Page 68 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

fringes and thong embroidery upon the buckskin garments they
are making. And here, too, there is much competition.

On the southern edges of the great forests the hunters make
contact, at their fall marts, with the people of the plains. But
though the hunters of the northern forests live much the same

way of life all around the globe, the people with whom they meet
are very different in America, Asia, and Europe.

In America they meet the buffalo hunters of the Great Plains.
They are no mean hunters, these plainsmen. They take pride in
choosing out and dispatching the largest of the bison, facing
them on foot with their flint-tipped spears. And current still are

folk tales from the time when their ancestors a thousand years ago
trapped the great mastodons which then lived in the Mississippi

valley.
In Asia the southern neighbors of the forest dwellers are the
herdsmen of the steppes. We shall meet in a later chapter these

shepherds and cattlemen who ranged over the wide plains from
the Black Sea to Mongolia, driving their flocks of sheep and

herds of cattle and horses from valley to river valley and from
water hole to water hole.
In the south these herdsmen are in trading contact with the

bronze-using cultivators of the Middle East, and from them
they have heard of the ass-drawn carts used by the Sumerians in

warfare. They are at this time experimenting with modifications
of this radical invention, heavy four-wheeled wagons to be drawn
by oxen, and light two-wheeled chariots which they are training

their horses to draw. But only the vaguest reports of these tech­
nical wonders reach the southern fringes of the forest, just as the

copper weapons known to be current among the rich herdsmen
of the south rarely reach the north, though stone imitations of the
copper battle-axes are not uncommon.

In Europe the pine woods end not in plains but in the oak
and ash forests which cover the low-lying coastlands around the

North Sea and stretch down over the flatlands of central Eu­
rope. Scattered through the forests are the clearings of the back-
woods fanners, some abandoned and overgrown, others cleared