Now come some definitions, so I may describe my material more easily. Archeologists have always loved to make divisions and subdivisions within the long range of materials which they have found. They often disagree violently about which particular assemblage of material goes into which subdivision, about what the subdivisions should be named, about what the subdivisions really mean culturally. Some archeologists, probably through habit, favor an old scheme of Grecized names for the subdivisions: paleolithic, mesolithic, neolithic. I refuse to use these words myself. They have meant too many different things to too many different people and have tended to hide some pretty fuzzy thinking. Probably you haven’t even noticed my own scheme of subdivision up to now, but I’d better tell you in general what it is. I think of the earliest great group of archeological materials, from which we can deduce only a food-gathering way of culture, as the _food-gathering stage_. I say “stage” rather than “age,” because it is not quite over yet; there are still a few primitive people in out-of-the-way parts of the world who remain in the _food-gathering stage_. In fact, Professor Julian Steward would probably prefer to call it a food-gathering _level_ of existence, rather than a stage. This would be perfectly acceptable to me. I also tend to find myself using _collecting_, rather than _gathering_, for the more recent aspects or era of the stage, as the word “collecting” appears to have more sense of purposefulness and specialization than does “gathering” (see p. 91). Now, while I think we could make several possible subdivisions of the food-gathering stage--I call my subdivisions of stages _eras_[5]--I believe the only one which means much to us here is the last or _terminal sub-era of food-collecting_ of the whole food-gathering stage. The microliths seem to mark its approach in the northwestern part of the Old World. It is really shown best in the Old World by the materials of the “Forest folk,” the cultural adaptation to the post-glacial environment in northwestern Europe. We talked about the “Forest folk” at the beginning of this chapter, and I used the Maglemosian assemblage of Denmark as an example.