The Book of History (Vol. 1 of 18): A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times to the PresentVarious
History
The Book of History (Vol. 1 of 18): A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times to the Present
Various
World history
The methods of holding a hammer-stone and of making a flint by
pressure are illustrated at the top, those of using a chopping tool
at the bottom, of this plate. The other objects are spear-heads,
axes, and hammers of stone and flint, and javelin-heads of horn,
the latter being smooth and barbed. The method of tying a flint
chisel to a wooden handle is shown at the right (×). Most of these
objects are to be seen in the British Museum.
]
From Fraas’s description there seems to be no doubt whatever that the
relic-bed, with its remains of civilisation, was perfectly undisturbed,
and its palæontological contents plainly show its great geological
age. It was perfectly protected by Nature. On the top lies peat, the
same that covers the lowlands of the whole neighbourhood for miles,
and forms the extensive moorlands of Upper Swabia, on which no other
formations are to be seen than the gravel drift-walls thrown up by
glaciers of the Drift Period. Under the peat lies a layer of calc-tufa,
four to five feet thick, a fresh-water formation from the water-courses
that now unite with the source of the Schussen. Under this protecting
cover of tufa were the remains of the Glacial Period and Glacial Man.
The tufa covered a bed of moss of a dark brown colour, inclining to
green, the moss still splendidly preserved. Under this bed of moss was
the glacier drift. The moss was dripping full of and intermingled with
moist sand. In it were the relics of Glacial Man--all lying in heaps as
fresh and firm as if they had been only recently collected. A sticky,
dark-brown mud filled the moss and sand and the smallest hollow spaces
of antlers and bones, and emitted a musty smell.
[Illustration: EARLY DRINKING VESSEL
Reindeer’s skull used as drinking vessel by men of the Stone Age.
British Museum collection.
]
[Illustration: TREASURE-STORES OF PRIMEVAL KNOWLEDGE
Such to-day are the mounds of prehistoric rubbish accumulated by
the people of the Stone Age. These Danish “kitchen middens” have
vastly enriched our knowledge of the remote past.
]
Glacial Man had used the place as a refuse-pit. Among the bones and
splinters of bone of animals that had been slaughtered and consumed by
man, among ashes and charred remains, among smoke-stained hearthstones
and the traces of fire, there lay here, one upon the other, numerous
knives, arrow-heads, and lance-heads of flint, and the most varied
kinds of hand-made articles of reindeer horn. All this was in a shallow
pit about seven hundred square yards in extent, and only four to
five feet deep in the purest glacier drift, clearly showing that the
excellent preservation of the bones and bone implements was solely due
to the water having remained in the moss and sand. The bank of moss was
like a saturated sponge; it closed up its contents hermetically from
the air, and preserved in its ever-damp bosom what had been entrusted
to it thousands of years before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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