The cave-dwellers succeeded the people of the river-drift as inhabitants of Britain, and the combined occupancy of the country by these peoples covered a vast stretch of time. It is very probable that their periods overlapped, and that the later people were in part contemporary with the former. Though the people of the river-drift and the dwellers in caves may have avoided intermixture, as have the Esquimaux and the American Indians, yet there is nothing absolutely to preclude the idea that such race distinction was observed during great periods of time. So that all we have to say of the women of the cave-dwellers may be equally applied to the women of the later times of the river-drift.
The cave-dwellers, like their predecessors, were hunters. For their dwellings they chose the caves from which they had driven out the bear and the lion. These rude homes the women hung about with the skins of the horse or the wolf, and spread on the floor for couches the hides of these or of other beasts that had fallen by the arrows of the hunters or had been ensnared in their pitfalls. Here the tribe remained until the scarcity of game or the assault of enemies impelled it to migrate. Where there were no caves, huts were constructed. These were framed with the branches and trunks of trees and covered with skins and hides.
The woman of the cave-dwellers was a sturdy specimen of her sex, and the long and arduous migrations in which the burden of the work fell upon her shoulders were probably borne with little sense of hardship. We can imagine a tribe, travelling afoot, for as yet neither the horse nor any other animal had been domesticated: the men with their long fish spears across their backs, their stone arrows hanging at their sides, and their bows in hand, always alert for the wild beasts with which they waged a relentless warfare; the women laden with all the paraphernalia of their simple existence, many with a babe slung at the back, and their naked, uncouth progeny following or gambolling about them. The strange personal appearance of both men and women would add to the oddity of the scene in modern eyes, for their bodies were painted in grotesque patterns, and, if the rigors of the season made any covering necessary, a simple skin, laced about them with reindeer sinews, sufficed for clothing. On coming to a fresh hunting region, near to some body of water or flowing stream, where the game would naturally come to slake their thirst,--perhaps upon the grassy plains that still extended over what is now the English Channel and formed a part of the original land connection with the continent,--they paused for another term of settled residence. Again the caves were resorted to, or rudely thatched huts were erected. If the wild beasts pressed the wanderers too hard, they sometimes had recourse to huts erected upon rough stone heaps in the midst of an oozy swamp.