MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
toothed tiger. Man then found food, both animal and 
vegetable, plentiful, and he had little need for protection 
from cold. He may have known and used frre, although we 
have little actual evidence thereof. Probably he wore no 
clothing, and it is extremely unlikely that Pre-Chellean 
man had learned to erect even the simplest sort of shelter 
against inclement weather. His chief if not only need of 
defense, indeed, must have been against the dangerous wild 
animals of the time. The wandering life of the primitive 
* hunter and food gatherer of those far distant days, unlike 
that of later Mousterian man, was surely on the whole an 
easy one, entailing little in the way of real hardship, 
privation, or peril. 
The stone implements of the Pre-Chellean epoch are 
very roughly chipped; and the number of different types 1s 
extremely limited, their forms, indeed, being apparently 
determined mainly by accident. Pre-Chellean man made 
them almost exclusively from the cores of pebbles or nod- 
ules and not from the flakes chipped off from the latter. 
This distinction between a core and a flake industry is an 
important one. The Pre-Chellean flint worker clumsily 
left much of the crust or original surface of the pebble on 
his implements—something that the more expert tool 
makers of later periods rarely if ever did. The true coup- 
de-poing, or “‘fist-ax,” so characteristic of the Chellean and 
Acheulian epochs which were to follow, was not yet fully 
developed (Fig. 38), and it is most unlikely that the idea of 
providing an implement with any sort of handle or haft 
had yet occurred to man. In fact this device, which seems 
perfectly obvious to us, appears to have been beyond the 
inventive powers of so recent a people as the now extinct 
Tasmanians, who when they first became known to Euro- 
peans, less than 300 years ago, were still actually living in 
the lower Old Stone Age. 
The Pre-Chelleans probably used wood for clubs and 
perhaps spears, although of such objects we have no actual 
remains. However, at Piltdown, in the same deposit in 
[ 184 ] 
