MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
baton de commandement, or staff of office, but this is merely 
guesswork (Fig. 45). Was it a sort of war-club, ceremonial 
or otherwise, or the badge of a medicine man? Was it a 
toggle used to hold the edges of a fur cloak together? Was 
it a shaft straightener, or was its purpose that of taking 
the kinks out of a length of rawhide rope? As yet we can 
not tell. 
In the Late Aurignacian also there begin to appear bone 
needles, at first without eyes; these indicate a considerable 
advance in the working up and stitching together of skins, 
probably for clothing. 
But perhaps the outstanding technical achievement of 
the Aurignacian epoch was the invention of the burin, or 
engraving tool, a flint with a sharp angulate point used for 
incising figures of various sorts on the walls of caves. Their 
remarkable artistic genius constitutes the most notable 
thing about the Cro-Magnon race, although, like all art in 
its beginnings, theirs was inextricably bound up with 
magical ideas and practices. 
The Cro-Magnon hunter, like many savage races since, 
believed unshakably that, if he drew a representation of an 
animal and then performed over it magical ceremonies of 
the right sort, he could cause animals of that species to 
become more numerous or easier to capture, as the case 
might be. So far as we know now, this represents man’s 
earliest scheme to increase his own food supply by assist- 
ing or coercing nature to be more liberal. To us the notion 
of producing food through the growing of crops or the 
rearing of animals seems perfectly obvious. It was not so, 
however, to the primitive hunter and food gatherer, and 
he must have endured long and painful experiences of 
scarcity before he finally grasped the idea that he himself 
could do anything at all to make food more plentiful. 
When this idea first dawned on him, however, Auri- 
gnacian man did not set to work right away planting and 
tending various wild seeds and tubers or catching and 
domesticating certain wild animals. Such a line of conduct 
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