PROBLEM 5. 



The Stages of Man's Development on the Earth 573 



first; then cattle, sheep, pigs, and don- 

 keys were domesticated; horses were 

 tamed later on. Men settled together in 

 groups and undoubtedly had some sort 

 of social organization. 



Even before they planted crops, they 

 learned to make pottery and to weave 

 baskets. The remains of villages show 

 that these early men not only buried 

 their dead with much ceremony but en- 

 gaged in worship of some kind. It is be- 

 lieved that some of them worshiped the 

 sun, for stones are found in lines leading 

 in the direction of the rising sun. 



The Bronze and the Iron Age. The 

 stone ages lasted until six thousand 

 years ago. At this time men learned how 

 to smelt copper from its ores; that is, 

 they heated copper-bearing rocks until 

 they obtained copper. They melted cop- 

 per and cast it into tools and other arti- 

 cles. At about the same time they learned 

 how to obtain tin. About 5000 years ago 

 they learned how to combine copper and 

 tin to make bronze, a much harder metal 

 than either of the other two. Thus the 

 Bronze Age is associated with the begin- 

 nings of a new and much more advanced 

 culture. For one thing the search for 

 copper and tin led to far more extensive 

 travel. Goods and ideas were exchanged 

 to a much greater extent than before. 

 Civilization spread rapidly and advanced 

 more quickly. 



About 3500 years ago men began to 

 enter into the Iron Age. This metal is 

 better than bronze because it is even 

 harder. At the time when the smelting 

 of iron was discovered the period of 

 written history begins, though monu- 

 ments with inscriptions date farther 

 back. At this point we end our story of 



the slow development of men and their 

 cultures. 



Did you notice that the first, or Old 

 Stone Age, lasted for many hundreds of 

 thousands of years until after Homo 

 sapiens was well established and spread 

 over the earth? The first discoveries were 

 slow in coming. Each of the others came 

 in more and more rapid succession. Does 

 that mean that modern men are more in- 

 telligent than Neandertal men or the 

 early men of the species Homo sapiens, 

 or the men who gave us the cultures of 

 early Egypt, Greece, and Rome? There 

 is no reason for beheving this. Each dis- 

 covery opens up new possibilities for 

 discoveries. They pile up so fast that in 

 another few thousand years the Atomic 

 Age may have been left so far behind 

 that in an account of man's civilization 

 it, too, may be dismissed in a few sen- 

 tences. 



What is a "race"? Race is a word we 

 hear frequently and we think we know 

 its meaning until we are asked to define 

 it. A race is a subdivision of the species 

 Homo sapiens whose members tend to 

 have certain inborn physical characters 

 in common. But you can see that as soon 

 as members of two different races inter- 

 marry new combinations of physical 

 traits arise. Naturally, in thousands of 

 years this happened frequently. For this 

 reason races are not sharply distin- 

 guished one from another. There are 

 many in-between individuals who are 

 placed in one race or another according 

 to whether a majority of their characters 

 are of one kind or another. 



Man's classification of man. A race is 

 not the largest or first subdivision of the 

 species Homo sapiens. We divide man 



