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Nature does not equip us with knowledge of civilization A new-born child placed in the wilds of a tropical forest and left there alone would of course die. If, however, we can imagine him possessing the strength to survive until he reached the age of ten years, he would know none of the many things which a boy of ten in your town or city now knows. Hunger would have led him to eat the nuts, fruits, and digestible roots and tubers which he would find in the forest. But if you should show him a chair, he would not know what its use might be. If you placed him in front of a door, he would not know how to open it. He would possess no tools or weapons or implements of any kind, nor any clothing. He would probably never have seen a fire; or, if so, he would not know how to make one or realize that his food might be cooked. Finally, he would not even know how to speak, or that there was such a thing as speech.

Earliest man had to learn everything All these things every child among us learns from others. But the earliest men had no one to teach them these things, and by slow experience and long effort they had to learn them for themselves. Everything had to be found out; every tool, however simple, had to be invented; and, above all, the earliest man had to discover that he could express his feelings and ideas by making sounds with his throat and mouth. At first thought the men who began such discoveries seem to us to be ​mere animals. Nevertheless the earliest man possessed, among other advantages, three things which lifted him high above the animals. He had a larger and a more powerful brain than any animal; he had a pair of wonderful hands such as no other creature possessed, and with these he could make tools and implements; finally, he had a throat and vocal organs such that in the course of ages he would learn to speak.

Condition of earliest man At first man must have roamed the tropical forests without any clothing, without huts or shelter of any kind, with no tools or weapons, eating roots, fruit or berries where he found them. Occasionally he may have found a dead bird or animal killed by some other creature, and thus learning the taste of flesh he would be led to pursue the less dangerous animals and to lay them low with a stone or a club. His food was of course all raw, for he could not even make a fire, nor did he know that roasted flesh was better food.

Condition of the Tasmanians of modern times Men so completely uncivilized as this no longer exist on earth. The most savage tribes found by explorers have learned how useful fire is and they understand how to make it. The people whom the English found on the island of Tasmania a century or so ago were among the lowest savages known to us. They wore no clothing; they had not learned how to build a hut; they did not know how to make a bow and arrows, nor even to fish. They had no goats, sheep, or cows, no horses, nor even a dog. They had never heard of sowing seed nor raising a crop of any kind. They did not know that clay will harden in the fire, and so they had no pottery jars, jugs, or dishes for food.

Naked and houseless, the Tasmanians had learned to satisfy only a very few of man's needs. Yet that which they had learned had carried them a long way beyond the earliest men. They could kindle a fire, which kept them warm in cold weather, and over it they cooked their meat. In order to secure this meat they had learned to construct very good spears, though without metal tips, for they had never heard of metal. These ​spears they could throw with great accuracy and thus bring down the game they needed for food, or drive away their human enemies. They could take a flat stone, and by chipping off its edges to thin them they could produce a rude knife with which to skin and cut up the game they killed. They were also very deft in making cups, vessels, and baskets of bark fiber. Above all, they had a simple language, with words for all the things they used, and this language served for everything they needed to say.

It is certain that man has existed on the earth for several Progress of early man traceable by us after he begins to make stone tools hundred thousand years at least. We cannot now trace all the different stages in his progress, which brought him at last as far as the savage Tasmanians had come. We do not know the various steps which finally enabled him to speak. With fire he would become acquainted from the forest fires kindled by lightning, or from the floods of molten lava descending the slopes of the fiery mountains along the Mediterranean. The wooden clubs and other weapons or tools of wood which he made in this stage of his career have, of course, long ago perished. As soon as he began to make stone tools, however, he was producing something which might last for untold thousands of years. This art he first learned in Europe some fifty thousand years ago. After that he left behind him a trail of stone tools, and by these we can follow him through the different stages of his upward progress, as they show us his increasing skill in such matters. We thus find that he passed through three stages: the Early Stone Age, the Middle Stone Age, and the Late Stone Age.

A few rough and irregular fragments of flint still survive to Early Stone Age tools show us man's earliest attempts to make weapons or tools of stone. The form which he finally adopted as his first successful tool, however, is a roughly shaped piece of flint as long as a man's hand, which we call a fist-hatchet (Fig. I). Its ragged ​

Fig. I. A Flint Fist-Hatchet of the Early Stone Age

The earliest finished tool produced by man, chipped from a great flake of flint some fifty thousand years ago. The original is about nine inches long, and the drawing reduces it to less than one third. It was grasped in the fist by the upper (narrower) part, and never had any handle. Handles of wood or horn do not appear until much later (compare Fig. 7). See Ancient Times, Fig. 2

edge was sufficiently sharp so that its owner could cut and chop with it. Its maker had not learned to attach a handle, but he grasped it firmly in his fist. The first of these fist-hatchets discovered in modern times was found in England two hundred years ago, but at that time no one understood its enormous age, or guessed who had made it. For the last fifty years such fist-hatchets have been found in large numbers deeply buried under the sand and soil that has gathered since their owners used them along the rivers of France, Belgium, and England. They are found side by side with the bones of tropical animals of vast size, showing that the men who made these stone tools lived in a much warmer climate than that of Europe to-day.

We may call the period of the fist-hatchets the Early Stone Age. The man of that day, some fifty thousand years ago, led the life of a, hunter, roaming about in the shadows of the lofty forests which fringed the streams and covered the wide plains of western Europe. The ponderous hippopotamus wallowed along the banks of the rivers. The fierce rhinoceros with a horn three feet long charged through the jungles of what is now France and England. The hunter fleeing before them caught dim glimpses of mountainous elephants plunging through the thick tropical growth. ​Herds of bison and wild horses grazed on the uplands and the glades resounded far and wide with the notes of tropical birds which settled in swarms upon the tree tops. At night the hunter slept where the chase found him, trembling in the darkness at the roar of the lion or the mighty saber-tooth tiger.

The coming of the ice For thousands of years the life of the hunter went on with

little change. He slowly improved his rough stone fist-hatchet, and he probably learned to make additional implements of wood, but of these last we know nothing. Then he began to notice that the air of his forest home was losing its tropical warmth. Geologists have not yet found out why, but as the centuries passed, the ice which all the year round still overlies the region of the North Pole and the summits of the Alps began to descend. The northern ice crept further and further southward until it covered England as far south as the Thames. The glaciers of the Alps pushed down the Rhone valley as far as the spot where the city of Lyons now stands. On our own continent of North America the southern edge of the ice is marked by lines of bowlders carried and left there by the ice. Such lines of bowlders are found, for example, as far south as Long Island and westward along the valleys of the Ohio and the Missouri.^[1] The hunter saw the glittering blue masses of ice with their crown of snow, pushing through the green of his forest abode and crushing down vast trees in many a sheltered glen or favorite hunting ground. Gradually these savage men of early Europe were forced to accustom themselves to a cold climate, but many of the animals familiar to the hunter retreated to the warmer south, never to return. ​

Remains of Middle Stone Age man in caverns Unable to build himself a shelter from the cold, the hunter took refuge in the limestone caves, where he and his descendants continued to live for thousands of years, during the next or "Middle Stone Age."

Fig. 2. Selection of Flint Tools of Middle Stone Age Man

These tools are not only more highly varied than man possessed before (see Fig. I) but they are much more finely finished, especially along the edges, where you can see that tiny flakes have been chipped off in a long row, producing a sharp cutting edge. Many thousands of years elapsed from the time of Fig. I to that of Fig. 2

Archaeologists now find in the caverns of France, Spain, and Italy numerous objects used by these cave men during their long sojourn in the caverns. Rubbish, once even as much as forty feet deep, accumulated on the cavern floor, as century after century the sand and earth blew in, and fragments of rock fell from the ceiling. To-day we find among all this also many layers of ashes and charcoal from the cave dwellers' fire, besides numerous tools, weapons, and implements which he used. These things disclose, step after step, his slow progress and show us that man had now left the old fist-hatchet far behind and become a real craftsman. ​The industries of Middle Stone Age man We see him at the door of his cave, carefully chipping off the edge of his flint tools and producing such a fine cutting edge that he can use it to shape bone, ivory, and especially reindeer horn. The mammoth furnishes him with ivory, and great herds of reindeer which had come southward with the ice are grazing before the mouth of the cavern. The hunter has a considerable list of tools from which he can select.

Fig. 3. Ivory Needle of the Middle Stone Age

With such needles and with tendons thread the skin clothing of the Middle Stone Age hunters was sewed together by the earliest seamstresses of Europe, twenty or twenty-five thousand years ago

We see at his elbow knives, chisels, drills and hammers, polishers and scrapers, all of flint (Fig. 2); while with these he works out pins, needles, spoons, and ladles, all of ivory or bone, and carves them with pictures of the animals he hunts in the forest (Fig. 4). He now fashions a keen, barbed ivory spear point, which he mounts with such needles and with tendons as on a long wooden shaft. He has also discovered the bow and arrow and carries at his girdle a sharp flint dagger. The fine ivory needles (Fig. 3) show that the hunter's body is now protected from cold and the brambles of the trackless forest by clothing sewed together out of the skins of the animals he has slain.

Life of the Middle Stone Age hunter Thus equipped the hunter of the Middle Stone Age was a much more dangerous foe of the wild creatures than his ancestors of the Early Stone Age. In a single cavern in Sicily archæologists have dug out the bones of no less than two thousand hippopotami which these Middle Stone Age hunters killed. Here too lay even the bone whistle with which the returning hunter announced his coming to the hungry family waiting in the cave. Surrounded by revolting piles of garbage and amid foul odors of decaying flesh our savage European ancestor crept into his cave dwelling at night, little realizing that many feet beneath the cavern floor on which he slept lay the remains of his ancestors in layer upon layer, the accumulations of thousands of years. ​Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/32 ​Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/33 ​Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/34 ​Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/35 ​Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/36 ​Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/37 ​Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/38 ​Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/39 ​Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/40