There are axes, knives, scrapers,
lance-points of flint; arrows, harpoon-points, needles of bone like
those used by certain savages to this day. The soil is strewn with the
bones of animals which these men, untidy like all savages, threw into
a corner after they had eaten the meat; they even split the bones to
extract the marrow just as savages do now. Among the animals are found
not only the hare, the deer, the ox, the horse, the salmon, but also
the rhinoceros, the cave-bear, the mammoth, the elk, the bison, the
reindeer, which are all extinct or have long disappeared from France.
Some designs have been discovered engraved on the bone of a reindeer
or on the tusk of a mammoth. One of these represents a combat of
reindeer; another a mammoth with woolly hide and curved tusks.
Doubtless these men were the contemporaries of the mammoth and the
reindeer. They were, like the Esquimaux of our day, a race of hunters
and fishermen, knowing how to work in flint and to kindle fires.
POLISHED STONE AGE
=Lake Dwellings.=--In 1854, Lake Zurich being very low on account of
the unusual dryness of the summer, dwellers on the shore of the lake
found, in the mud, wooden piles which had been much eaten away, also
some rude utensils.
Pages:
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28