Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/21

 GENERAL HISTORY OF EUROPE BOOK I. THE ANCIENT WORLD CHAPTER I PREHISTORIC MAN I. How MAN HAS BUILT UP CIVILIZATION 1. Ignorance and Poverty of Earliest Man. How long man has' existed on the earth no one knows. Those who have studied the matter most carefully in recent times make various guesses some five "hundred thousand years, some a million. In the be- ginning he must have lived without houses or clothes or any means of making a fire. He had to invent even language. There were no books or teachers to help him, and so he had to find out everything for himself. He wandered naked and houseless through the woods and over the plains, picking up a living by looking for wild fruit, seeds, berries, roots, and such animals as he might find dead or could succeed in striking down with a stone or stick. As a great English philosopher long ago remarked, the original life of man must have been "poor, nasty, brutish, and short." We may imagine one of these naked, brutish forefathers of ours sitting in the shade and amusing himself by picking up a sharp stone arid scraping the bark off a stick he had at hand with a view to killing a squirrel that was playing around. He might happen to sharpen the stick and so make a rude spear, which he discovered could be used to pierce an animal as well as hit him. In some such way the first weapon better than clubs and stones might have been invented. Now to invent means to "happen on" i