Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1922-10-28
The Outline of History-By H. @. Wells
|. The Romance of Mother Earth

23.-HOW THE LAKE JEWELLERS LIVED
OF the agricultural methods of the lake
I \ jewellers we. know very little. No
~ plows and no hoes have been found.
They were Of wood and have persisted. Neo-
lithic men cultivated and ate wheat, barley
and millet but they knew nothing of oats or
rye. Their grain they roasted, ground be-
tween stones and stored in pots, to be eaten
when needed. And they made exceedingly
solid and heavy bread because round fiat
slabs of it have been got out Of these de-
posits. Apparently they had no yeast. If
they had no yeast, then they had no ferment-
ed drink.
The Trail Of the Wheat
One sort Of barley that they had is the sort
that was cultivated by the ancient Greeks,
Romans and Egyptians, and they also had
an Egyptian variety Of wheat, showing that
their ancestors had brought or derived this
cultivation from the southeast. The center
OF diffusion of wheat was somewhere in the
eastern Mediterranean region. A wild form
is still found in the neighborhood of Mount
Hermon.
when the lake jewellers sowed their little
patches of wheat in Switzerland, they were
already following the immemorial practice
of mankind. The seed must have been
brought, age by age, from that distant CEN
ter OF dlHus1on. In the ancestral lands Of
the southeast men had already been sowing
wheat perhaps for thousands of years. Those
lake jewellers also ate peas and crabapples-
the only apples that then existed in the world.
Cultivation and selection had not yet pro-
duced the apple of today
They dressed chiefly in skins. but they also
made a rough cloth of fax. Fragments of
that f1axen cloth have been discovered. Their
nets were made of fax; they had as yet no
knowledge of hemp and hempen rope. With
the coming of bronze, their pins and orna-
ments increased in number. There is a rea-
son to believe they set great store upon their
hair, wearing it in large shocks with pins
Of bone and afterward Of metal.
To judge from the absence Of realistic
carvings or engravings or paintings, they
either did not decorate their garments or
decorated them with plaids, spots, interlacing
designs, or similar conventional ornament.
Before the coming Of bronze there is no evil
dence of stools or tables; the Neolithic people
probably squatted on their clay floors.
There were cats in these lake dwellings;
no mice or rats had yet adapted themselves
to human dwellings; the cluck of the hen
was not as yet added to the sounds of human
life, nor the domestic egg to it's diet.
The chief tool and weapon of Neolthic
man was his axe; his next the bow and ar
row. His arrowheads were of flint. beauti-
fully made, and he lashed them tightly to
their shafts.
Probably he prepared the grounA for his
had stuck a stag's horn. Fish he hooked or
harpooned. These implements no doubt stood
about in the interior of the house, from the
walls of which hung his fowling nets.
On the floor, which was of clay or trodden
cowdung CATER the fashion of hut floors in
India today, stood pots and jars and woven
baskets containing grain, milk nd suchlike
! food. Some of the pots and pans hung by
rope loops to the walls. At one ell of the
room, and helping to keep it warm in winter
by their animal heat, stabbed the beasts. The
children took the COWS and goats out to Craze,
and brought them in at night before the
wolves and bears came prowling.
Since Neolithic man had the bow, he prob
ably also had stringed instruments, for the
rhythmic twanging of a bowstring seems al
most inevitably to lead to that. He also had
earthenware drums, across which skins were
stretched; perhaps also he made drums by
stretching skins over hollow tree stems.
We do not know when man began to sing
but evidently he was making music, anG
since he had words, songs were no doubt