The Story of the East Riding of YorkshireBrowne, Horace B. (Horace Baker)
History
The Story of the East Riding of Yorkshire
Browne, Horace B. (Horace Baker)
Yorkshire (England) -- History
What sort of man was it who first inhabited Holderness and how did he
live? Artists in his day were few and far between, and the few who did
exist in Europe gave pleasure to themselves and to their companions by
drawing portraits of reindeer and horses on pieces of bone. To draw
portraits of their fellows was probably the last thing they would think
of doing. Reindeer and horses are graceful creatures, but the artists’
fellows were anything but graceful.
As far as we know, the first inhabitants of Holderness were a race of
short, dark-haired men, who depended for their food and clothing on the
animals of the forest and the mere, who pursued their prey and fought
one another with weapons of stone, and who lived in dwellings built on
piles driven into the bed of a lake in exactly the same way as the New
Guinea islanders live to-day.
Something definite about their dwelling-places we know; for what is
appropriately called a _lake-dwelling_ was discovered thirty years ago
at Ulrome. This was a structure made of tree trunks laid side by side
and held together by piles driven into the bed of what was then a large
mere.
[Illustration: BONE IMPLEMENTS AND WEAPONS FROM BARROWS ON THE WOLDS.]
A, B. Hammer head and pick made from the shed antlers of
a red deer (1/1, 1/4).
C. Bodkin or needle (1/1).
D. Dagger made from a man’s thigh-bone (1/3).
On this rough sort of platform, which measured 90 feet by 60 feet,
dwelling-places had been constructed, and a ‘popular watering-place’ it
must have been; for there was evidence that it had been built in the
first place by a race of people whose tools were of flint and bone, and
that this race had been ousted many years later by another more advanced
race who had weapons and tools of bronze. That the dwellers here were
mighty hunters and mighty eaters was proved by enormous accumulations of
animal bones under and around the platform. That they were also
cannibals is likely from the presence of human bones among this refuse.
* * * * *
So much for the ‘lake-dwellers’ of Ulrome. Up on the Wolds there were
men living a somewhat different life. These hunted and ate the same
kinds of creatures, and they used the same kinds of weapons, but their
dwellings were dug out of the soil—shallow circular or elliptical pits
each covered over with a conical roof of branches and turf, supported on
a central post; or deeper troughs covered over with sods and scrub laid
on slabs of chalk, so that the roof was level with the surrounding earth
and indistinguishable from it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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