He couldn't make himself a bowl of sun-baked pottery,
and, if he had discovered the almost universal art of manufacturing an
intoxicating liquor from grain or berries (for, as Byron, with too great
anthropological truth, justly remarks, 'man, being reasonable, _must_
get drunk'), he at least drank his aboriginal beer or toddy from the
capacious horn of a slaughtered aurochs. That was the kind of human
being who alone inhabited France and England during the later
pre-Glacial period.
A hundred and seventy thousand years elapse (as the play-bills put it),
and then the curtain rises afresh upon neolithic Europe. Man meanwhile,
loitering somewhere behind the scenes in Asia or Africa (as yet
imperfectly explored from this point of view), had acquired the
important arts of sharpening his tomahawks and producing hand-made
pottery for his kitchen utensils. When the great ice sheet cleared away
he followed the returning summer into Northern Europe, another man,
physically, intellectually, and morally, with all the slow accumulations
of nearly two thousand centuries (how easily one writes the words! how
hard to realise them!) upon his maturer shoulders. Then comes the age
of what older antiquaries used to regard as primitive antiquity--the age
of the English barrows, of the Danish kitchen middens, of the Swiss lake
dwellings. The men who lived in it had domesticated the dog, the cow,
the sheep, the goat, and the invaluable pig; they had begun to sow small
ancestral wheat and undeveloped barley; they had learnt to weave flax
and wear decent clothing: in a word, they had passed from the savage
hunting condition to the stage of barbaric herdsmen and agriculturists.
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