Life in these times was probably as good as a hunter could expect it
to be. Game and fish seem to have been plentiful; berries and wild
fruits probably were, too. From France to Russia, great pits or
piles of animal bones have been found. Some of this killing was done
as our Plains Indians killed the buffalo--by stampeding them over
steep river banks or cliffs. There were also good tools for hunting,
however. In western Europe, people lived in the openings of caves and
under overhanging rocks. On the great plains of eastern Europe, very
crude huts were being built, half underground. The first part of this
time must have been cold, for it was the middle and end phases of the
last great glaciation. Northern Europe from Scotland to Scandinavia,
northern Germany and Russia, and also the higher mountains to the
south, were certainly covered with ice. But people had fire, and the
needles and tools that were used for scraping hides must mean that they
wore clothing.
It is clear that men were thinking of a great variety of things beside
the tools that helped them get food and shelter. Such burials as we
find have more grave-gifts than before. Beads and ornaments and often
flint, bone, or antler tools are included in the grave, and sometimes
the body is sprinkled with red ochre. Red is the color of blood, which
means life, and of fire, which means heat. Professor Childe wonders if
the red ochre was a pathetic attempt at magic--to give back to the body
the heat that had gone from it. But pathetic or not, it is sure proof
that these people were already moved by death as men still are moved by
it.
Their art is another example of the direction the human mind was
taking. And when I say human, I mean it in the fullest sense, for this
is the time in which fully modern man has appeared. On page 34, we
spoke of the Cro-Magnon group and of the Combe Capelle-Brünn group of
Caucasoids and of the Grimaldi “Negroids,” who are no longer believed
to be Negroid. I doubt that any one of these groups produced most of
the achievements of the times. It’s not yet absolutely sure which
particular group produced the great cave art. The artists were almost
certainly a blend of several (no doubt already mixed) groups. The pair
of Grimaldians were buried in a grave with a sprinkling of red ochre,
and were provided with shell beads and ornaments and with some blade
tools of flint. Regardless of the different names once given them by
the human paleontologists, each of these groups seems to have shared
equally in the cultural achievements of the times, for all that the
archeologists can say.
MICROLITHS
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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