The History of Man Told by Way of His Houses [antikvár]

People live in big houses now, with doors and windows, paved courtyards, and columned porches, but many thousands of years ago men did not live like this, nor were there countries with sixty millions of inhabitants as there are today. In ancient times there were no books to tell about things; we determine how men used to live by the stones, bones, shells, and tools we find. We call those times the "Stone Age" when men went about almost naked or dressed in animal skins, fighting the wild beasts of the forest, living hidden away in mountain caves, and not knowing-back in "Paleolithic" days-that there was copper or iron in the world. "Paleolithic" is a big word! The men of those days did not even know how to cut stone, although they soon learned how to shape it with axes made of sharp-edged flint, and that was in the new stone age called "Neolithic". Neo means new and lithic means stone. Paleo, of course, means old, ancient. In those days men lived in mountain caves where wild animals could not reach them, or else they dug a hole in the ground and covered the entrance with a door made out of branches, or they used branches to roof over a cleft in the rock, or they set three tall sticks into the ground and bound their tops together into a point, covering them with hides from the animals they hunted. Animals were large then. Apparently in America the men of those times did not live like that, but gathered in villages instead of in separated families. We can still see the ruins of what are called "earth-builders" because they built thick walls of earth in round or square or triangular shapes, or in four circles, one inside the other. Some Indians lived in stone houses that were like villages and were called pueblos because they housed almost a thousand families at one time, and these people, like the present-day Zuni Indians, entered their homes through the roof rather than through the doors as we do. In other places there are stone houses in the crevices of rocks, reached by toeholds cut out by pickaxes, like a staircase. Families got together everywhere to defend themselves and build cities in the rocks or in the middle of lakes-these later known as lacustrine