440 GENERAL ZOOLOGY 



thousand years ago. Regarding the place of man's origin, 

 some have believed that his earliest home was Africa, be- 

 cause the great apes, which most resemble him, live there 

 today. Others have maintained that it was somewhere in 

 equatorial regions, where the vegetation is abundant and the 

 climate quite similar throughout the year; others claim 

 that it was on some of the high plains of the temperate zone, 

 like those of Persia and Tibet. 



Primitive man was a savage, living in caves. His princi- 

 pal means of defense, in addition to those with which nature 

 had provided him, were a stone picked from the ground or a 

 bough broken from a tree. At an early stage in his develop- 

 ment he learned the use of fire, made clothing of the skins of 

 wild beasts to keep himself warm, and fashioned rude imple- 

 ments out of bone, shell, horn, wood, and stone. In those 

 places where such easily worked metals as copper and zinc 

 were accessible man early learned their use and made from 

 them implements of bronze, a compound of the two metals. 

 From a hunting existence arose the nomadic or wandering 

 life, with property in the shape of herds of domesticated or 

 semidomesticated animals, and the more fixed agricultural 

 condition in which the main dependence for food was on the 

 products of the field. We see people today in each of these 

 conditions of existence. Along with the advance in the mode 

 of life has gone a mental and moral evolution as man's con- 

 quest of nature has been pushed through wider and wider 

 fields. 



