Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/80

 6o A Short History of The World the Old Stone Age, and how dream and fancy would create stories and legends about such things that would become credible as they told them. Some of these stories would be good enough to remember and tell again. The women would tell them to the children and so estabUsh a tradition. To this day most imaginative children invent long stories in which some favourite doll or animal or some fantastic semi-human being figures as the hero, and primitive man probably RELICS OF THE STONE AGE Chert implements from Somaliland, In general form they are similar to those found in Western and Northern Europe did the same — ^with a much stronger disposition to believe his hero real. For the very earliest of the true men that we know of, were probably quite talkative beings. In that way they have differed from the Neanderthalers and had an advantage over them. The Neanderthaler may have been a dumb animal. Of course the primitive human speech was probably a very scanty collection of names, and may have been eked out with gestures and signs. There is no sort of savage so low as not to have a kind of science of cause and effect. But primitive man was not very critical in his associations of cause with effect ; he very easily connected an effect with something quite wrong as its cause. " You do so and so," he