Man Learning the Art of Living
The results of cave research are almost as rich and varied as the results yielded by the study of the lake-dwellings in their bearing on the Neolithic stratum. Where there is a Drift stratum in the cave-earth the confusion of Palæolithic and Neolithic objects can, as we have said, scarcely be avoided. But there are numerous grottos and small caves in which the Neolithic stratum is the oldest, so that mistakes are out of the question. In a large number of such places in the cave district of the Franconian-Bavarian Jura the conditions under which finds have been made in the Neolithic stratum have proved almost as pure and unmixed as in the lake-dwellings.
The cave-dwellers of the later Stone Age in the Franconian Jura were, like the Swiss lake-dwellers of the Stone Age, mainly a pastoral race. They possessed all the important domestic animals that the latter possessed—dog, cow, horse, sheep, goat, pig—and likewise practised agriculture, or, at any rate, flax-growing; at the same time hunting and fishing formed a considerable part of their means of subsistence. So that, not only on artificial pile-works on the shores of lakes, but also on the banks of South German rivers, there formerly lived a race which, although still mainly restricted to hunting and fishing, and using no metal, but exclusively stone and bone tools, already practised cattle-breeding and primitive agriculture, and was able to increase the means of existence afforded it by Nature by the first technical arts—by the chipping and grinding of stone instruments, bone carving, and, above all, pottery-making, tanning, and the arts of sowing, weaving and plaiting.
Beginning of Weaving and Knitting
Of most importance, as showing the state of civilisation of the Neolithic rock-dwellers, are the numerous articles carved from bone that must be looked upon as instruments for weaving and net-knitting. For the latter purpose there were large, finely-smoothed bone crochet-needles, some of them carved from the rib of a large ruminant. The handle-end is smoothed by use, and the end with the hook is rounded from the same cause. The end is frequently perforated, so that it might be hung up. Still more numerous were shuttles of various forms.
According to the numerous finds of perforated clay weaver’s weights, the loom, like that of the lake-dwellers, must have been like the ancient implement that, according to Montelius, was in use on the Faröe Islands a comparatively short time ago. Spinning-whorls are very numerous, being partly flat, round discs of bone pierced in the centre, and partly thick bone rings or large beads of bone and deer-horn and flat burr-pieces of deer-antlers.
It was formerly thought that the Neolithic Europeans did not possess the arts of engraving and carving animals and human figures which the Palæolithic Men had understood in such conspicuous manner. The progress of research has now produced more and more proof that in the later Stone Age the arts of carving and engraving had not died out. We have the celebrated amber carvings of the later Stone Age from the Kurisches Haff, near Schwarzort, some of which probably served a religious purpose; those of ivory, bone, stalactite, etc., from the caves of France and the Polish Jura; the figures from Butmir, and other evidences.
Fortified Settlements in Stone Age
In Italy, in Lombardy, and Emilia, another group of settlements of the Stone Age has been found, which again exhibit the civilization and all other signs of the later Stone Age, and in many respects more closely resemble the lake-dwellings than do the cave-dwellings. These are the “terramare,” whose inhabitants, however, had already to some extent advanced to the use of bronze. A sharp division of strata into habitation of the pure Stone Age and habitation of the Metal Age has not yet been made. The huts stood on pile-work on dry land, the piles being six to ten feet high; the whole settlement was fortified with trench and rampart, generally with palisades, and was of an oblong or oval plan. Besides many natural and artificial caves in Italy the dwelling-pits, which may formerly have borne the superstructure of a hut, also belong to the pure Stone Age.