Chapter XVII: How the Earth Looked When the Shell Men and the Cave Men Lived

At the time when the cave men and the shell men lived, the earth looked much as it looks now, as far as hills and rivers and trees and grass could make it. The earth had its seasons--its spring and summer, its autumn and winter. Then, as now, the forests dropped their leaves in autumn. Many leaves of oak, maple, poplar, and hickory fell upon clayey soil and left their imprints; and the clay afterwards turned to stone, and the imprints show us that the forests of the cave men were like our own.

The insects, too, were the same as those of our own fields. We know this because the gum flowed down the pine trees then as now; and ants, crickets, butterflies, grasshoppers, and spiders visiting the tree were held and covered. The gum turned to stone and made the amber of a later time and kept the insects within it unchanged, and there within the amber we see the insects that the cave men knew.

The animals, also, were much the same as those of our own time. It seems strange to us that at that time the reindeer and the mammoth should have lived in the same country; because the reindeer of our time lives in a cold country, and the elephant, which is like the mammoth, lives in a hot country. But before the time of the cave men, it was warm in England and France, and the mammoth went to live there then. Afterwards, it became colder; but the mammoth liked it there, so he grew himself a coat of thick woolly hair to keep out the cold and stayed, while the reindeer lived there only in winter and went northward in summer.

We know that the mammoth had this heavy coat of wool because, in the cold country of Siberia, some time since, there was a mammoth thawed out of the ice; and also because the cave men have left a drawing that pictures the long hair. It was about a hundred years ago, when a fisherman on the frozen Lena River saw an iceberg of odd shape. Two years later, he saw the tusks of a mammoth standing out from it. And five years after that, all the ice had melted from around it, and the big body of the mammoth lay upon the sand. There was a flowing mane on the neck, and the body was covered with reddish wool and long black hair. The people about the country there cut up the flesh as food for their dogs, and the bones and tusks were sent to the museum in St. Petersburg.

Thousands of teeth and tusks of mammoths have been brought up by the nets of fishermen in the North Sea, that washes England. And whole islands along that coast are made up of nothing but ice and sand and the teeth and tusks of mammoths. During every storm, pieces of this old ivory are washed loose and cast ashore; and the fishermen sell them.

It is thought that what is now the North Sea was, at the time the elephants lived there, a swamp in which the animals went to drink and bathe, and in which, at times, they became mired; and that this is why so many of their bones are found along that coast.

Mammoths were very like big elephants, with tusks that turned up. There are none on earth now. Neither are there any cave tigers. And the two-horned rhinoceros has gone, and the great snowy owl.

Caverns and rock shelters in which men of the Stone Age lived have been found in many places in our own country and in other lands. But caves are few, even in limestone countries; and these early, stone-chipping men lived the world over. So, in the open places and in forests among wild beasts, they must have dug pits for safety or made rude huts of earth or branches.

In caverns there have been more bones of horse and reindeer found than of any other animals; and this shows that the early hunters did best in killing these animals. There have been few bones of mammoths found; but that is because those bones were mostly too heavy for the cave people to carry away. It is likely that the flesh was eaten on the spot where the animal was killed.