Half -Light over Warm Seas 107 



open rock faces, the latter in delicate lines on the bones of birds. 

 The story is bizarre, to say the least, and happened this wise. 



One Professor Shogoro Tsuboi of Tokyo made a trip to the south- 

 em (then Japanese) portion of the island of Sakhalin in the early 

 1920s, in order to examine some mounds containing the remains of 

 ancient human dwellings, at a point where a river named the Susuya 

 debouches into the Aniwa Bay. In these mounds he found not only 

 a considerable amount of crude pottery and stone and bone imple- 

 ments, but also some extremely curious artifacts made out of the 

 hollow bones of birds. One of the largest of these, made from the 

 leg bone of an eagle, was highly polished and had obviously been 

 used like our "straws" for some such purpose as sucking eggs or 

 other primeval equivalents of ice-cream sodas. Further, this was 

 carefully incised, not with a simple design like other similar objects, 

 but with a clear picture of two whales, each with a long-handled 

 harpoon sticking out of its back from which a line wandered away 

 on the one hand to a globular object and on the other to lens- 

 shaped things crossed by seven and eight upright Unes respectively. 



The interpretation of this might well floor the amateur, but after 

 one has perused the findings of the professional archaeologists who 

 have studied the past cultures of that area and especially the history 

 of boats employed by those people, both there and elsewhere, it be- 

 comes very obvious. The boats used by the ancients thereabouts 

 were made of skins sewn together and stretched on a framework of 

 withes like the present-day kayaks of the Eskimos. Secondly, blad- 

 ders made from the stomachs of seals or other animals, or from sewn 

 skins, and inflated with air were used by many primitive peoples — 

 and notably by the Amerindians, who are both racially and cul- 

 turally related to the early inhabitants of northeastern Asia — to keep 

 the harpoon afloat or to retard the whales. These facts explain the 

 details of this precious bird-bone tube, except for the little upright 

 strokes incised over the boat figures. It has been suggested that these 

 indicate the number of men employed in each boat, and this seems 

 reasonable. Therefore, we have a record in this discovery of open- 

 sea whaling by the ancient inhabitants of the island of Sakhalin 

 during the Late Stone Age, or Neolithic Period, when pottery, at 

 least, was in use. Nevertheless, this carries us back in time to a date 

 that has been estimated as certainly more than 2000 and probably 



