LIFE AT THE END OF THE ICE AGE IN EUROPE
Life in these times was probably as good as a hunter could expect it to be. Game and fish seem to have been plentiful; berries and wild fruits probably were, too. From France to Russia, great pits or piles of animal bones have been found. Some of this killing was done as our Plains Indians killed the buffalo—by stampeding them over steep river banks or cliffs. There were also good tools for hunting, however. In western Europe, people lived in the openings of caves and under overhanging rocks. On the great plains of eastern Europe, very crude huts were being built, half underground. The first part of this time must have been cold, for it was the middle and end phases of the last great glaciation. Northern Europe from Scotland to Scandinavia, northern Germany and Russia, and also the higher mountains to the south, were certainly covered with ice. But people had fire, and the needles and tools that were used for scraping hides must mean that they wore clothing.
It is clear that men were thinking of a great variety of things beside the tools that helped them get food and shelter. Such burials as we find have more grave-gifts than before. Beads and ornaments and often flint, bone, or antler tools are included in the grave, and sometimes the body is sprinkled with red ochre. Red is the color of blood, which means life, and of fire, which means heat. Professor Childe wonders if the red ochre was a pathetic attempt at magic—to give back to the body the heat that had gone from it. But pathetic or not, it is sure proof that these people were already moved by death as men still are moved by it.
Their art is another example of the direction the human mind was taking. And when I say human, I mean it in the fullest sense, for this is the time in which fully modern man has appeared. On [page 34], we spoke of the Cro-Magnon group and of the Combe Capelle-Brünn group of Caucasoids and of the Grimaldi “Negroids,” who are no longer believed to be Negroid. I doubt that any one of these groups produced most of the achievements of the times. It’s not yet absolutely sure which particular group produced the great cave art. The artists were almost certainly a blend of several (no doubt already mixed) groups. The pair of Grimaldians were buried in a grave with a sprinkling of red ochre, and were provided with shell beads and ornaments and with some blade tools of flint. Regardless of the different names once given them by the human paleontologists, each of these groups seems to have shared equally in the cultural achievements of the times, for all that the archeologists can say.