Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/333

] stone axes. He therefore believes that if they do not belong to the age of the Neolithic tumuli, they must be of a later and not an earlier age. On weighing both sides of the question it seems to me very probable that the refuse-heaps were accumulated by a section of the same people who raised the tumuli over their dead; and that they found it advantageous to live by hunting and fishing in a region teeming with game of various kinds; or that they were compelled to forsake their domestic animals except the dog, and to take refuge in the gloomy pine forests on the shores of the Baltic, under the pressure of invasion. The remains do not appear to me to mark a phase preceding the Neolithic culture in northern Europe.

Although the Neolithic men were immeasurably above the Cave-men in culture, they were far below them in the arts of design. They have not left behind any well-defined representations of the forms either of plants or animals. Their engravings consist of the hollows, or cup-stones, on the slabs composing the stone chambers of their tombs, of spirals and concentric circles; and their highest artistic achievement is the rude figure of a stone axe in its handle of wood, engraved (Fig. 109) on the roof of the sepulchral chamber of Dol-ar-Marchnant, near Locmariaker in Brittany. A group of axes is also