Night Is Before the Dawn 17 



in those ancient times. It is probable, in fact, that many more whales 

 were stranded and used by Stone Age people than the remains we 

 find today would indicate and they probably often served to tide a 

 whole community over the winter. 



We might have supposed that all bones of whales and objects 

 made from whale products found in the sites of prehistoric habita- 

 tion had eventuated from stranded whales were it not for the dis- 

 covery of some very remarkable pictures in Norway. These consist 

 of a considerable series of rock engravings of contemporary date, 

 displaying in remarkable detail a whole array of scenes, together 

 with numerous esoteric signs, symbols, and sketches, that indicate 

 beyond a shadow of doubt that these intrepid neolithic seamen ac- 

 tually went out upon the waters and pursued the whales. 



It always seems astonishing that early men made the effort to 

 record, often in magnificently durable materials, just those very 

 things which appear to be of most interest to us and of most use in 

 interpreting history. The question as to whether the mammoth was 

 contemporary with man and what it looked like was thus neatly 

 settled by some considerate, palaeolithic cave artist who took the 

 trouble — probably under a mystical or religious urge — to crawl 

 into a deep cave in the south of France thousands of years ago, make 

 a light, and draw the animals for us. Here, the questions as to how 

 and when men first took to following the whale upon the open sea 

 have likewise been answered for us with the neatest dispatch by 

 some shivering neolithic fisherman who lived thousands of years ago 

 on the fjords that debouch into the North and Norse Seas. It is a 

 little uncanny. 



These rock engravings are found in shallow caves and on exposed 

 slabs of rock. They consist of the most amazing variety of depic- 

 tions. There are masses of enigmatic signs that we cannot decipher; 

 there are many representations of skin canoes with pointed ends and 

 of human figures both sitting in them and standing beside them. 

 There are also the plainly recognizable outlines of the beasts hunted, 

 including elk, reindeer, bear, seal, water fowl, halibut, and whales. 

 Twenty-nine representations of whales have been found and the 

 identification of all but two or three of them is beyond doubt, for 

 these ancient artists were keen observers of nature and knew their 

 fauna much better than we do ours — they had to, if they were to 



