ABSTRACT
The influences which were abroad in the millennia which followed the end of the last Ice Age were powerful indeed and were to change fundamentally the patterns of human existence; the world had never known their like before. The switch from the old stable ways of the hunter-gatherers, to whom the world was a place wholly predictable, which made few demands on its people that they could not very easily satisfy, had been traumatic; quite suddenly the herds began to decline, game grew scarcer, populations increased, wider territories had to be ranged and hostile groups, anxious for their own survival, were encountered. The world began to be unforeseeable and, hence and probably for the first time, frightening.
