In thus limiting our idea of the stone age, we may conclude that alike in Europe and in America,[31] there has been a period when metal was entirely unknown, when stones were the sole weapons, the sole tools of man, when the cave, for which he had to dispute possession with bears and other beasts of prey, was his sole and precarious refuge, and when clumsy heaps of stones served alike as temples for the worship of his gods and sepulchral monuments in honor of his chiefs.
Excavations in every department of France have yielded thousands of worked flints, and there are few more interesting studies than an examination of the mural map in the Saint Germain Museum on which are marked with scrupulous exactitude the dwelling-places of our most remote ancestors, and the megalithic monuments which are the indestructible memorials of our forefathers.
In the Crimea were picked up a number of small flints cut into the shape of a crescent exactly like those found in the Indies and in Tunis, and the Anthropological Society of Moscow has introduced us to a Stone age the memory of which is preserved in the tumuli of Russia. On the shores of Lake Lagoda have been found some implements of argillaceous schist, in Carelia and in Finland tools made of slate and schist, often adorned with clumsy figures of men or of animals. The rigor of the climate did not check the development of the human race; in the most remote times Lapland, Nordland, the most northerly districts of Scandinavia, and even the bitterly cold Iceland, were peopled. The Exhibition of Paris, 1878, contained some stone weapons found on the shores of the White Sea.
On several parts of the coast of Denmark we meet with mounds of an elliptical shape and about nine feet high, with a hollow in the centre, marking the site of a prehistoric dwelling. It was not until about 1850 that the true nature of these mounds was determined. Excavations in them have brought to light knives, hatchets, all manner of stone, horn, and bone implements, fragments of pottery, charred wood, with the bones of mammals and birds, the skeletons of fishes, the shells of oysters and cockles buried beneath the ashes of ancient hearths. To these accumulations the characteristic name of Kitchenmiddings, or kitchen refuse, has been given.
Several caves have recently been examined in Poland, one of which, situated near Cracow, appears to belong to Palæolithic times. Count Zawiska has already given an account of his interesting discoveries to the Prehistoric Congress at Stockholm. In the Wirzchow cave he identified seven different hearths, and took out of the accumulations of cinders various amulets, clumsy representations of fish cut in ivory, split bones, bears’, wolves’, and elks’ teeth pierced with a hole for threading, and more than four thousand stone objects of a similar type to those found in Russia, Scandinavia, and Germany. We meet with similar traces of successive habitation in a cave near Ojcow; the valuable contents of which included some beautiful flint tools, some awls, bone spatulæ, and some gold ornaments, mixed, in the lower of the hearths, with the bones of extinct animals, and in the upper, with those of species still living.
The discoveries made in the Atter See and in the Salzburg lakes with those in the Moravian caves prove what had previously been very stoutly denied, the existence in those districts of ancient races at a very remote date.
The most ancient inhabitants of Hungary, however, cannot be traced further back than to Neolithic times. In that country have been found, with polished stone implements, thousands of objects made of stag-horn, or bone, almost all without exception finely finished off. The discovery of copper tools and ornaments of a peculiar form in the Danubian provinces, bears witness to a distinct civilization in those districts, and confirms what we have just said about a Copper age.
From the Lake Stations of Austria and Hungary, we pass naturally to those of Switzerland. We shall have to introduce to our readers whole villages built in the midst of the waters, and a people long completely forgotten. In many of these stations, none but stone implements have been found, and on the half-burnt piles on which the huts had been set up, it is still easy to make out the notches cut with flint hatchets.
We meet with similar pile dwellings, as these structures are called, in France, Italy, Germany, Ireland, and England, for from the earliest times man was constantly engaged in sanguinary contests with his fellowmen, and sought in the midst of the waters a refuge from the ever present dangers surrounding him.
The discoveries made in Belgium must be ranked amongst the most important in Europe, and we shall often have occasion to refer to them. Holland, on the other hand, having much of it been under the sea for so long, yields nothing to our researches but a few arrow-heads, hatchets, and knives made of quartz or diorite, and all of them of the coarsest workmanship.