A wooden platform was supported by the pile work and on this were built wooden houses covered with turf.  Objects found by the hundred among the piles reveal the character of the life of the former inhabitants.  They ate animals killed in the chase—­the deer, the boar, and the elk.  But they were already acquainted with such domestic animals as the ox, the goat, the sheep, and the dog.  They knew how to till the ground, to reap, and to grind their grain; for in the ruins of their villages are to be found grains of wheat and even fragments of bread, or rather unleavend cakes.  They wore coarse cloths of hemp and sewed them into garments with needles of bone.  They made pottery but were very awkward in its manufacture.  Their vases were poorly burned, turned by hand, and adorned with but few lines.  Like the cave-men, they used knives and arrows of flint; but they made their axes of a very hard stone which they had learned to polish.  This is why we call their epoch the Polished Stone Age.  They are much later than the cave-men, for they know neither the mammoth nor the rhinoceros, but still are acquainted with the elk and the reindeer.[2]

=Megalithic Monuments.=—­Megalith is the name given to a monument formed of enormous blocks of rough stone.  Sometimes the rock is bare, sometimes covered with a mass of earth.  The buried monument is called a Tumulus on account of its resemblance to a hill.  When it is opened, one finds within a chamber of rock, sometimes paved with flag-stones.  The monuments whose stone is above ground are of various sorts.  The Dolmen, or table of rock, is formed of a long stone laid flat over other stones set in the ground.  The Cromlech, or stone-circle, consists of massive rocks arranged in a circle.  The Menhir is a block of stone standing on its end.  Frequently several menhirs are ranged in line.  At Carnac in Brittany four thousand menhirs in eleven rows are still standing.  Probably there were once ten thousand of these in this locality.  Megalithic monuments appear by hundreds in western France, especially in Brittany; almost every hill in England has them; the Orkney Islands alone contain more than two thousand.  Denmark and North Germany are studded with them; the people of the country call the tumuli the tombs of the giants.

Megalithic monuments are encountered outside of Europe—­in India, and on the African coast.  No one knows what people possessed the power to quarry such masses and then transport and erect them.  For a long time it was believed that the people were the ancient Gauls, or Celts, whence the name Celtic Monuments.  But why are like remains found in Africa and in India?