Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/335

] would be a more serious obstacle to the canoes made out of the trunk of a big tree than to a Roman fleet. The south-eastern derivation of the Neolithic peoples will go far to explain the sharp line of demarcation between them and their predecessors the Cave-men, who retreated before them farther to the north and to the north-east.

The Neolithic implements, and the domestic animals and plants, described in the preceding pages, have been discovered over the whole of Europe with the exception of northern Russia and northern Scandinavia. They imply that the Neolithic civilisation was long established, and that it underwent so little change, if any, in the lapse of ages that no traces of a change have been preserved to our times. Its duration varied in different countries, and it yielded place to a higher culture in Greece and Italy long before it passed away from central and northern Europe. Glass beads brought from the Mediterranean, and probably of Phœnician work, occur in the Neolithic tombs of France, and in the pile-dwellings of Switzerland. There is every reason to believe that Egypt and Assyria were highly organised empires, and that the Mediterranean peoples were far advanced in the path of civilisation, while the Neolithic phase held its ground in France and Germany, in Britain and in Scandinavia.

The introduction of this civilisation is the starting-point of the history of the present inhabitants of Europe. To the Neolithic peoples we owe the rudiments of the culture which we ourselves enjoy. The arts which they introduced have never been forgotten, and all subsequent