GRASSLAND AND FARMLAND AS FACTORS IN THE 
CYCLICAL DEVELOPMENT OF EURASIAN HISTORY? 
By J. RUSSELL SMITH 
[With 1 plate] 
This paper might be called a study of equipment eras—or the inter- 
acting influences of equipment and culture in certain environments. 
Man is a tool-using animal, and there is a tendency to confuse the 
results of mental or personal qualities and the results of the equip- 
ment that we may have at hand. Consider for a moment a group of 
European primitives, so-called, who left cultural and skeletal remains 
in caves of France some 20,000 years ago. Anthropologists have 
named them Cromagnon. If they were living today most of us 
would doubtless call them savages, regard them as inferior beings. 
Sir Arthur Keith tells us that the Cromagnons had larger brain pans 
than we have. But we of this generation have inherited agriculture 
with its crops and beasts, also engines and machines, transport and 
buildings, and books, the master tool, the mother of tools. 
It is easy for us in our inherited cultural riches to lose sight of the 
scanty cultural inheritance of Cromagnon man. He and his parents 
were living in the collector stage of economics. He plucked his living 
from the natural environment with the aid of his fingers, toes, and 
teeth, and with equipment of wood, fire, flint, shells, bone, sinew, and 
skins—Stone Age we call it. He ate everything that was digestible— 
beast, birds, fish, reptile, and insect, seed, leaf, stem, and root, and 
sometimes the neighbors, but that was usually ceremonial. He prob- 
ably lived a life filled with terrors and what we would regard as 
impossible hardship. 
It is one of the greatest achievements in human history that Stone 
Age man made some sort of living in every continent except Ant- 
arctica. Archeologists and anthropologists trace Stone Age man from 
shores of the Arctic Sea in Greenland to the chill and reeking wet- 
ness of Tierra del Fuego; from Alaska to Newfoundland ; from Gibral- 
tar to Kamchatka; from the Siberian Tundra to South Africa, Tas- 
mania, and the far islands of the Pacific. Stone Age man made a living 
1 Reprinted by permission from Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 
33, No. 3, September 1943. 
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