Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/31

Rh We see him at the door of his cave, carefully chipping off the edge of his flint tools and producing such a fine cutting edge that he can use it to shape bone, ivory, and especially reindeer horn. The mammoth furnishes him with ivory, and great herds of reindeer which had come southward with the ice are grazing before the mouth of the cavern. The hunter has a considerable list of tools from which he can select.

We see at his elbow knives, chisels, drills and hammers, polishers and scrapers, all of flint (Fig. 2); while with these he works out pins, needles, spoons, and ladles, all of ivory or bone, and carves them with pictures of the animals he hunts in the forest (Fig. 4). He now fashions a keen, barbed ivory spear point, which he mounts with such needles and with tendons as on a long wooden shaft. He has also discovered the bow and arrow and carries at his girdle a sharp flint dagger. The fine ivory needles (Fig. 3) show that the hunter's body is now protected from cold and the brambles of the trackless forest by clothing sewed together out of the skins of the animals he has slain.

Thus equipped the hunter of the Middle Stone Age was a much more dangerous foe of the wild creatures than his ancestors of the Early Stone Age. In a single cavern in Sicily archæologists have dug out the bones of no less than two thousand hippopotami which these Middle Stone Age hunters killed. Here too lay even the bone whistle with which the returning hunter announced his coming to the hungry family waiting in the cave. Surrounded by revolting piles of garbage and amid foul odors of decaying flesh our savage European ancestor crept into his cave dwelling at night, little realizing that many feet beneath the cavern floor on which he slept lay the remains of his ancestors in layer upon layer, the accumulations of thousands of years.