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.
[Illustration: Drawing of a mammoth, on a piece of mammoth tusk; found
in a cave in France]
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.