294 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



or other living things who use them. Man's ancestors, at some very 

 early time, hit upon the idea of shaping stones — first, by breaking, 

 and, later, by systematically chipping them — to fit various purposes. 

 The primitive banging stone attached to the end of stick became a 

 mace or hammer; with one pointed end it became a pick; with one 

 wedge-shaped end, an axe. Meantime, knives, scrapers, chisels, and 

 sharp points for boring or drilling were invented. Similar tools were 

 developed in wood and bone for work on softer substances. The 

 process was a laborious one of trial and error, and it extended over 

 hundreds of thousands of years. Then came one of those major ad- 

 vances that occur in the evolution of any series of things after 

 which one may say that something new has been added though it 

 remains hard to say just exactly how, when, where, or why it came 

 about. 



At some stage, apemen conceived the idea of using tools by what 

 we now call remote control. Instead of waiting until you caught 

 your horse or rabbit to bash in its head, you lurked behind a con- 

 venient bush and threw your stone at the quarry as it passed by. It 

 is strange to reflect that this apparently most simple and basic 

 stratagem appears to have been quite foreign to life on this planet 

 until man appeared. Monkeys may occasionally lob some object at an 

 adversary; digging dogs and baboons can shower you with stones; 

 and certain fish can shoot blobs of water at flies; but no animal actu- 

 ally throws things deHberately. 



The first projectile was probably a thrown stone, but some ape- 

 men, with that latent strain common to all men, early noticed that 

 a sharpened stone at the end of a stick did a much more deadly job, 

 and thus the spear was born. But this did not hold fast in the quarry. 

 Next came some even cleverer character who, presumably noting 

 that a high proportion of both men and beasts struck by a spear still 

 got away, conceived the idea of attaching the spear to a line. It 

 probably took the first half of the recent ice age to figure this out, 

 but the end product was the harpoon, which is nothing more than 

 a series of arrowheads, joined one in front of the other. The idea 

 very probably originated with the triangular arrowhead, the two 

 backward-pointing tines of which so greatly increase the holding 

 power of the whole device. 



There is some evidence that the harpoon may have been employed 



