Prehistoric Men

Mankind, we’ll say, is at least a half million years old. It is very hard to understand how long a time half a million years really is. If we were to compare this whole length o...

In parts of France, some peasants still live in caves. In prehistoric time, many generations of people lived in them. As a result, many caves have deep layers of debris. The fir...

The oldest blade tools we have found were deep down in the layers of the Mount Carmel caves, in Tabun Eb and Ea. Similar tools have been found in equally early cave levels in Sy...

Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 52664-h.htm or 52664-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/52...

The next men we have to talk about are all members of a related group. These are the Neanderthal group. “Neanderthal man” himself was found in the Neander Valley, near Düsseldor...

We archeologists shall have to depend much more than we ever have on the natural scientists who can really help us. I can tell you this from experience. I had the great good for...

The catalogue of the Hassuna assemblage is of course more full and elaborate than that of Jarmo. The Iraqi government’s archeologists who dug Hassuna itself, exposed evidence of...

At some time toward the end of the last great glaciation--almost certainly after 20,000 years ago--people began to move over Bering Strait, from Asia into America. As you know,...

Reasoning from what we know or can easily imagine, there should have been three major steps in the prehistory of tool-making. The first step would have been simple _utilization_...

Now we must return to the Near East again. We are coming to the point where history is about to begin. I am going to stick pretty close to Iraq and Egypt in this chapter. These...

The animal bones of the Natufian layers show beasts of a “modern” type, but with some differences from those of present-day Palestine. The bones of the gazelle far outnumber tho...

Next, much to our annoyance, we have what is almost a temporary black-out. According to the system of terminology I favor, our next “assemblage” after that of Ubaid is called th...

Iron--once the know-how of reducing it from its ore in a very hot, closed fire has been achieved--produces a far cheaper and much more efficient set of tools than does bronze. I...

Near East, beginnings of civilization in, 20, 144; cave sites, 58; climate in Ice Age, 99; “Fertile Crescent,” 107, 146; food-production in, 99; Natufian assemblage in, 113-115;...