r lower,
middle, and upper status, or older, middle, and later periods. The lower
status of savagery was that wholly prehistoric stage when men lived in
their original restricted habitat and subsisted on fruit and nuts. To
this period must be assigned the beginning of articulate speech. All
existing races of men had passed beyond it at an unknown antiquity.

[Sidenote: Middle status of savagery.]

Men began to pass beyond it when they discovered how to catch fish and
how to use fire. They could then begin (following coasts and rivers) to
spread over the earth. The middle status of savagery, thus introduced,
ends with the invention of that compound weapon, the bow and arrow. The
natives of Australia, who do not know this weapon, are still in the
middle status of savagery.[25]

[Footnote 25: Lumholtz, _Among Cannibals_, London, 1889, gives
a vivid picture of aboriginal life in Australia.]

[Sidenote: Upper status of savagery.]

The invention of the bow and arrow, which marks the upper status of
savagery, was not only a great advance in military art, but it also
vastly increased men's supply of food by increasing their power of
killing wild game. The lowest tribes in America, such as those upon the
Columbia river, the Athabaskans of Hudson's Bay, the Fuegians and some
other South American tribes, are in the upper status of savagery.

[Sidenote: Lower status of barbarism: it ended differently in the two
hemispheres.]

The transition from this status to the lower status of barbarism was
marked, as before observed, by the invention of pottery. The end of the
lower status of barbarism was marked in the Old World by the
domestication of animals other than the dog, which was probably
domesticated at a much earlier period as an aid to the hunter. The
domestication of horses and asses, oxen and sheep, goats and pigs, marks
of course an immense advance. Along with it goes considerable
development of agriculture, thus enabling a small territory to support
many people. It takes a wide range of country to support hunters. In the
New World, except in Peru, the only domesticated animal was the dog.
Horses, oxen, and the other animals mentioned did not exist in America,
during the historic period, until they were brought over from Europe by
the Spaniards. In ancient American society there was no such thing as a
pastoral stage of development,[26] and the absence of domesticable
animals from the western hemisphere