Night Is Before the Dawn 9 



spindle-shaped and the hunter is in a bark canoe on a rough sea, 

 more especially in midwinter off the coast of New Brunswick. In 

 fact, the whole business is strangely reminiscent of what must have 

 happened when neolithic men set out at dawn in their little skin 

 boats from the channels of the distant isles to await the coming of 

 the porpoises. 



Ten thousand years ago the lands around the North Sea were in- 

 habited rather sparsely by a number of different peoples. Their 

 origins are obscure but seem to have been quite diverse. They were 

 modern men in the strict sense of that term, which is to say they 

 were of a bodily structure in no essential way dissimilar to peoples 

 found today in the same area. Some races or groups were powerfully 

 built, others puny; some had narrow heads, others broad heads; 

 some were tall, others short; but as a whole their range of variation 

 did not exceed that of the modern inhabitants of western Europe. 

 Only in their culture and their organization were they far removed 

 from us. 



These peoples were in various stages of Stone Age development. 

 Some were comparatively advanced, especially those dwelling back 

 from the sea in the larger land masses. These may even have begun 

 already to imitate in rare copper the stone axes and other weapons or 

 the ceremonial devices of their ancestors, a step that was to carry 

 them forward to the age of metals. Along the coasts, however, dwelt 

 peoples who seem not to have been so advanced. Whether this was 

 due to sloth, resulting from the greater ease with which they could 

 feed themselves on the bounty of the seashores, or to the fact that 

 they were inferior people who had been driven to the coasts by more 

 vigorous tribes coming from inside the continent, we are not sure. 

 Most of them at the period of which we speak seem, however, to 

 have made do with rather crudely chipped flint implements, with 

 weapons of bone and wood, and with the most primitive pottery. 

 They must have dwelt in huts made of driftwood, peat, or skins, for 

 it is only later that we find foundations of dwellings constructed 

 from stones piled together. They appear, in fact, to have lived much 

 as the aborigines of Tierra del Fuego did until the last century — 

 naked despite the cold of the winters, possessing only primitive 

 umiak-like canoes, and sheltering from the weather behind miserable 

 lean-tos or in primitive leaky huts. 



