The face of the country was now entirely changed. The glaciers were gone, and so, too, were all the strange animals. True, the reindeer, the wild ox, and even here and there the Irish elk, were still feeding in the valleys; wolves and bears still made the country dangerous, and beavers built their dams across the streams, which were now much smaller than formerly, and flowed in deeper channels, carved out by water during the interval; but the elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, and tigers were gone never to return, and near the caves in which some of the people lived, and the rude underground huts which formed the homes of others, tame sheep and goats were lying with dogs to watch them. Also, though the land was still covered with dense forests, yet here and there small clearings had been made, where patches of corn and flax were growing. Naked children still played about as before, but now they were moulding cups of clay like those in which food was being cooked on the fire outside the caves or huts. Some of the women, dressed partly in skins of beasts, partly in rough woven linen, were spinning flax into thread, using as a spinning-whorl a small round stone with a hole in the middle tied to the end of the flax, as a weight to enable them to twirl it. Others were grinding corn in the hollow of a large stone by rubbing another stone within it.
Fig. 80.
Neolithic implements.
1, Stone hatchet mounted in wood. 2, Jade celt, a polished stone weapon, from Livermore in Suffolk, ¼ size. 3, Spindle whorl, ½ size.
The men, while they still spent much time in hunting, had now other duties in tending the sheep and goats, or looking after the hogs as they turned up the ground in the forest for roots, or sowing and reaping their crops. Yet still all the tools were made of stone, no longer rough and merely chipped like the old stone weapons, but neatly cut and polished. Stone axes with handles of deer-horn, stone spears and javelins, stone arrowheads beautifully finished, sling-stones and scrapers, were among their weapons and tools, and with them they made many delicate implements of bone. On the broad lakes which here and there broke the monotony of the forests, canoes, made of the trunks of trees hollowed out by fire, were being paddled by one man, while another threw out his fishing line armed with delicate bone-hooks; and on the banks of the lakes, nets weighted with drilled stones tied on to the meshes were dragged up full of fish.
For these Neolithic men, or men of the New Stone Period, who used polished stone weapons, were farmers and shepherds and fishermen. They knew how to make rude pottery, and kept domestic animals. Moreover, they either came from the east or exchanged goods by barter with tribes living more to the eastward, now that canoes enabled them to cross the sea; for many of their weapons were made of greenstone or jade, and of other kinds of stone not to be found in Europe, and their sheep and goats were animals of eastern origin. They understood how to unite to protect their homes, for they made underground huts by digging down several feet into the ground and roofing the hole over with wood coated with clay; and often long passages underground united these huts, while in many places on the hills, camps, made of ramparts of earth surrounded by ditches, served as strongholds for the women and children and the flocks and herds, when some neighbouring tribe attacked their homesteads.
Still, however, where caves were ready to hand they used them for houses, and the same shelter which had been the home of the ancient hunters, now resounded with the voices of the shepherds, who, treading on the sealed floor, little dreamt that under their feet lay the remains of a bygone age.
