Women -- England -- History; Women -- Great Britain -- History
The cave-dwellers, like their predecessors, were hunters. For their
dwellings they chose the caves from which they had driven out the bear
and the lion. These rude homes the women hung about with the skins of
the horse or the wolf, and spread on the floor for couches the hides
of these or of other beasts that had fallen by the arrows of the
hunters or had been ensnared in their pitfalls. Here the tribe
remained until the scarcity of game or the assault of enemies impelled
it to migrate. Where there were no caves, huts were constructed. These
were framed with the branches and trunks of trees and covered with
skins and hides.
The woman of the cave-dwellers was a sturdy specimen of her sex, and
the long and arduous migrations in which the burden of the work fell
upon her shoulders were probably borne with little sense of hardship.
We can imagine a tribe, travelling afoot, for as yet neither the horse
nor any other animal had been domesticated: the men with their long
fish spears across their backs, their stone arrows hanging at their
sides, and their bows in hand, always alert for the wild beasts with
which they waged a relentless warfare; the women laden with all the
paraphernalia of their simple existence, many with a babe slung at the
back, and their naked, uncouth progeny following or gambolling about
them. The strange personal appearance of both men and women would
add to the oddity of the scene in modern eyes, for their bodies were
painted in grotesque patterns, and, if the rigors of the season made
any covering necessary, a simple skin, laced about them with reindeer
sinews, sufficed for clothing. On coming to a fresh hunting region,
near to some body of water or flowing stream, where the game would
naturally come to slake their thirst,--perhaps upon the grassy plains
that still extended over what is now the English Channel and formed a
part of the original land connection with the continent,--they paused
for another term of settled residence. Again the caves were resorted
to, or rudely thatched huts were erected. If the wild beasts pressed
the wanderers too hard, they sometimes had recourse to huts erected
upon rough stone heaps in the midst of an oozy swamp.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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