Night Is Before the Dawn 15 



apart by men. The end of one of the ribs had been cut and shaped 

 artificially and near it was found another tool made from a deer's 

 antler. 



Such evidence of early man's interest in stranded whales does not 

 come from the Firth of Forth alone, for in East Jutland, during other 

 drainage operations, the skull of a rorqual was discovered in an old 

 beach deposit. When it was raised, eight stone adzes, two stone 

 axes, and a number of flint flakes were found underneath. In Eng- 

 land, bones of the common porpoise have been found in neolithic 

 deposits in a cave some distance from the sea. They must have been 

 carried there by men. There is also much other evidence that early 

 men made use of whales that they either caught or found stranded. 



Whale bones fashioned into various artifacts are constantly crop- 

 ping up in prehistoric sites all around the North Sea. The ribs ap- 

 pear to have been used as rafters for huts just as — we shall see later — 

 they still are today in other parts of the world. Basins made from 

 the large vertebrae, and pigment pots from smaller ones, are nu- 

 merous. They have been found in Scotland, the Orkneys, Shetlands, 

 and Hebrides, and they appear again in later Bronze and Iron Age 

 times in southern England. Combs, perforated mallets, and knife 

 handles made from the bones of whales are common and, ironically, 

 even a harpoon made of this substance was found in an ErteboUe 

 midden in Jutland. In fact, worked whale bones are very common in 

 kitchen-middens. There may also have been many other uses for this 

 material, for we know that it was employed in ancient Ireland for 

 making the frames of saddles and even in place of timbers for large 

 rowboats. One can hardly imagine a more logical use for the ribs of 

 the larger whales. 



The most interesting tools made from the bones of whales are, 

 however, strange, elongated, pancake-shaped objects with a number 

 of notches, or nicks, on each side which have been unearthed in 

 great profusion at some prehistoric sites. The elucidation of the 

 purpose for which these were used has a rather amusing history. A 

 large number of these objects made from the bones of oxen were 

 originally found at a site named Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands 

 and baflled their discoverers, who described them as adzes but asked, 

 "What was there to hack with an adze on a treeless land?" No ex- 

 planation was then forthcoming. Later, over a hundred similar heart- 



