Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/83

 XIII The Beginnings of Cultivation "W'W TE are still very ignorant about the beginnings of cultivation ^Y/ ^^^ settlement in the world although a vast amount of re- ' search and speculation has been given to these matters in the last fifty years. All that we can say with any confidence at present is that somewhen about 15,000 and 12,000 B.C. while the Azihan people were in the south of Spain and while the remnants of the earlier hunters were drifting northward and eastward, somewhere in North Africa or Western Asia or in that great Mediterranean valley that is now submerged under the waters of the Mediterranean sea, there were people who, age by age, were working out two vitally im- portant things ; they were beginning cultivation and they were domesticating animals. They were also beginning to make, in addition to the chipped implements of their hunter forebears, im- plements of polished stone. They had discovered the possibility of basketwork and roughly woven textiles of plant fibre, and they were beginning to made a rudely modelled pottery. They were entering upon a new phase in human culture, the Neolithic phase (New Stone Age) as distinguished from the Palaeo- lithic (Old Stone) phase of the Cro-Magnards, the Grimaldi people, the Azilians and their like.i Slowly these Neolithic people spread over the warmer parts of the world ; and the arts they had mastered, the plants and animals they had learnt to use, spread by imitation and acquisition even more widely than they did. By 10,000 B.C., most of mankind was at the Neohthic level. Now the ploughing of land, the sowing of seed, the reaping of harvest, threshing and grinding, may seem the most obviously reasonable steps to a modern mind just as to a modern mind it is a commonplace that the world is round. What else could you do ? 1 The term Palaeolithic we may note is also used to cover the Neanderthaler and even the Eolithic Implements. The pre-human age Is called the " Older Palaeo- lithic," the age of true men using unpolished stones is the " Newer Palaeolithic." 63