Word: reindeers
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Some 22,000 years ago, in southwestern France, a band of Stone Age hunters camped the year round beneath a rocky overhang while hunting the locally migrating herds of reindeer on which their lives depended. They cooked the reindeer meat over hearths scooped from the ground; made clothes and leanto shelters from the skins; and from the bones and antlers cut out spear points, awls, and beads...
...artic world like the present-day tundras of northern Europe. In this severer climate, new species of plants and animals thrived, while others which previously had flourished declined. And the Stone Age hunters, no longer able to stand the winter, went south each fall with the migrating herds of reindeer, to return again in the spring to their favorite camping spot beneath the rocky shelter...
...spot where the reindeer hunters chose to camp is beneath a rocky overhang, called the Abri Pataud, on a farm in the village of Les Eyzies. This region of the Dordogne, regarded as the "prehistoric capital" of western Europe, has several hundred other Stone Age sites; at Lascaux, Font-de-Gaume and other localities are the famous prehistoric cave paintings. The Abri Pataud shelter has been known since the 1890's, but its wealth of Stone Age relics came to light only in 1953, when Prof. Movius made a test excavation. Full-scale excavations began...
...vastly misunderstood phenomenon: radioactive fallout. With radioactive clouds from the Soviet tests spinning around the earth, fallout was on almost everybody's mind. U.S. housewives worried that their milk might be contaminated by the tests or that their children might get cancer. The Finns worried that their reindeer meat might become radioactive when reindeers munched on contaminated lichen. Great Britain set up plans for rationing baby foods and dried milk if radioactivity became too high. And in India, some people stopped buying chicken and other fowl because they feared radiation poisoning...
...Iron Curtain's other side, nations close to the test site, or in the path of fallout, took other precautions. The Finns laid off reindeer meat for fear arctic herds had been contaminated. Swedes were engaged in a wild goose chase to make sure migrating flocks had not been affected. In West Germany and Britain, the governments announced plans to distribute powdered milk for children if dairy supplies showed dangerous radioactivity. Japan reported record levels of radioactivity in rainwater, took extensive precautions to ensure that polluted fall rains would not endanger food or water supplies...