Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/27

Rh 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 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 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