CHAPTER, Xiil 
THE NEW STONE: AGE 
To New Stone Age man we owe the development of true 
agriculture and especially of the growing of cereals, the 
basis of all later civilization. Where this first occurred we 
do not know as yet. Doubtless many peoples, once they 
had reached a certain stage of culture, took to protecting 
and cultivating and finally to sowing certain wild plants 
about them which experience had shown to be especially 
valuable for food. The American Indians, for example, 
almost certainly entered the Western Hemisphere as mere 
food gatherers, hunters, and fishermen. Yet by the time 
they became known to Europeans they had domesticated a 
great number of plants, embracing such important forms 
as maize, sweet and “‘Irish” potatoes, pumpkins, squashes, 
Lima and kidney beans, tomatoes, and tobacco, to men- 
tion only a few. 
We have emphasized the great part which magic played 
in the life of early man and how its influence spread into 
the vast field of food production. We no longer think it 
necessary to fertilize our fields with the life-blood of 
human beings, but primitive man did so through many 
thousands of years. Only in the nineteenth century was 
this cruel practice stamped out in British India, and it 
still persists in certain backward regions not yet under 
effective civilized control. The custom seems to have 
arisen through that false association of ideas so common 
to the emergent human mind. Primitive man observed 
very far back in his history that life in some mysterious 
way depended upon the blood. The idea persisted even 
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