The melting back of the glaciers and the weather fluctuations caused other changes, too. We know a fair amount about these changes in Europe. In an earlier chapter, we said that the whole Ice Age was a matter of continual change over long periods of time. As the last glaciers began to melt back some interesting things happened to mankind.
In Europe, along with the melting of the last glaciers, geography itself was changing. Britain and Ireland had certainly become islands by 5000 B.C. The Baltic was sometimes a salt sea, sometimes a large fresh-water lake. Forests began to grow where the glaciers had been, and in what had once been the cold tundra areas in front of the glaciers. The great cold-weather animals—the mammoth and the wooly rhinoceros—retreated northward and finally died out. It is probable that the efficient hunting of the earlier people of 20,000 or 25,000 to about 12,000 years ago had helped this process along (see [p. 86]). Europeans, especially those of the post-glacial period, had to keep changing to keep up with the times.
The archeological materials for the time from 10,000 to 6000 B.C. seem simpler than those of the previous five thousand years. The great cave art of France and Spain had gone; so had the fine carving in bone and antler. Smaller, speedier animals were moving into the new forests. New ways of hunting them, or ways of getting other food, had to be found. Hence, new tools and weapons were necessary. Some of the people who moved into northern Germany were successful reindeer hunters. Then the reindeer moved off to the north, and again new sources of food had to be found.
THE READJUSTMENTS COMPLETED IN EUROPE
After a few thousand years, things began to look better. Or at least we can say this: By about 6000 B.C. we again get hotter archeological materials. The best of these come from the north European area: Britain, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, north Germany, southern Norway and Sweden. Much of this north European material comes from bogs and swamps where it had become water-logged and has kept very well. Thus we have much more complete assemblages[4] than for any time earlier.
[4] “Assemblage” is a useful word when there are different kinds of archeological materials belonging together, from one area and of one time. An assemblage is made up of a number of “industries” (that is, all the tools in chipped stone, all the tools in bone, all the tools in wood, the traces of houses, etc.) and everything else that manages to survive, such as the art, the burials, the bones of the animals used as food, and the traces of plant foods; in fact, everything that has been left to us and can be used to help reconstruct the lives of the people to whom it once belonged. Our own present-day “assemblage” would be the sum total of all the objects in our mail-order catalogues, department stores and supply houses of every sort, our churches, our art galleries and other buildings, together with our roads, canals, dams, irrigation ditches, and any other traces we might leave of ourselves, from graves to garbage dumps. Not everything would last, so that an archeologist digging us up—say 2,000 years from now—would find only the most durable items in our assemblage.
The best known of these assemblages is the Maglemosian, named after a great Danish peat-swamp where much has been found.
SKETCH OF MAGLEMOSIAN ASSEMBLAGE
CHIPPED STONE
HEMP
GROUND STONE
BONE AND ANTLER
WOOD