MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
6000 B.c. Along with its use, we meet with many traces 
surviving from the preceding epoch, that in which weapons 
and implements were made of stone. In fact, for a very 
long period men seemed to have looked on the lumps of 
native copper and the nuggets of gold which they found 
here and there merely as varieties of tough, malleable 
stone, and cut, pounded, and polished them into shape 
long before some prehistoric Edison found out how to 
melt and cast them. 
ees Ei ‘ Hence we often speak, 
; not of an Age of Copper, 
but of a Chalcolithic Pe- 
riod, from two Greek 
words meaning, respec- 
tively; (copper) (anid 
COMETS Then, as we push on 
Fic. 5. Outlines of the skulls of a chim- still further backward 
panzee (dotted line), of a Neanderthal into the past, we reach 
man (solid line), and of a modern European a time when men knew 
(broken line); showing stages in cranial A 
development. After Boule nothing of metals, but 
depended instead on 
stone, chipped, ground, and polished, for their most 
serviceable tools and weapons. This cultural stage is 
called the Neolithic Period, or New Stone Age. In its long 
course, man made very many of the basic discoveries upon 
which all his later progress has depended. The further 
back we penetrate into bygone ages, the less certain be- 
comes our chronology, because we have less and less to go 
by. But perhaps we shall be reasonably close to the truth 
in estimating that in the more advanced parts of the world 
of that day the New Stone Age was beginning something 
like 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. 
As our knowledge of the past steadily increases, we 
realize more and more that there are few breaks in prog- 
ress. Successive stages always grow quite naturally out 
of those that have gone just before. Thus instead of a 
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