Because of the mixture in the gravels and in the materials they carried, we can’t be sure which animals these men hunted. Bones of the larger animals turn up in the gravels, but they could just as well belong to the animals who hunted the men, rather than the other way about. We don’t know. This is why camp sites like Commont’s and Olorgesailie in Kenya are so important when we do find them. The animal bones at Olorgesailie belonged to various mammals of extremely large size. Probably they were taken in pit-traps, but there are a number of groups of three round stones on the site which suggest that the people used bolas. The South American Indians used three-ball bolas, with the stones in separate leather bags connected by thongs. These were whirled and then thrown through the air so as to entangle the feet of a fleeing animal. Professor F. Clark Howell recently returned from excavating another important open air site at Isimila in Tanganyika. The site yielded the bones of many fossil animals and also thousands of core-bifaces, flakes, and choppers. But Howell’s reconstruction of the food-getting habits of the Isimila people certainly suggests that the word “hunting” is too dignified for what they did; “scavenging” would be much nearer the mark. During a great part of this time the climate was warm and pleasant. The second interglacial period (the time between the second and third great alpine glaciations) lasted a long time, and during much of this time the climate may have been even better than ours is now. We don’t know that earlier prehistoric men in Europe or Africa lived in caves. They may not have needed to; much of the weather may have been so nice that they lived in the open. Perhaps they didn’t wear clothes, either. WHAT THE PEKING CAVE-FINDS TELL US The one early cave-dwelling we have found is that of Peking man, in China. Peking man had fire. He probably cooked his meat, or used the fire to keep dangerous animals away from his den. In the cave were bones of dangerous animals, members of the wolf, bear, and cat families. Some of the cat bones belonged to beasts larger than tigers. There were also bones of other wild animals: buffalo, camel, deer, elephants, horses, sheep, and even ostriches. Seventy per cent of the animals Peking man killed were fallow deer. It’s much too cold and dry in north China for all these animals to live there today. So this list helps us know that the weather was reasonably warm, and that there was enough rain to grow grass for the grazing animals. The list also helps the paleontologists to date the find.