Chapter XVI: How Stone Weapons of the Cave Men Were First Found

If you should cross the broad ocean that lies toward the rising sun, you would come to a beautiful country called France. Here grow the olive, the orange, and the grape; and the mulberry, on which the silk worm feeds. But it is not with these that we have to do to-day, but with some strange old things that once lay buried far below the soil in which they grow.

About seventy years ago, a man in that country who sold sand and gravel found that his own gravel pits were worked out. He went to the banks of a river--the river Somme--near by and found a good gravel bed, which he began to cut down and cart off to sell. He dug away at the hill for months and got far below the top of the ground. Then one day his spade struck something hard; he dug it out and saw that it was a very large bone.

"That is a queer bone," he said to himself. "I wonder what animal it belonged to. It is too big to have been the bone of a horse or a cow. It is big enough to have belonged to an elephant. Well, no matter what it came from," he said, throwing it aside, "it is neither sand nor gravel, so it is nothing to me."

As he dug on, he threw out some rudely shaped stones.

"These are queer, too," he said, "but they will not sell for gravel." And away went the stones from his shovel.

That evening a learned man from Paris, the most beautiful city of France, was walking beside the river and looking at the sunset clouds in sky and water.

There in the pit lay the big bones. He saw them. Forgotten were clouds and sky! He knew that he was looking at the bones of some animal long since gone from the earth! For years after that, he watched the work in the gravel pits and carried away any bones and shaped stones that were dug out. He studied them and found that some of the bones were those of the mammoth, and that there were bones of the rhinoceros too.

At last he showed the bones and the stones to the learned men in Paris, and said, "These stones are very old; they are as old as the ground in which they lay. They were shaped by men who knew very little and had very little, and who used them for weapons. Near the stone weapons were these bones of the mammoth and the rhinoceros. So those animals lived at the time the men did, and in this country."

The learned men listened, but did not believe what he said.

A few years after that, however,--about twenty years,--other shaped stones were found on the banks of the river that flows by the great city of London, in England, across the narrow water from France. And in Denmark, another country near France, still more shaped stones were found, and, with them, bones of the reindeer.

Then the learned men had to believe that men who shaped stones once lived in England and France and Denmark; and that at the same time lived the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the reindeer; and that the men had very little and knew very little, and made the shaped stones for weapons.

Soon after this, chipped stones were found all the world over. More than that, there were people living who still were chipping them. The Eskimo, who live in the frozen north of our own country, make their weapons of stone.

So you see that by the Age of Stone is meant a time when the metals--tin and copper and iron--were not known; and when stone, horn, bone, shell, and wood were used for tools and weapons. The cave men were in the Stone Age long ago. The Eskimo are in the Stone Age now. And the American red men, though they were still in the Stone Age, were beginning to learn the use of one metal--copper.

And the people of the shell mounds--how do we know about them? In Denmark to-day you may see shell mounds. They are the old hunting and fishing villages. They are of different sizes; some are a quarter of a mile long and half as wide. They are built up of things that the hunters and fishermen threw away: oyster and mussel and periwinkle shells; bones of the wolf, the hyena, the dog; of wild duck, swan, and grouse; of cod, herring, flounder, and other deep-sea fish. Many of the bones had been split open for the purpose of extracting the marrow. Besides bones, there are also pieces of burnt wood; and there is sea plant, which may have given salt.

The stone tools and weapons found in the heaps are axes, knives, hammers, awls, lance heads, and sling stones--all of rude make. There are also bits of rude pottery, which show that these men knew a little more than the cave men; they knew how to bake clay. They were ahead of the cave men also in having one tamed animal--the dog. No bones were found of any tamed animal except the dog, and this seems to show that it was the earliest animal tamed by man.

Mounds like those in Denmark are found in many other countries: in our own land where the red men lived; in Africa, the land of the black man; and in Asia, where the brown man lives. Wherever man has led a wandering life, eating fish and leaving their bones behind him, these heaps are found; and they are always by the sea or by a river.