Note 31 — Chapter I · The Stone Age: its Duration and its Place in Time.

In thus limiting our idea of the stone age, we may conclude that alike in Europe and in America,31 there has been a period when metal was entirely unknown, when stones were the sole weapons, the sole tools of man, when the cave, for which he had to dispute possession with bears and other beasts of prey, was his sole and precarious refuge, and when clumsy heaps of stones served alike as temples for the worship of his gods and sepulchral monuments in honor of his chiefs.