PREHISTORIC CULTURES
For that long period of man’s history that is all prehistory, we have no written descriptions of cultures. We find only the tools men made, the places where they lived, the graves in which they buried their dead. Fortunately for us, these tools and living places and graves all tell us something about the ways these men lived and the things they believed. But the story we learn of the very early cultures must be only a very small part of the whole, for we find so few things. The rest of the story is gone forever. We have to do what we can with what we find.
For all of the time up to about 75,000 years ago, which was the time of the classic European Neanderthal group of men, we have found few cave-dwelling places of very early prehistoric men. First, there is the fallen-in cave where Peking man was found, near Peking. Then there are two or three other early, but not very early, possibilities. The finds at the base of the French cave of Fontéchevade, those in one of the Makapan caves in South Africa, and several open sites such as Dr. L. S. B. Leakey’s Olorgesailie in Kenya doubtless all lie earlier than the time of the main European Neanderthal group, but none are so early as the Peking finds.
You can see that we know very little about the home life of earlier prehistoric men. We find different kinds of early stone tools, but we can’t even be really sure which tools may have been used together.