Evening in the North 293 



at this juncture, most germane to our record of man's pursuit of 

 the whale, and for two reasons. First, even today a not inconsiderable 

 number of dead whales are washed up on seashores all over the world, 

 and the farther one goes back in time, the more such creatures 

 should have been so beached, because they were much more numer- 

 ous in all seas before man started to slaughter them systematically. 

 Men-apes probably, therefore, came across many dead whales, and 

 what could have been more glorious a find to a family party of 

 such lowly creatures who were at least partially carrion-feeders 

 and certainly scavengers. Such a mountain of ripe flesh would keep 

 their potbeUies filled for a whole season, because, even in the tropics, 

 it takes a quite unrealized length of time for a whale carcass to de- 

 compose. In fact, the heat generated by decomposition through 

 normal bacterial action so raises the temperature inside the body 

 that it starts to cook the flesh within a matter of hours. I once lived 

 with a dead sperm on a tropical beach for three weeks while cutting 

 out its skeleton, and although the stench was terrific and rancid oil 

 poured continually out of the carcass in rivulets under the blistering 

 sun, and although the beast had been dead at least a month before I 

 found it, the great masses of flesh beneath its blubber were perfectly 

 fresh when cut out and they remained so until I left, even though 

 scattered about a muddy foreshore. Of much greater importance to 

 our story, however, is something quite else which must have oc- 

 curred to some apemen who wandered about beaches in search of 

 a meal. 



These primitive parodies of ourselves had, at a very early period 

 of their evolution, discovered that a recalcitrant nut, an animal's 

 skull, or any other hard object containing edible material could be 

 opened more easily by pounding it either on a stone or, conversely, 

 with a stone. Certain wasps use small stones to tamp down the mud 

 with which they construct their nests; some birds break snail or 

 clam shells by dropping them from a height on to rocks; and chim- 

 panzees will batter away persistently and with enormous intent 

 upon all things that appear to be hollow with anything serviceable 

 that comes to hand. It is obviously thus that our ancestors came by 

 "tools." 



Now, tools have an evolutionary procession of their own which 

 is, to a certain extent, altogether separate from that of the humans 



