378 SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



domesticated animals kept by the men are those which 

 we have to-day, and many of the crops and cultivated 

 plants are those of our own time, such as wheat, barley, 

 oats, and rye. We know also by their remains that the 

 Neolithic men fed on chestnuts, hazel nuts, walnuts, 

 plums, apples, pears, and strawberries, and cultivated the 

 vine, the pale opium-poppy, and the narrow-leaved flax. 

 Hemp was not known to them. 



As we push back still farther into the night of 

 antiquity we cannot say at how many thousand years 

 from to-day, whether ten, twenty, or fifty thousand 

 the climate becomes very cold, the glaciers extend far 

 down the valleys, and we note that the level of sea 

 and land has changed. Great Britain and Ireland are part 

 of the Continent of Europe. There are strange animals 

 in the south of what was England, and there, as well as 

 in France, reindeer abound, wild horses, the bison, the 

 Siberian saiga antelope, the great ox, bears, gluttons, and 

 wolves ; and there are men living in caves the natural 

 caverns which form in limestone rock. These men are 

 chipping flints (but do not polish them) and carving 

 bones, but now have no herds, nor cultivated fields, nor 

 pottery (some very rough fragments have been found), 

 nor buildings, nor earthworks. They are like some 

 modern savages, Nature's gentlemen, " who toil not, 

 neither do they spin," but they hunt and fish. They 

 live entirely on the produce of the chase and on fish, wild 

 fruits, and roots. 



They wear undressed skins and furs, and paint or 

 tattoo their faces. They make twisted ropes (probably 

 of skin) which they fix as a halter round the head and 

 jaw of the wild horse, as shown by their own carvings 

 (Figs. 8 and 9). Probably they ride him. They certainly 

 eat him. At Solutre, near Macon, the bones of no less 

 than a hundred thousand horses were found piled up as 



