MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
substance seems to have been occasionally employed be- 
fore, although the only example known thus far is the 
artificially shaped fragment of an elephant’s leg bone 
from Piltdown, already mentioned. Now, however, among 
the instruments employed by Neanderthal man we find 
bone “anvils,” or chopping blocks, and leg bones of the 
cave bear worked down at one end, apparently for use in 
helping to remove the hides from large animals. 
Undoubtedly the Neanderthalers also utilized wood in 
many ways, among others in the manufacture of spears, 
clubs, and perhaps throwing-sticks. They seem to have 
used a certain type of notched scraper of flint, somewhat 
after the manner of a modern spokeshave, for dressing 
down cylindrical wooden objects such as spear shafts. At 
Claxton-on-Sea, in the east of England, there has actually 
been found the point of a wooden spear which almost 
surely belongs to the Mousterian epoch. 
Quite possibly, too, by this time man had learned the 
secret of arming spears, and perhaps clubs also, with flint 
points, to secure greater power of penetration. To us 
nowadays, the working parts of any tool—the head of an 
ax, the point of a spear, or the tines of a pitchfork—seem 
the essential and primary ones. But that was not at all 
the way in which primitive man looked at it. With him 
the spear, for example, made entirely of one straight and 
pointed shaft of wood, came first. Only very long after- 
ward did the idea dawn on him that if he fastened one of 
his piercing implements of flint to the end of his spear he 
could increase its effectiveness. Similarly with implements 
designed for striking, the plain wooden club must have been 
used for ages before anybody thought of improving it by 
fastening to it such things as flint flakes, sharks’ teeth, or 
fragments of volcanic glass, as various peoples have done. 
The shapes of some of the flint implements of the Mous- 
terian epoch make it hard to see how they could have 
been used with any effect unless fitted with handles of 
some sort. 
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