FIRST CIVILIZATION—ANEOLITHIC. 39 
Schellenberg’s discovery of the casts of chaff of wheat and barley, which was used 
always in mixing the clay for the thick pots shown on plates 20 (fig.1) and 21 (fig. 1). 
At first, besides cultivating the soil, they hunted wild animals, and while the 
bones of these, as well as those of the animals which they domesticated later, show 
that they ate the flesh of these, including the pig and probably also the fox and 
wolf, these bones are not sufficiently abundant to prove that meat formed by any 
means the chief part of their diet. Awls, and doubtless some other implements, 
were made of bone, and straight-edged flakes* from flint; but, excepting mace- 
heads, there was not found any weapon, either offensive or defensive or for the 
chase—neither celt, point of arrow or of spear, nor artificially formed slingstone. 
It would seem that such weapons as they had must have been of wood with fire- 
hardened points or points of bone, or unformed slingstones or bolos of naturally 
formed stones, or lastly lassos. ‘Towards confirmation of this is the statement 
by Dr. Duerst that the bones he examined of the wild animals were of individuals 
of such ages as were easily killed. 
In the lowest strata of this culture we find the practice of the peculiar mortuary 
custom of burying children, and only children, under the earthen floor of the 
dwelling. We were continually coming upon these little skeletons during our 
excavations. They lay generally on a fire-hardened bed of earth of about the size 
and shape of the hearths that occur everywhere in the floors of the dwellings, 
or in places on only a layer of ashes. Many of these burials contained beads 
or other burial gifts, and the intention was so evident that it seems probable that 
in those cases where no gifts were found, objects of perishable materials had 
disappeared, for no trace of animal or vegetable substance, excepting bones and 
charcoal, has been able to survive through eighty to one hundred centuries of 
Time’s destroying agents, The remarkable preservation of the bones seems 
to be due to the niter with which they are saturated. This burial custom was 
followed so generally throughout the life of the kurgan that it would form the 
basis of a proximative estimate of the density of population of the kurgan and of 
its rate of growth, if we knew that ail children dying under a given age were buried 
in this manner. Of this, however, we have no knowledge, and it is equally possible 
that they represent sacrifices. The existence of this custom through not only 
this earliest culture but through the two succeeding ones as well—through many 
thousand years—is a remarkable ethnological fact which, considered together with 
the associated custom of burial in a contracted position, may prove to be very 
useful in comparative ethnology when our knowledge of Eurasiatic and African 
burials shall have increased. At present there is little mention of the custom 
in ancient or modern literature. But this is perhaps due to a lack of observation 
during the process of excavating. ‘The layers of débris that accumulate slowly 
during long periods of occupation are so full of bones of animals that these little 
skeletons might easily escape special notice, while in the deeper culture layers 

* Such as were used in sickles in early Egypt and Susa. 
