Garam Éva szerk.: Between East and West - History of the peoples living in hungarian lands (Guide to the Archaeological Exhibition of the Hungarian National Museum; Budapest, 2005)

HALL 1 - The Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic (400,000-6000 B.C.) (Viola T. Dobosi)

75. Limestone disc with serrated edges from Bodrogkeresztár. 28,000 B.C. legends. These caves have offered shelter to human communities from time immemorial. They were used not only by prehistoric groups, but in later times too, as shown by the medieval money counterfeiting workshops and the first aid kits from the Great War found in them. At the time of extensive animal husbandry, when pigs were masted in oak woods in the Bükk Mountains, they were sheltered in caves (such as the Istállós-kő Cave, whose name means "Sty Cliff). The enormous bones found in these caves, the remains of unknown, long-extinct creatures became the stuff of legends about mighty dragons. The limestone hills and mountains of Hungary contain countless caves suitable for human settlement. About fifty years ago, László Vértes brought the 30 thousand years old hearth surrounded by stone slabs and covered with bones and stones from the Istállóskő Cave in the Szalajka Valley near Szilvásvárad to the Hungarian National Museum. Displayed in the interior of the reconstructed Palaeolithic cave are the tools and implements used by early hominids in different periods. The hunters of the Palaeolithic made their clothing and footwear from animal hides tanned to make leather. The exhibited spearhead comes from the Szeleta Cave near Lillafüred, the first Palaeolithic site excavated in Hungary. An independent culture has been named after the lovely, slender tools made from ash-grey stone. (Since the names of prehistoric peoples are not known, their archaeological culture is usually named after the site, where their heritage was first discovered.) The symmetrical, leaf shaped spearheads were the result of a long development. The earliest weapons, probably made from wood, perished during the millennia under the unfavourable condiitons in Hungary. Only the finds from a handful of Lower Palaeolithic sites in Europe indicate that the first weapons were wooden spears with sharp points. The sturdy stone points are all that survived of the spears used by the Neanderthals of the Middle Palaeolithic. The use of bone tipped spearheads called for the flexible joints and supple muscles characterising archaic modem man. Split-base stone points attached to a wooden