THE ORIGIN OF MAN 113 



And the stone implements, which we have recovered 

 in millions, confirms this. Whatever dispute there 

 may be about skulls, the stone implements tell a 

 plain story of gradual evolution. They are at first 

 so poor that experts could not agree for years whether 

 they had been touched by the hand of man or whether 

 their shape was purel}^ accidental. These are called 

 "Eoliths." The next and largest class of stone im- 

 plements, those which belong to the Old Stone Age, 

 begin with crudely chipped flints, and gradually 

 pass, in the course of perhaps a quarter-of-a-million 

 years, to rather skilfully shaped hand-axes, scrapers, 

 chisels, etc. They seem to make it impossible for us 

 to think that there were two races, a higher and a 

 lower, half-a-million years ago. Indeed, only a few 

 of the crudest flints (if any) go back to that remote 

 period, yet man had then already been on the earth 

 for ages. Thus from the stone implements we gather 

 that for ages man was too low in intelligence even to 

 shape stones for his use as tools and weapons. He 

 probably used sticks. Then for further hundreds of 

 thousands of years he was still too low to conceive 

 the idea of making handles for his implements, or 

 making the bow and arrow, and merely made such 

 progress as a poor type of savage might in the shaping 

 and finer touching of his stones. It is a story of most 

 extraordinarily slow progress in intelligence. 



Putting together the bones and the stones, we can 

 fairly reconstruct the story of early man. For some 



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