The puzzle of life and how it has been put together : $b A short history of the formation of the earth, with its vegetable and animal life, from the earliest times, including an account of prehistoric man, his weapons, tools, and worksNicols, Arthur
Science
The puzzle of life and how it has been put together : $b A short history of the formation of the earth, with its vegetable and animal life, from the earliest times, including an account of prehistoric man, his weapons, tools, and works
Nicols, Arthur
Geology -- Juvenile literature; Prehistoric peoples -- Juvenile literature
These primeval people built no houses. They lived in natural caves, and
scattered the remains of their food about the floor, so that we know
what they ate. Among the animals they used for food were the horse,
the reindeer, the ox, the cave-lion and bear, the wolf, the hyena, the
goat, the hare and several others, besides salmon and other fish. They
were very fond of the marrow of the bones, which they cracked with
stone hammers, and had little spoons made of bone with which to pick it
out.
They had places for making flint weapons too. At Cissbury Camp, near
Worthing, there is one of their old workshops. There are galleries dug
into the chalk where they got the flints, and there are thousands of
chips of flint lying about, with half finished arrow-heads, and some
of the tools they dug with. They had no spades or pickaxes; but they
used the broad, flat, shoulder-blade bone of the ox as a spade, and the
sharp brow antler of a deer’s horn for a pickaxe, to get these flints
out with. It must have been very hard work for them, because bone
spades and horn pickaxes would soon wear out, and would not be nearly
so useful as ours made of iron.
[Illustration: XI.
_Picture of Mammoth Scratched on Ivory._
_Fight between Reindeer Scratched on Slate._]
It is difficult to be certain how these stone-age people cooked their
food. Of course they could have roasted it, and the half-burnt bones in
some caves show that they did so; but in some caves in France there is
not a single burnt bone to be found. In these French cave dwellings,
too, there are no pieces of earthenware, as there are in some
others; so that the people could not have boiled it, unless they had
wooden pots and dropped red-hot stones into the water in them until the
meat got boiled, as some savages do now. Or they might have cooked it
under the hot ashes.
The people who used earthenware must have made more progress. It is
easy to understand how they made this useful discovery. Suppose they
had lighted a fire upon a damp clay soil, the earth would get baked
hard and crack off in pieces, and they would see that this soil could
be worked in the hands while soft into the shape of pans and dishes,
which could be dried quite hard in the sun or baked in hot ashes, just
as boys make clay marbles now. They could live much more comfortably
even with these rough earthenware things, and cook their food more
conveniently; but they still used the stone and flint tools and
weapons, and iron was still unknown to them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account