Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/35

 Early Mankind in Europe II Greek islands and the shores of the Black Sea, the villages of Late Stone Age man stretched far across Europe. The smoke of his settlements rose through the forests and high over the Fig. 7. Part of the Equipment of a Late Stone Age Lake Dweller This group contains the evidence for three important inventions made or received by the men of the Late Stone Age : first, pottery jars, like 2 and j, with rude decorations, the oldest baked clay in Europe, and /, a large kettle in which the lake-dwellers' food was cooked; second, ground-edged tools like 4, stone chisel with ground edge (p. 10), mounted in a deerhorn handle like a hatchet, or j, stone ax with a ground edge, and pierced with a hole for the ax handle (the houses of Fig. 5 were built with such tools) ; and third, weaving, as shown by 6, a spinning " whorl " of baked clay, the earliest spinning wheel. When suspended by a rough thread of flax eighteen to twenty inches long, it was given a whirl which made it spin in the air like a top, thus rapidly twisting the thread by which it was hanging. The thread when suffi- ciently twisted was wound up, and another length of eighteen or twenty inches was drawn out from the unspun flax to be similarly twisted. One of these earliest spinning wheels has been found in the Swiss lakes with a spool of flaxen thread still attached. (From photograph loaned by Professor Hoernes) lakes and valleys of Switzerland and northern Italy, where his villages of pile dwellings (Fig. 5) fringed the shores of the lakes. His roofs dotted the plains and nestled in the inlets of the sea,