The Cave Boy of the Age of Stone

by Margaret A. McIntyre

[Illustration: A bone awl; found in a cave in England]

The stone tools and weapons found in the heaps are axes, knives, hammers, awls, lance heads, and sling stones—all of rude make. There are also bits of rude pottery, which show that these men knew a little more than the cave men; they knew how to bake clay. They were ahead of the cave men also in having one tamed animal—the dog. No bones were found of any tamed animal except the dog, and this seems to show that it was the earliest animal tamed by man.

Mounds like those in Denmark are found in many other countries: in our own land where the red men lived; in Africa, the land of the black man; and in Asia, where the brown man lives. Wherever man has led a wandering life, eating fish and leaving their bones behind him, these heaps are found; and they are always by the sea or by a river.

CHAPTER XVII

HOW THE EARTH LOOKED WHEN THE SHELL MEN
AND THE CAVE MEN LIVED

At the time when the cave men and the shell men lived, the earth looked much as it looks now, as far as hills and rivers and trees and grass could make it. The earth had its seasons—its spring and summer, its autumn and winter. Then, as now, the forests dropped their leaves in autumn. Many leaves of oak, maple, poplar, and hickory fell upon clayey soil and left their imprints; and the clay afterwards turned to stone, and the imprints show us that the forests of the cave men were like our own.

The insects, too, were the same as those of our own fields. We know this because the gum flowed down the pine trees then as now; and ants, crickets, butterflies, grasshoppers, and spiders visiting the tree were held and covered. The gum turned to stone and made the amber of a later time and kept the insects within it unchanged, and there within the amber we see the insects that the cave men knew.

The animals, also, were much the same as those of our own time. It seems strange to us that at that time the reindeer and the mammoth should have lived in the same country; because the reindeer of our time lives in a cold country, and the elephant, which is like the mammoth, lives in a hot country. But before the time of the cave men, it was warm in England and France, and the mammoth went to live there then. Afterwards, it became colder; but the mammoth liked it there, so he grew himself a coat of thick woolly hair to keep out the cold and stayed, while the reindeer lived there only in winter and went northward in summer.

[Illustration: Drawing of a mammoth, on a piece of mammoth tusk;
found in a cave in France]

We know that the mammoth had this heavy coat of wool because, in the cold country of Siberia, some time since, there was a mammoth thawed out of the ice; and also because the cave men have left a drawing that pictures the long hair. It was about a hundred years ago, when a fisherman on the frozen Lena River saw an iceberg of odd shape. Two years later, he saw the tusks of a mammoth standing out from it. And five years after that, all the ice had melted from around it, and the big body of the mammoth lay upon the sand. There was a flowing mane on the neck, and the body was covered with reddish wool and long black hair. The people about the country there cut up the flesh as food for their dogs, and the bones and tusks were sent to the museum in St. Petersburg.

Thousands of teeth and tusks of mammoths have been brought up by the nets of fishermen in the North Sea, that washes England. And whole islands along that coast are made up of nothing but ice and sand and the teeth and tusks of mammoths. During every storm, pieces of this old ivory are washed loose and cast ashore; and the fishermen sell them.

It is thought that what is now the North Sea was, at the time the elephants lived there, a swamp in which the animals went to drink and bathe, and in which, at times, they became mired; and that this is why so many of their bones are found along that coast.

Mammoths were very like big elephants, with tusks that turned up. There are none on earth now. Neither are there any cave tigers. And the two-horned rhinoceros has gone, and the great snowy owl.

Caverns and rock shelters in which men of the Stone Age lived have been found in many places in our own country and in other lands. But caves are few, even in limestone countries; and these early, stone-chipping men lived the world over. So, in the open places and in forests among wild beasts, they must have dug pits for safety or made rude huts of earth or branches.

In caverns there have been more bones of horse and reindeer found than of any other animals; and this shows that the early hunters did best in killing these animals. There have been few bones of mammoths found; but that is because those bones were mostly too heavy for the cave people to carry away. It is likely that the flesh was eaten on the spot where the animal was killed.

CHAPTER XVIII

HOW EARLY MEN BELIEVED THAT ALL THINGS
THAT MOVE ARE ALIVE

All early peoples made their songs by singing over and over a line or two. And into these words they put what they were thinking most about, or hoping for. They believed that the whispered wish went into the thing they sang to, and helped to bring about the thing they hoped for. So the old axmaker, in time to his chipping, sings over and over to the arrow head:

"I give you the eye of the eagle,
To find the rabbit's heart.
I give you the eye of the eagle,
To find the rabbit's heart."

And the mother sings to the child:

"Though a baby,
Soon a-hunting after berries
Will be going."

Early men believed that since they themselves are alive and move, all other things that move also are alive, and have feelings and likes and dislikes as men have. The rustling leaves, the waving grass, a rolling stone, a drifting cloud, the rising moon—all are to them alive, and many of them are to be feared.

The speech of the cave and the shell men was made up of few words, and the meaning was helped out by motions of the hands and body. They knew little outside of their forest life, and probably could not count beyond three. But the power to grow was in them, and from such rude beginnings came the men who built the cities of Paris and London.

CHAPTER XIX

THE PEOPLE OF OUR TIME WHO WERE MOST LIKE THE CAVE MEN

Up to a short time ago, on the island of Tasmania, near Australia, there lived a people more nearly like the cave men than any people we know about. Their weapons were made of limestone and were without handles, because they did not know how to fix handles to them. Their boat was a raft of bark bundles and was pushed by a pole. They lived under shelters made of boughs, and made fire by twirling a stick on a piece of soft wood. They drew rude pictures on bark; and they were quick and cunning about hunting, but knew little more. They believed that the shadow of a thing was its other self—the self that traveled in dreams and that lived after the body died; and that the echo was the talking shadow. Like the cave men these people were hunters, without any tamed animal to help them.