ABOUT FACTS NET Ancient

We tend to think of ourselves as superior to most of those that came before us. Oh we all know that every once in a while a genius would come along, I am really not talking about individuals, but I am talking about races. As a race, most modern men feel that they are superior to those races that have gone before them, but is this true? If I were to go along and strip away all our technology and give someone a bear skin to wear and a wooden pole for protection and hunting, how do you think they would do? My guess is that the stone age person would fare much better. But how did these stone age people live, did they just sleep on the ground and maybe cover themselves with a few bushes and hope that no large animal came along to eat them?

Recently a hut was found in France. It had a frame of sticks with skins as the walls and roof. It was divided into two rooms, one of which contained a fireplace. The hut was inside of a cave for protection from the animals and maybe the elements as well. It was pretty large and was about 109 feet long and 11.5 feet wide. Did you say big deal? Well you will have to rethink that when I tell you the next part. The structure is believed to be as old as 500,000 years. It had a floor made from grasses. It is believed that Neanderthals lived in it and used pine to burn for heat. These are the same Neanderthals that have been maligned as being not to bright as compared to us.

Another very old structure has been found, it is a wooden hut also found in France. This one is believed to be up to 450,000 years old. It was made using tree branches and bracing them with stones. They would take the stones and make a circle around the structure for the brace. Other strange circles of stones have been found and this might indicate that there were more of this wooden huts built that have long disappeared leaving only the stones. It is even thought that these huts may have started to be built over 1,000,000 years ago. These dates stagger the imagination. Again the Neanderthals are credited with the construction.

It is beginning to look as if sleeping on the ground or just in caves as previously thought, might be the wrong picture. These ancient people seem to be a lot more sophisticated than we first thought. Maybe the determination of housing structures was dictated more by climate than anything else. Let's look at ancient Britain for example. If we go back 18,000 years, our ancestors were living in a country covered by a sheet of ice. How they ever survived is almost beyond human understanding. There was 5,000 years of icy hell that had to be survived before things changed. It wasn't until 13,000 years ago that the ice was gone. Now more humans and animals crossed into Britain from a land bridge and a different type of life began. There is a cave in Lancashire that was believed to have been inhabited about 11,000 years ago known as Kirkhead Cave. Other caves were also believed to have been occupied such as Mother Grundy's Parlour and Robin Hood's Cave. It is suspected that their habitation goes back 12,000 years ago.

What I find intriguing about the cave dwelling in Britain is the fact that homo sapiens may have lived in them and they (us) are considered more advanced than Neanderthals yet there were no huts built. This all changed in ruins and impressions found in Ireland. During an excavation in Northern Ireland it was discovered that a teepee type structure had stood in a certain place.

Looking at tools you would have to say that the hand tool that was in favor the longest was the stone axe. Its popularity lasted for about 1,000,000 years. No one can say for sure exactly what it was used for, but I guess we would have to assume that it was at least a secondary weapon of protection, maybe after some stabbing tool. Using it for hunting seems to be too dangerous, however, since it is a weapon that you would have to use very close up. This might work for smaller animals but could you imagine trying to kill a bear or large cat with a stone axe? It seems the hand axe was better used as a house hold tool. It could chop wood, scrape skins and cut meat, among other things.The Pleistocene Period started 2,000,000 years ago and we are part of it. We live in the Holocene. Even at the beginning man had fire and not only fire. He had wooden tools along with tools made from bone and stone. When you think about it, man was quite advanced for not having any schools or books to pass knowledge down from.

One thing that you hardly ever see mentioned is the fact that not only was early man a hunter, but also early woman. Where ever early man moved to, he tried to make sure that predators didn't live nearby. It would not have been very easy to defend against large cats or other big predators such as bears with the weapons that were available to him. Early man was not only smart, but he had to be cunning like an animal. Some archeologists believe that early humans were mostly on the move and that included men, and women with their children.

So you see primitive man was not like the general picture that is painted of him, a war like hunter without skills except for shining animals, that went out to hunt leaving his family at a base camp. As for the huts, the ones made of poles and skins could be easily moved but the ones made of branches present a mystery and may have been used only temporarily until the tribe moved on, and then abandoned.