Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/87

 The Beginnings of Cultivation 67 tivated fields and their development of villages and little walled cities, were spreading. Age by age a drift and exchange of ideas went on between these communities. Eliot Smith and Rivers have used the term " Heliolithic culture " for the culture of these first agricultural peoples. " Heliolithic " (Sun and Stone) is not perhaps the best possible word to use for this, but until scientific men give us a better one we shall have to use it. Originating somewhere in the Mediterranean and western Asiatic area, it spread age by age eastward and from island to island across the Pacific until it may even have reached America and mingled with the more primitive ways Brit, Mils. SPECIMEN OF NEOLITHIC POTTERY Dug up at Mortlake from the Thames Bed of living of the Mongoloid immigrants coming down from the North. Wherever the brownish people with the Heliolithic culture went they took with them all or most of a certain group of curious ideas and practices. Some of them are such queer ideas that the};- call for the explanation of the mental expert. They made pyramids and great mounds, and set up great circles of big stones, perhaps to facilitate the astronomical observation of the priests ; they made mummies of some or all of their dead ; they tattooed and circumcised ; they had the old custom, known as the couvade, of sending the father to bed and rest when a child was born, and they had as a luck symbol the well-known Swastika. If we were to make a map of the world with dots to show how far these grouped practices have left their traces, we should make a