334 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN mSTITITTION, 1955 



effect depending largely on the blimtness or, if sharp, the width of 

 the tool. 



The forceful pull and push of a blunt, serrated object like an ante- 

 lope palate can scrape, grate, abrade, or rasp off fat and flesh from 

 skin and bone, or bark and rind from branch and stem. Persistence 

 in scraping or rubbing leads to various named effects like braying, 

 shredding, or polishing, depending on the material scraped. 



The forceful inward or outward blows of objects with business ends 

 as blunt as long bones or wooden billets can result in variously named 

 effects such as pounding, hammering, cracking, or smashing; but, if 

 the object wielded has a flattened platelike form and is furnished, like 

 the mandible, scapula, or innominate bone, with more or less narrow 

 and even linear borders, it is a natural blade and can hack and chop, 

 or cleave and split as neatly as sword or ax. 



Apart from hurling then, pounding, cleaving, scraping, stabbing (or 

 digging), and slicing (or sawing) may therefore be defined as the five 

 basic operations carried out by men with tools. From one or another 

 of these basic operations is derived every other implemental proce- 

 dure in our most modern machine shops and our largest vocabularies. 

 These five basic operations, and many others that can be given names, 

 were all comprehensively subserved by the osteodontokeratic culture. 



Now when man or protoman began to employ pebbles for cutting as 

 well as hurling or pounding they could not meet all five of these needs 

 as well as osteodontokeratic tools did — they were but accessory tools. 

 Not until man had learned to fashion pebble tools and other stone 

 tools sufficiently sharp-edged and sharp-pointed to be permanently 

 substituted for tusks, antelope mandibles, and horns could they begin 

 to replace them. Consequently osteodontokeratic tools continued to 

 be used alongside stone tools down through the ages. Stone tools, 

 however sharp or massive and useful as missiles, could never become 

 substitutes for bones and wood as clubs until they became hafted to 

 bone or wood ; at the outset pebbles could only assist man to fashion 

 better clubs from wood than protoman could find naturally in bones. 

 There were also among osteodontokeratic tools primal tools, such as 

 palatal scrapers and mandibular saws for some of whose uses stone- 

 age man apparently never found entirely suitable lithic substitutes. 

 The effectiveness of the osteodontokeratic armamentarium, despite an 

 advanced knowledge of stone, is nowhere better illustrated than by its 

 persistence in the Arctic, Pacific, and Antarctic cultures until recent 

 times. 



This incapacity of pebble tools to meet all the implemental needs of 

 protohumanity demonstrates the futility of imagining, with William 

 L. Straus, Jr. (1955, p. 133), that tool making "represents the greatest 

 distinction of man," or with Oakley (1951, pp. 69-81), that "tool- 



