Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/529

Rh house, with doors and windows, carried out exclusively with axes and other implements of flint.

At first the people are supposed to have made such clothes as they wore of skins and hides; at a later period they became acquainted with woven stuffs of wool; and the lake-dwellers of Switzerland cultivated flax. For ornaments they had beads of amber (Fig. 5), the teeth of animals, and articles of bone. Awls and needles were made of bone, and an instrument resembling a comb made of the same material, is supposed to have been used, just as instruments of the kind are employed by the Eskimos, in cutting out the leather threads for sewing. Fishing and the chase supplied the chief means of subsistence, and probably, during the earlier part of the period, the only means. Hooks (Fig. 6) were made of bone, or of bone with the point and barb of flint. Harpoons



and fishing-spears were also in use, and the lake-dwellers had nets. The people had boats, for remains of fish that can only be caught in deep-sea water have been found in the middens. The earliest boats were probably "dug-outs," though none of those now known can be referred to the Stone age. Domestic animals were kept, for their bones have been found in the passage-graves. The Swiss pastured their cattle and tilled the ground, raising flax, three sorts of wheat, and two-cornered and six-cornered barley. We have no direct proofs of tillage in Sweden during the Stone age, but certain facts seem to show that it was not unknown to them; and this view has been confirmed by the discovery of a stone