224. Other Traits of the Full Neolithic
The earliest animals were kept for their flesh and hides. Two or three thousand years passed before cattle were used before the plow or to draw wagons. Both the plow and the wheel were unknown in Europe until well in the Bronze Age, after they had been established for some time in Asia. Still later was the use of milk. Here again Asia and Egypt have precedence.
Many other elements of culture appear in the Full Neolithic. Houses were dug into the ground and roofed over with timbers and earth. The dead were buried in enduring chambers of stone: “dolmens,” often put together out of enormous slabs; or excavations in soft bed rock. Upright pillars of undressed stone were erected—either singly as “menhirs” or in “alignments”—in connection with religious or funerary worship. Pottery was ornamented in a variety of geometric decorative styles, usually incised rather than painted; their sequences and contemporary distributions in several areas are gradually being determined.