CHAPTER II

PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATION IN ITALY

*Accessibility of Italy to external influences.* The long coast-line of
the Italian peninsula rendered it peculiarly accessible to influences from
overseas, for the sea united rather than divided the peoples of antiquity.
Thus Italy was constantly subjected to immigration by sea, and much more
so to cultural stimuli from the lands whose shores bordered the same seas
as her own. Nor did the Alps and the forests and swamps of the Po valley
oppose any effectual barrier to migrations and cultural influences from
central Europe. Consequently we have in Italy the meeting ground of
peoples coming by sea from east and south and coming over land from the
north, each bringing a new racial, linguistic, and cultural element to
enrich the life of the peninsula. These movements had been going on since
remote antiquity, until, at the beginning of the period of recorded
history, Italy was occupied by peoples of different races, speaking
different languages, and living under widely different political and
cultural conditions.

As yet many problems connected with the origin and migrations of the
historic peoples of Italy remain unsolved; but the sciences of archaeology
and philology have done much toward enabling us to present a reasonably
clear and connected picture of the development of civilization and the
movements of these peoples in prehistoric times.

*The Old Stone Age.* From all over Italy come proofs of the presence of
man in the earliest stage of human development--the Paleolithic or Old
Stone Age. The chipped flint instruments of this epoch have been found in
considerable abundance, and are chiefly of the Mousterien and Chelleen
types. With these have been unearthed the bones of the cave bear, cave
lion, cave hyena, giant stag, and early types of the rhinoceros,
hippopotamus, and elephant, which Paleolithic man fought and hunted. In
the Balzi Rossi caves, near Ventimiglia in Liguria, there have been found
human skeletons, some of which, at least, are agreed to be of the
Paleolithic Age. But the caves in Liguria and elsewhere, then the only
habitations which men knew, do not reveal the lifelike and vigorous mural
drawings and carvings on bone, which the Old Stone Age has left in the
caves of France and Spain.

*The New Stone Age.* With the Neolithic or New Stone Age there appears in
Italy a civilization characterized by th