Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/25



CHAPTER I

EARLY MANKIND IN EUROPE

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.

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