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 men of the later Stone Age are the ancestors of the civilised men
of to-day. Classical antiquity among Greeks and Romans had still a
consciousness of this, at least partly; it was not entirely forgotten
that the oldest weapons of men did not consist of metal, but of stone,
and even inferior material. The worked stones which the people then,
as now, designated as weapons of the deity, as lightning-stones or
thunderbolts, were recognised by keener-sighted men as weapons of
primeval inhabitants of the land.
[Sidenote: What the Kitchen Middens Tell Us]
The “kitchen middens” on the Danish coasts mark places of more or less
permanent settlement, consisting of more or less numerous individual
dwellings. From these middens a rich inventory of finds has been made,
affording a glimpse of the life and doings of those ancient times.
The heaps consist principally of thousands upon thousands of opened
shells of oysters, cockles, and other shellfish still eaten at the
present day, mingled with the bones of the roe, stag, aurochs, wild
boar, beaver, seal, etc. Bones of fishes and birds were also made
out, among the latter being the bones of the wild swan and of the now
extinct great auk, and, what is specially important in determining
the geological age of these remains, large numbers of the bones of
the capercailzie. Domestic animals are absent with the exception of
the dog, whose bones, however, are broken, burnt, gnawed in the same
way as those of the beasts of the chase. Everything proves that on
the sites of these middens there formerly lived a race of fishers and
hunters, whose chief food consisted of shellfish, the shells of which
accumulated in mounds around their dwellings. Proofs of agriculture and
cattle-rearing there are none; the dog alone was frequently bred not
only as a companion in the chase, but also for its flesh.
The state of civilisation of the old Danish shellfish-eaters was not
quite a low one in spite of its primitive colouring, and in essential
points was superior to that of Palæolithic Man. Not only had they tamed
a really domestic animal, the dog, but they made and used clay vessels
for cooking and storing purposes. The cooking was done on fireplaces.
They could work deer-horn and bone well. Of the former hammer-axes
with round holes were made, and of animal bones arrow-heads, awls, and
needles, with the points carefully smoothed. Small bone combs appeared
to have served not so much for toilet purposes as for dividing animal
sinews for making threads, or for dressing the threads in weaving.
[Illustration: EUROPE IN THE ICE AGE
The map illustrates the extent of the Ice Age in Europe. It will
be noticed that in England the ice-cap did not extend south of the
position of London though it occurred much further south in the
mountain regions of the Pyrenees, the Alps, Tyrol, the Carpathians
and the Caucasus. The dark portions of the map represent the extent
of the ice.
]
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