The Cave Boy of the Age of Stone

by Margaret A. McIntyre

  Wolves]

  As the sun rose next morning, Thorn and his grandfather and grandmotherwent over to the swamp. The cave people soon began to come in from allthe caves round about in the hill country. They came in little crowds,laughing and talking very loud. They were happy, for there was plentyto eat and somebody to eat with. As they came up, they stood for along time looking at the mammoth and talking about how big he was. Andsome told of other mammoths that had got stuck in swamps and of howthey had found them.

  Thorn sat down on the side of a hill and watched the people coming.The arms and faces of the men and women were painted in stripes of redor yellow. All the cave men that Thorn knew were there, and many thathe did not know. Before long his own family came.

  Soon after that the men began to cut great pieces of meat from themammoth. They gave them to the women to roast. The women made firesand put stones in them to get hot. They dug holes in the ground androlled into them some of the hot stones. Next they threw meat upon thehot stones and rolled more hot stones upon it. Then they covered theholes with dirt and built fires upon them. While the meat wasroasting, the women went over to watch the men playing.

  The men were talking together in a crowd. A man named Crowfoot stoodout and shouted, "I can climb a tree faster than any man here!"

  "No, no!" shouted five or six men who jumped up and ran to trees.

  "Go!" called a man.

  They all jumped as high as they could and then climbed very fast, handover hand, feet and legs pushing as if a wounded bear were after them.Crowfoot reached the top first.

  Everybody shouted, "Crowfoot! Crowfoot!"

  Then a man with big arms stood out and said, "I am best man in throwingthe spear!"

  A dozen men snatched spears and ran out. Everybody stood where hecould see. The men with spears stood far back from a tree. One threw.His spear struck the tree, but fell. Everybody laughed. The next manthrew.

  His spear missed the tree. Everybody yelled and roared. Strongarmthrew. His spear struck and stood in the tree shaking.

  "Strongarm!" shouted the people.

  Other men threw, whose spears stood in the tree. Then those men ranand pulled out their spears and stood farther back and threw again.Each man threw many times. Strongarm's spear stood oftenest in thetree from the longest distance.

  Throwing a spear]

  "Strongarm's eye is best!" the others shouted. "His arm is strongest!"

  After that a young man cried, "I have flying feet! Who will run withme?"

  "I will!"

  "I will!"

  And young men ran out and stood beside him, and all the people watched.

  The race started. The young men ran lightly, like deer. They skimmedthe ground like swallows. Some of them ran all the way side by side,and came in together sweating and panting.

  The people clapped their hands and said laughing, "They are good cavemen; they can both fight and run away."

  By this time the meat was roasted. The women pulled it from the holeswith long sticks, and the people took great pieces in their hands andate them, and then took more.

  "Mammoth meat is good and juicy," one man said.

  "Yes," said another, "but not so tender as horse or reindeer meat."

  After eating all they wanted, Thorn and Pineknot and old Hickory'schildren and some of the other children went off to play. They playedbeing grown up; and Thorn fought with the other little hunters andcaught and carried off a wife, and played living with her and theirchildren in a cave.

  The men ate for a long time, but at last they had enough. Then theybegan to break up the tusks of the mammoth, and they gave a piece toeach man who had helped to kill the animal.

  "To wear on your necklace," they said.

  And they gave a piece to Thorn because he had found the mired mammoth.Strongarm looked at him proudly then, and the boy stood straight andtall and held his head high.

  A man standing near him snatched for the piece of tusk, but Strongarmshouted, "Get off!" and scowled and shook his fist.

  The man grew angry and raised his stone ax. Strongarm snatched his,and in a minute there was a clash of stone axes. The other men stoodaround and watched. They loved a good fight. Before long Strongarm'sax crashed down on the man's head, and he fell over and lay still. Theothers looked at him, and then went on breaking up the tusks.

  After that every man grew busy, and began to cut as much meat from thebig bones of the mammoth as he could carry. One bone was all cut bare.Three men standing near it whispered together. Then they lifted thebone and carried it toward a man who could not make axes and was toolazy to hunt. They set it down before him.

  "This is your prize," they said, without a smile.

  Everybody was looking.

  The man turned red and snatched a spear. But the other men ran awayand laughed. And everybody laughed.

  Then the people started homeward, carrying the mammoth meat. Thornsaid good-bye to his grandfather for a while and went home with hismother. Old Hickory and his family went along with Strongarm and hisfamily, and the children ran through the bushes and scared up the wildrabbits and porcupines.

  When they reached the cave, Thorn told Pineknot all over again aboutthe mammoth. And he scratched a picture on the piece of tusk to showhim. Holding up the picture he said, "This is the way the angrymammoth looked. His mouth was open, and his trunk was up. When stilla long way off, the men heard him trumpeting."

  Then Thorn made another picture of the mammoth. In it he showed thebig body with the long hair, and the turned-up tusks, the long trunk,the small eyes, and the shaggy ears.

  Thorn was very happy that evening, as he sat in his old place by thefire. Pineknot sat beside him, and Wow wow lay at his feet.

  CHAPTER XV

  THE RED MEN OF OUR OWN COUNTRY IN THE STONE AGE

  Last summer a little boy went to visit his grandfather who lived nearone of the beautiful lakes in the northern part of our own land. Thefamily doctor was very kind to the boy and often took him on long walksinto the country.

  A North American Indian]

  One day, as they were going through the woods together, the boy said tohis friend, "Grandpa says that when he first came here, red men livedall about him, and that they made their houses of skins and called themwigwams. Afterwards the red men were all moved to the west and givenland there. But grandpa says that for years after they went away, heused to find their arrow heads and stone axes as he turned up theground in plowing. I wish that I could find an arrow head!"

  As the doctor walked on he pointed to a pebble half buried in the sandbeside the path. The boy stooped; there was a beautiful arrow head!He was very glad. Seeing that he was pleased, the doctor took him tohis office and showed him hundreds of arrow heads. Some of them weresmall and finely chipped.

  A stone arrow head]

  "These are bird arrows," the doctor said.

  Then he showed large arrows.

  "These are for killing buffalo and other big game."

  And there were stone axes and hammers. Lastly, the doctor showed himsomething that looked like a little, very old hatchet. The boy turnedit over and over and looked at it. It was all weather stained, andreddish-brown and green.

  A stone ax]

  "This is not stone," the boy said at last.

  "No," said the doctor, "that is a copper hatchet. I was very glad toget that because there are not many of them found now. You know thatwhen Columbus came to our country, red men lived all over the land.They were in what we call the Stone Age; that is, they made their toolsand weapons of stone. But there are great lumps of copper beside oneof our lakes here. Now copper, you know, is a rather soft metal, andthe red men about here learned to pound it into shape for weapons.They called both their stone hatchets and copper hatchets 'tomahawks.'

  "Red men never learned to melt iron and make tools of it as we do,though there was plenty of iron in the mountains among which manytribes lived. The red men n
ever got beyond the Stone Age and into theIron Age as white men did."

  "Where did you get all these beautiful stone things?" the boy askedafter a while, looking at them with longing eyes.

  "I have been years in getting them together," the doctor said. "Manyof them I found myself, on my walks through the country. Others Ibought from the people who found them."

  "You must love them very much," said the boy.

  "I do," said his friend, "and some day I shall give them all to amuseum where they will be kept for people to see."

  CHAPTER XVI

  HOW STONE WEAPONS OF THE CAVE MEN WERE FIRST FOUND

  If you should cross the broad ocean that lies toward the rising sun,you would come to a beautiful country called France. Here grow theolive, the orange, and the grape; and the mulberry, on which the silkworm feeds. But it is not with these that we have to do to-day, butwith some strange old things that once lay buried far below the soil inwhich they grow.

  About seventy years ago, a man in that country who sold sand and gravelfound that his own gravel pits were worked out. He went to the banksof a river--the river Somme--near by and found a good gravel bed, whichhe began to cut down and cart off to sell. He dug away at the hill formonths and got far below the top of the ground. Then one day his spadestruck something hard; he dug it out and saw that it was a very largebone.

  "That is a queer bone," he said to himself. "I wonder what animal itbelonged to. It is too big to have been the bone of a horse or a cow.It is big enough to have belonged to an elephant. Well, no matter whatit came from," he said, throwing it aside, "it is neither sand norgravel, so it is nothing to me."

  As he dug on, he threw out some rudely shaped stones.

  "These are queer, too," he said, "but they will not sell for gravel."And away went the stones from his shovel.

  That evening a learned man from Paris, the most beautiful city ofFrance, was walking beside the river and looking at the sunset cloudsin sky and water.

  There in the pit lay the big bones. He saw them. Forgotten wereclouds and sky! He knew that he was looking at the bones of someanimal long since gone from the earth! For years after that, hewatched the work in the gravel pits and carried away any bones andshaped stones that were dug out. He studied them and found that someof the bones were those of the mammoth, and that there were bones ofthe rhinoceros too.

  At last he showed the bones and the stones to the learned men in Paris,and said, "These stones are very old; they are as old as the ground inwhich they lay. They were shaped by men who knew very little and hadvery little, and who used them for weapons. Near the stone weaponswere these bones of the mammoth and the rhinoceros. So those animalslived at the time the men did, and in this country."

  The learned men listened, but did not believe what he said.

  A few years after that, however,--about twenty years,--other shapedstones were found on the banks of the river that flows by the greatcity of London, in England, across the narrow water from France. Andin Denmark, another country near France, still more shaped stones werefound, and, with them, bones of the reindeer.

  Then the learned men had to believe that men who shaped stones oncelived in England and France and Denmark; and that at the same timelived the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the reindeer; and that the menhad very little and knew very little, and made the shaped stones forweapons.

  Picture of reindeer, scratched on slate; found in a cavein France]

  Soon after this, chipped stones were found all the world over. Morethan that, there were people living who still were chipping them. TheEskimo, who live in the frozen north of our own country, make theirweapons of stone.

  Eskimo by their winter huts; drawn by an Eskimo]

  So you see that by the Age of Stone is meant a time when themetals--tin and copper and iron--were not known; and when stone, horn,bone, shell, and wood were used for tools and weapons. The cave menwere in the Stone Age long ago. The Eskimo are in the Stone Age now.And the American red men, though they were still in the Stone Age, werebeginning to learn the use of one metal--copper.

  And the people of the shell mounds--how do we know about them? InDenmark to-day you may see shell mounds. They are the old hunting andfishing villages. They are of different sizes; some are a quarter of amile long and half as wide. They are built up of things that thehunters and fishermen threw away: oyster and mussel and periwinkleshells; bones of the wolf, the hyena, the dog; of wild duck, swan, andgrouse; of cod, herring, flounder, and other deep-sea fish. Many ofthe bones had been split open for the purpose of extracting the marrow.Besides bones, there are also pieces of burnt wood; and there is seaplant, which may have given salt.

  A bone awl; found in a cave in England]

  The stone tools and weapons found in the heaps are axes, knives,hammers, awls, lance heads, and sling stones--all of rude make. Thereare also bits of rude pottery, which show that these men knew a littlemore than the cave men; they knew how to bake clay. They were ahead ofthe cave men also in having one tamed animal--the dog. No bones werefound of any tamed animal except the dog, and this seems to show thatit was the earliest animal tamed by man.

  Mounds like those in Denmark are found in many other countries: in ourown land where the red men lived; in Africa, the land of the black man;and in Asia, where the brown man lives. Wherever man has led awandering life, eating fish and leaving their bones behind him, theseheaps are found; and they are always by the sea or by a river.

  CHAPTER XVII

  HOW THE EARTH LOOKED WHEN THE SHELL MEN AND THE CAVE MEN LIVED

  At the time when the cave men and the shell men lived, the earth lookedmuch as it looks now, as far as hills and rivers and trees and grasscould make it. The earth had its seasons--its spring and summer, itsautumn and winter. Then, as now, the forests dropped their leaves inautumn. Many leaves of oak, maple, poplar, and hickory fell uponclayey soil and left their imprints; and the clay afterwards turned tostone, and the imprints show us that the forests of the cave men werelike our own.

  The insects, too, were the same as those of our own fields. We knowthis because the gum flowed down the pine trees then as now; and ants,crickets, butterflies, grasshoppers, and spiders visiting the tree wereheld and covered. The gum turned to stone and made the amber of alater time and kept the insects within it unchanged, and there withinthe amber we see the insects that the cave men knew.

  The animals, also, were much the same as those of our own time. Itseems strange to us that at that time the reindeer and the mammothshould have lived in the same country; because the reindeer of our timelives in a cold country, and the elephant, which is like the mammoth,lives in a hot country. But before the time of the cave men, it waswarm in England and France, and the mammoth went to live there then.Afterwards, it became colder; but the mammoth liked it there, so hegrew himself a coat of thick woolly hair to keep out the cold andstayed, while the reindeer lived there only in winter and wentnorthward in summer.

  Drawing of a mammoth, on a piece of mammoth tusk; foundin a cave in France]

  We know that the mammoth had this heavy coat of wool because, in thecold country of Siberia, some time since, there was a mammoth thawedout of the ice; and also because the cave men have left a drawing thatpictures the long hair. It was about a hundred years ago, when afisherman on the frozen Lena River saw an iceberg of odd shape. Twoyears later, he saw the tusks of a mammoth standing out from it. Andfive years after that, all the ice had melted from around it, and thebig body of the mammoth lay upon the sand. There was a flowing mane onthe neck, and the body was covered with reddish wool and long blackhair. The people about the country there cut up the flesh as food fortheir dogs, and the bones and tusks were sent to the museum in St.Petersburg.

  Thousands of teeth and tusks of mammoths have been brought up by thenets of fishermen in the North Sea, that washes England. And wholeislands along that coast are made up of nothing but ice and sand andthe teeth and tusks of mammoths. During every storm, p
ieces of thisold ivory are washed loose and cast ashore; and the fishermen sell them.

  It is thought that what is now the North Sea was, at the time theelephants lived there, a swamp in which the animals went to drink andbathe, and in which, at times, they became mired; and that this is whyso many of their bones are found along that coast.

  Mammoths were very like big elephants, with tusks that turned up.There are none on earth now. Neither are there any cave tigers. Andthe two-horned rhinoceros has gone, and the great snowy owl.

  Caverns and rock shelters in which men of the Stone Age lived have beenfound in many places in our own country and in other lands. But cavesare few, even in limestone countries; and these early, stone-chippingmen lived the world over. So, in the open places and in forests amongwild beasts, they must have dug pits for safety or made rude huts ofearth or branches.

  In caverns there have been more bones of horse and reindeer found thanof any other animals; and this shows that the early hunters did best inkilling these animals. There have been few bones of mammoths found;but that is because those bones were mostly too heavy for the cavepeople to carry away. It is likely that the flesh was eaten on thespot where the animal was killed.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  HOW EARLY MEN BELIEVED THAT ALL THINGS THAT MOVE ARE ALIVE

  All early peoples made their songs by singing over and over a line ortwo. And into these words they put what they were thinking most about,or hoping for. They believed that the whispered wish went into thething they sang to, and helped to bring about the thing they hoped for.So the old axmaker, in time to his chipping, sings over and over to thearrow head: