can count history in terms of centuries, we must reckon with millennia for prehistory. It was a painstaking challenge to bring order to the chronology in all lands. As a prehistory researcher, enquiries need reliable knowledge of geology and pedantic exactness with regards to working methods. Today, no skeleton may be removed from its finding place before it has been photographed in its original position and location. The most recent attempt to provide an overview of the history of these faceless people was presented by the Director of the Stuttgarter Sammlung väterlandische Altertümer ('Stuttgart Collection of Fatherland Antiquities'), Dr. P Gößler*.

(* P. Gößler, Der Urmensch in Mitteleuropa, Stuttgart, Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, 1924.)

According to that, the earliest discovered remains of people date from the Ice Age; this ended at about 20,000 to 25,000 years BC. The question, as to whether people lived even earlier during the Tertiary, is left open by Gößler. The oldest preserved human bones are the lower jaw of Heidelberg Man (found in 1907) from the beginning of the first Ice Age, and the skull lids of Neanderthal people found near Düsseldorf in 1856.

Perhaps at the same time -a couple of thousand years are of no consequence here- lived the person to whom the skull from Broken Ridge in Rhodesia** belonged (Illustrations 1a and 1b). In any case, the primate found on Java, Pithecanthropus erectus, belongs to a much later time. The illustrated group of ancient people from Broken Hill (Illustration 1,5) is an image from the imagination. What is certain, is only the shaped flint which the standing man holds in his hand. Such flint stones, which have only been used by Tasmanians in recent time, can also be seen in the depiction of the Neanderthals. Illustration 2,5 already shows a simple sawing implement, which was used spare the flat of the hand when smoothing off other items. Otherwise, they are rather crude stone tools. The spear tip shape (Illustration 2,11) is from a later age.

(** Compare this with the relevant article in Kosmos Handweiser 1922, p.130).

The oldest stage of the Stone Age ended about 10,000 BC in Central Europe, the so called Paleolithic. The tundra landscape (moss and marsh steppes) replaced the forest, and people could only live on its edges. The person from Grimaldi comes from this time, and they were found in 1895 in a grotto on the Riviera. We have landed in an age during which art arose. Illustration 3,6 allows strong hair to be recognised; Illustration 3,9 depicts a work of relief cutting, and shows the preference of the artist for a rotund female form, as does the contemporary (?) 'Venus of Willendorf' (see Illustration 4). Further remains showing the execution of art work are: A realistic twig (Ill. 3,7) and an imaginative ornament (Ill. 3,8). Already then, impressionalism and expressionalism had probably struggled with one another for contemporary favour. At the same time, we see a pronounced form of burial (Ill. 3,4), another indication of culture, and soon -only 5,000 years later- pile dwellings (Pfahlbauten) appear in Alpine areas, dolmens in North Germany, these are buildings which can be followed in the research of Frobenius from the east coast of the Atlantic Ocean across to West Africa. This gives grounds for assuming a culture, whereas earlier finds show people isolated within their landscape.

Pottery and agriculture came into being, but it still lasted 3,000 years until people in Central Europe learned how to process metal. By that time, the Egyptian pyramids had been long built. Bronze was followed by iron at around 1,000 BC, and this is known from beautiful finds from Hallstadt and La Tène. We also soon meet the peoples of this culture; it is the Celts, and they erected the large ring dykes in southern Germany. They were pressured from the northwest by Germans, from the southwest by Romans and, with research into this migration of peoples (Völkenwanderungszeit) -which began a few centuries BC- historians and prehistorians must work hand in hand, and supplement each other. However, on the penultimate map, Gößler shows an area that brings prehistorians relevance until deep into medieval Germany: The Slav remains in Central and East Germany about which no song or saga relates.

An index of more of my translations of old Kosmos articles can be found at:

Kosmos Translations Archive

A number of Mesozoic (and post-Mesozoic) location summaries can be found at Localities.