long-since-vanished

Updated: May 10, 2025

Those who lived in the north had discovered the use of copper and had shaped for themselves knives and spear blades out of copper, but not even this metal was in use to any great extent, and for the most part they relied, down to the end of the eighteenth century, for their implements and weapons, on polished and sharpened stones, on deer's antlers, buffalo horns, sticks, sharp shells, beavers' incisor teeth, the claws or spines of crustaceans, flints, and suchlike substances in short, they were leading the same life and using almost exactly the same tools as the long-since-vanished hunter races of Europe of five thousand to one hundred thousand years ago the people who pursued the mammoth, the bison, the Irish "elk", and the other great beasts of prehistoric Europe.

Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston - Pioneers in Canada