This I believe to be as faithful a picture as can be drawn of the makers of the shell mounds.
But in Denmark, although shells formed by far the major part of these middens, yet they ate other fish, the herring, dorse, dab, and eel. Birds also were not despised by them, bones of swallows, the sparrow, stork, capercailzie, ducks, geese, wild swans, and even of the great auk (now extinct) have been found. Then of beasts they ate the stag, roe-deer, wild boar, urus, dog, fox, wolf, marten, otter, lynx, wild cat, hedgehog, bear, and mouse; beside which they lived on the seal, porpoise, and water rat.
Owing to the almost total absence of polished implements—and yet the fact being that portions of one or two have been found—the makers of these kjökkenmöddings, are classed as belonging to the later Palæolithic period.
Of the Bronze and Iron Ages there is no necessity to write, men were emerging from their primæval barbarity—and all the gentle arts, though undeveloped, were nascent. Men who could smelt metals, and mould, and forge them, cannot be considered as utter barbarians, such as were the long-headed men, with their chipped flint implements and weapons.
Wild Men.
Sometimes a specimen of humanity has got astray in infancy, and has been dragged up somehow in the woods,
like Caspar Hauser, and Peter the Wild Boy, and fiction supplies other instances, such as Romulus and Remus, Orson, &c. Some of them were credited with being hairy as are the accompanying wild man and woman, as they are portrayed in John Sluper’s book, where they are thus described:—
“L’Homme Sauvage.
“Combien que Dieu le createur seul sage,