When the snow and the ice had departed and left a country which men could once again inhabit, the outward aspect of Britain had greatly altered. It was now an island, differing only in minor details from the Britain which we now know. With the restoration of a milder climate man returned. But the great beasts did not come back; and henceforth we hear only of the dog, the horse, the ox, the sheep, the pig, the goat, and the wolf. The age which then opened is known as the Neolithic, or New Stone Age. The use of metals had not yet been discovered, and all weapons and tools were still made of stone; but there was a marked improvement in their manufacture. The type of civilization was evidently higher. Hunting and fishing, together with incessant fighting, were still the chief occupations of man; but to these pursuits had now been added the tending of flocks and herds. The art of weaving, too, had been discovered, and skins had made way for brightly-coloured cloth garments. Pots, jugs, and dishes of every variety were baked, many of them accurate and graceful in their outline. {12} Finally, the people of the New Stone Age had learned to be agriculturists; and that led them to abandon nomadic habits for fixed settlements where, in time, villages came to be built. Many of these earliest villages were built in lakes, and traces of them have been discovered in Wales in Llangorse Lake and in Llyn Llydaw. Who these people were is a question which cannot be answered with even the slightest degree of certitude. Indeed the whole problem of race in those early times is so obscure as to make a study of it almost altogether barren and unprofitable. One thing only is certain, and that is that throughout the New Stone Age the people who dwelt in Britain were not Celts. As not a word of their language has survived, it is difficult to determine whether they were members of the great family called Aryans, to which the whole present population of Europe, with the exception of Finns, Turks, and Hungarians, belongs. Of these people it is probable that three successive waves arrived. In many things they differed, but were alike in being all extremely dark. Their descendants constitute the most pronounced element in the population of modern Wales.