The neolithic stone implements con sist of axes and axe hammers, knives, daggers, spear and arrow heads, saws, chisels, borers, and scrapers. The axes and axe hammers are made of many varieties of stone besides flint. Some of the finer polished axes are of jade and fibrolite. Most of the other implements were made only of flint and generally fin ished by chipping, without being ground or polished. Some of the long Danish knives and daggers are marvels of dex terous workmanship, on account of the thinness of the blade and the straight ness and keenness of the edge.
The burial customs of the stone age included both inhumation and cremation, the former being, however, the earlier method. No burials of the river drift period have yet been discovered. The cave dwellers of the stone age buried their dead in cavities of the rocks. From a comparison of the remains from such cave cemeteries in different localities it has been concluded that even at this early period Europe was already oc cupied by more than one race of men. The populations of the neolithic time deposited their dead, with or without previous cremation, in or on the floors of the chambers of dolmens, or great-cham bered cairns. The sepulchral pottery ac companying these burials, in Britain at least, is generally of a hard-baked dark colored paste, and the ornamentation en tirely composed of straight lines placed at various angles to each other. The
implements found with these interments are mostly of the commoner kind, such as flint knives, scrapers, or strikelights (used with a nodule of pyrites of iron), arrowheads, and more rarely axes and axe hammers of flint or polished stone. The neolithic inhabitants of North and Central Europe were not merely nomadic tribes subsisting on the products of the chase; they practiced agriculture, and possessed the common domestic animals we now possess. The presence in the refuse heaps of their sea coast settle ments of the remains of deep-sea fishes shows that they must have possessed boats and fishing lines, as was also the case with the stone age inhabitants of the lake dwellings. The estimates that have been made of the antiquity of the stone age in Europe are necessarily various, but it has been considered that the close of the neolithic period or the time when the use of stone began to be superseded by that of bronze in North Europe cannot have been much later than from 1000 to 1500 B. C. See LAKE DWELLINGS; STONEHENGE; ARCH.OLOGY.