Thousands of teeth and tusks of mammoths have been brought up by the nets of fishermen in the North Sea, that washes England. And whole islands along that coast are made up of nothing but ice and sand and the teeth and tusks of mammoths. During every storm, pieces of this old ivory are washed loose and cast ashore; and the fishermen sell them.
It is thought that what is now the North Sea was, at the time the elephants lived there, a swamp in which the animals went to drink and bathe, and in which, at times, they became mired; and that this is why so many of their bones are found along that coast.
Mammoths were very like big elephants, with tusks that turned up. There are none on earth now. Neither are there any cave tigers. And the two-horned rhinoceros has gone, and the great snowy owl.
Caverns and rock shelters in which men of the Stone Age lived have been found in many places in our own country and in other lands. But caves are few, even in limestone countries; and these early, stone-chipping men lived the world over. So, in the open places and in forests among wild beasts, they must have dug pits for safety or made rude huts of earth or branches.
In caverns there have been more bones of horse and reindeer found than of any other animals; and this shows that the early hunters did best in killing these animals. There have been few bones of mammoths found; but that is because those bones were mostly too heavy for the cave people to carry away. It is likely that the flesh was eaten on the spot where the animal was killed.
CHAPTER XVIII
HOW EARLY MEN BELIEVED THAT ALL THINGS
THAT MOVE ARE ALIVE
All early peoples made their songs by singing over and over a line or two. And into these words they put what they were thinking most about, or hoping for. They believed that the whispered wish went into the thing they sang to, and helped to bring about the thing they hoped for. So the old axmaker, in time to his chipping, sings over and over to the arrow head:
"I give you the eye of the eagle,
To find the rabbit's heart.
I give you the eye of the eagle,
To find the rabbit's heart."