Page 327 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

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nine tenths of the inhabited world of the time—comparable re­
search has not been done and comparable knowledge is not
available. Over much of the world no research at all has been

done into the history of this particular period, or even into any
period at all. In other areas, specifically India, Asiatic Russia,
and Central America, work has commenced. And therefore we
have, as of now, knowledge of approximately what life was like
in these areas at approximately the middle of the Second Millen­

nium b.c. But the results are not extensive enough, or refined
enough, for the period to be more closely focused, for us to per­
ceive changes occurring within this third of a millennium. And

so long as changes cannot be detected within a period as long as
that intervening between the Pilgrim Fathers and our own day,
then we are not writing history but only anthropology—and
poor anthropology at that. (This is not a criticism of the re­
searchers who are doing the essential preliminary work, but of

myself. For where the material is not yet available to write his­
tory, it is unscientific to try.)
But let us do the best we can jvith what we have.

In the very widest terms the racial types of the world oc­
cupy at this period the same areas they occupied before the
great reshuffling that accompanied and followed the European
expansion of the last five hundred years. And over the greater
part of this range men still hunted or fished for their food, or col­

lected it from the wild-growing trees, bushes, and plants. In
Australia the blackfellows were in 1300 b.c. hunting kangaroos,
catching lizards, digging roots and chipping flint as they had

done in 2000 b.c., as they had done for uncounted millennia,
and as they do in the Northern Territories today. In Greenland
and along the Arctic coasts of Canada, Alaska, and Siberia,
Eskimolike peoples were still living an Eskimolike life, hunting
seals from skin kayaks on a driftwood framework, fashioning

carefully specialized weapons of bone and leather thongs, and
carving walrus and narwhal ivory into exquisite, and often
highly humorous, figurines. At the summer markets, at the points

where the great rivers entered the Arctic Ocean, they still met
yearly the deer hunters and fur trappers of the northern forests,
exchanging their tools and onaments of bone and ivory for too