The Cave Boy of the Age of Stone

by Margaret A. McIntyre

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.