For all of the time up to about 75,000 years ago, which was the time
of the classic European Neanderthal group of men, we have found few
cave-dwelling places of very early prehistoric men. First, there is the
fallen-in cave where Peking man was found, near Peking. Then there are
two or three other _early_, but not _very early_, possibilities. The
finds at the base of the French cave of Fontéchevade, those in one of
the Makapan caves in South Africa, and several open sites such as Dr.
L. S. B. Leakey’s Olorgesailie in Kenya doubtless all lie earlier than
the time of the main European Neanderthal group, but none are so early
as the Peking finds.
You can see that we know very little about the home life of earlier
prehistoric men. We find different kinds of early stone tools, but we
can’t even be really sure which tools may have been used together.
WHY LITTLE HAS LASTED FROM EARLY TIMES
Except for the rare find-spots mentioned above, all our very early
finds come from geological deposits, or from the wind-blown surfaces
of deserts. Here is what the business of geological deposits really
means. Let us say that a group of people was living in England about
300,000 years ago. They made the tools they needed, lived in some sort
of camp, almost certainly built fires, and perhaps buried their dead.
While the climate was still warm, many generations may have lived in
the same place, hunting, and gathering nuts and berries; but after some
few thousand years, the weather began very gradually to grow colder.
These early Englishmen would not have known that a glacier was forming
over northern Europe. They would only have noticed that the animals
they hunted seemed to be moving south, and that the berries grew larger
toward the south. So they would have moved south, too.
The camp site they left is the place we archeologists would really have
liked to find. All of the different tools the people used would have
been there together--many broken, some whole. The graves, and traces
of fire, and the tools would have been there. But the glacier got
there first! The front of this enormous sheet of ice moved down over
the country, crushing and breaking and plowing up everything, like a
gigantic bulldozer. You can see what happened to our camp site.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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