at Keilor (South Australia) — the Australian aborigines 

 developed in isolation as Archaic White people, and were 

 still in the Stone Age when they were discovered in the 

 seventeenth century. 



Some 7,000 years ago began the Neolithic Cultures 

 which started agriculture and the domestication of ani- 

 mals. These peoples lived in larger groups than early man 

 had done, and built wood dwellings (e.g. the lake dwellings 

 of Central Europe). Their social groups were able to re- 

 sist attack by more primitive men, and made possible the 

 beginning of various new activities including the extraction 

 and use of copper, the use of clay to make vessels for food 

 and water, and the development of early wooden ships. 

 Around 3000 B.C. Neolithic men migrated from the 

 Eastern Mediterranean into the British Isles and other 

 parts of Europe. A people — the Megalith Builders — 

 came by sea to Britain, where they constructed the stone 

 monuments such as Stonehenge — a very difficult feat 

 for people with only primitive mechanical devices. These 

 structures were orientated with reference to various astro- 

 nomical bodies, and served the purpose of determining 

 the time of year (important to agriculture), besides being 

 used as tombs for the dead and as places of worship of 

 the accepted gods. Another people, called the Swine Culture 

 from their keeping of pigs, travelled by land from North 

 Africa, crossed the Gibraltar Straits, and went on into 

 Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and East Britain. And, around 

 2000 B.C., a third people, known as the Bell Beaker 

 Culture from their characteristic drinking vessels, migrated 

 from Eastern Spain into France, Germany, and Britain. 

 These people had the newly invented bronz — a copper- 

 tin alloy — much superior in its properties to copper: this 

 metal thus replaced stone in the making of weapons, lead- 

 ing to the Bronz Age. 



14 



