Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 09.djvu/134

STONE AGE, or AGE OF STONE 100 STONE AGE, or AGE OF STONE mained in their stone age to the 20th century. On the other hand, the popula- tions of the European area, in portions of which there were successive centers of high culture and civilization from a very early period, had all emerged from their stone age, through the use of bronze, many centuries before the Christian era. The progress of early culture in Eu- rope seems to have been from the South and East, N. and W., so that the emer- gence of the different populations from their age of stone was accomplished shores of the Mediterranean, they were contemporary with animals which are now either wholly or locally extinct, such as the mammoth, wooly rhinoceros, cave lion, cave bear, and hy«na, the reindeer, m.usk ox, and urus. It is an open ques- tion to what extent this change of fauna implies a change of climate, but from the geological conditions in which the flint implements of the earliest types are found it is evident that, though exten- sive changes must have taken place since they were deposited in the river basins, PAL/tOLITHiC NEOLITHIC IMPLEMENTS OF THE STONE AGE much earlier in Southern and Eastern Europe than in the North and West. But while the stone age of different areas is thus not necessarily synchronous, it seems to be true of all European areas that this is the earliest condition in which man has appeared upon them. There are no data by v/hich the period of the early stone-using populations of Europe can be defined, even approxi- mately. But in England, Belgium, and France, and across the Continent to the they belong exclusively to the later de= posits of the Quaternary period. The stone age implements of Europe have been divided into two classes — the palaeolithic or older stone implements and the neolithic or newer stone imple- ments. This is equivalent to dividing the stone age of Europe into two periods, earlier and later, as the palaeolithic im- plements are found associated with the extinct and locally extinct fauna, while the neolithic implements are found as-