In concluding these introductory remarks, we must add that very
great difficulties await those who devote themselves to prehistoric
studies -- difficulties such as noise but those who have attempted
to conquer them can realize. The rare traces of prehistoric man must
be sought amongst the effects of the cataclysms that have devastated
the earth, and the ruins piled up in the course of ages. We must show
mall wrestling with the ever-recurrent difficulties of his hard life,
and gradually developing in accordance with a law which appears to
be immutable. Such is the aim of this work, and it is with gratitude
that we assert at the beginning that the PIANTA UOMO, the human
plant, as Alfieri calls our race, was endowed by the Creator from
the first with a very vigorous vitality, to enable it to contend with
the dangers besetting its steps in the early days of its existence,
and with a truly marvellous spirit, to be able to make so humble a
beginning the starting-point for a destiny so glorious.



CHAPTER II

Food, Cannibalism, Mammals Fish, Hunting, and Fishing.

The first care of man on his arrival upon the earth was necessarily
to make sure of food. Wild berries, acorns, and ephemeral grasses
only last for a time, whilst land mollusca and insects, forming but
a miserable diet at the best, disappear during the winter. Meat
must certainly have been the chief food of prehistoric man; the
accumulations of bones of all sorts in the caves and other places
inhabited by him leave no doubt on that point. The horse, which in
Europe was hunted, killed, and eaten for many centuries before it was