THE ANIMAL, MAN (ANTHROPOLOGY) 549 



learned to polish their flint axes, chisels, and other tools and weapons, 

 thus making the characteristic neolithic instruments. Meanwhile 

 harpoons and needles of bone had been invented, and the begin- 

 nings of human vanity were recorded in the form of beads and other 

 ornaments made of bone and shell. 



"The change from the Stone age to the Age of Metals," says 

 Professor MacCurdy, "was the most revolutionary step ever taken 

 by man." Of the metals, copper was first employed in Egypt, 

 mostly at first for ornaments, as early as 5000 B.C. This was fol- 

 lowed by malleable bronze, and finally by iron, which is not at all 

 easy to smelt out of the rocks where it occurs in nature. Iron, and 

 particularly its modification in the form of steel, has come to be 

 devoted to so many uses that if it were all magically withdrawn 

 today, our civilization would collapse. 



Getting the Upper Hand of Things 



Something of man's later successes and failures in the control of 

 his environment is related in the following pages on "Man, the 

 Conqueror." In this connection, however, may properly be men- 

 tioned a few of the very first problematical steps that led to his 

 ultimate triumph as a human being. 



Primitive man was without doubt overwhelmed and molded 

 by a dominating environment, and was to a very large extent the 

 slave of his surroundings. He could not have been aware of very 

 much in the make-up of w^hat was about him, in the sense in which 

 modern man knows his external world, any more than ants, running 

 about busily in the grass, realize the clouds floating in the sky over- 

 head. The revelations and mysteries of nature which the man of 

 today senses on all sides, as w^ell as the orderly sequences of cause 

 and effect that make up events, probably made very little impression 

 on our remote animal-like ancestors in the days when they were 

 becoming human. They were probably unaware even of the existence 

 of these surrounding factors, just as starfish are ignorant of stars, 

 or ants are unaware of clouds. 



Flashing lightning and crashing thunder primitive man did not 

 understand, and it terrified him into superstitious subjection to the 

 unknown forces about him. His dawning mind was enslaved because 

 he did not yet know his world. Intellectual freedom, based upon 

 a knowledge of the laws of nature, was to come only after long years 



