MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
he might be pardoned for thinking that the Stone Age 
came later than that of Iron. We know, however, thanks 
to our better information, that it was really the other 
way around. 
It is always easier to work from the known to the un- 
known. That is the way all riddles are solved. Man’s 
prehistoric past is really a riddle to be solved from certain 
ozs = 
typi yo 
MMMM 
Fic. 4. Cross-section of deposits in cave of Drachenloch, Switzerland, showing 
how consecutive occupation through the ages is recorded in distinct strata. 
After Bachler 
clues, a skein to be unraveled from the end in hand, which 
in this case is the present. Let us treat it so, starting 
from the things we know, and when we reach the things 
we have not known they will be much less unfamiliar to 
us. As we go backwards we shall see man’s great dis- 
coveries—metal working, weaving, pottery making, house 
building, the domestication of plants and animals, and 
implement making—fall away from him one by one, until 
at last we come to a time when he lived among the wild 
creatures, naked as one of them. 
The age we live in is an age of steel. This does not 
mean, of course, that we never employ other substances 
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