1 8 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



stimulated both by hereditary impulses as well as by its own 

 .reasoning from cause to effect, and induced to actions by new 

 experiences, they invented identical things, because the identical 

 needs of peoples similarly situated require identical forms of relief. 

 The primal inventions made others possible because they provided 

 new things that others might handle, might experience and might 

 think about. A right combination occurred, and a new device was 

 born. The same combinations of need, material, reason, incentive, 

 impulse and action were quite likely to occur to several men. One 

 man might make the discovery in South America ten thousand years 

 later than another man who lived in a cave in the foothills of the 

 French Pyrenees. Yet ,in time the need would have been met. 



It is not surprising, therefore, to find the same types of implements 

 the world over. The wonder is at the daring of primitive man, 

 the spirit of adventure that caused him to wander over seas and 

 deserts and to occupy every considerable body of land on the 

 globe; that the man-animal could adapt himself to every form of 

 climate, and with his few inventions could fasten himself to living 

 conditions. It may easily be believed that the permanence of the 

 biological characteristics making up the species man, is due to the 

 early discovery of tools and weapons, exterior to his own person. 

 As a permanent memorial of this belief, the chipped flints of all 

 the various periods of cultural development remain. Man fixed 

 himself as man when first of his own free will he chipped out an 

 eolith. 



If mankind enlightened ever desires to pay tribute to the handi- 

 work of the race, and by monument or inscription gratefully to 

 record its debt to the cause of its material progress, it may fittingly 

 raise the eolith to view and say, "All that we know of art, science, 

 invention and industry, and even the unity of the human family, we 

 owe to the man or men who first flaked stone to points and edges." 



3 THE ORIGIN AND DISTRIBUTION OF MAN IN NORTH 



AMERICA 



Archeologists deduce the former presence of man in any given 

 area by the discovery of human skeletal remains and by the finding 

 of cultural artifacts, such as chipped flints. In Europe and in Asia 

 these things have been found under such conditions as to point out 

 a remote antiquity. The finding of chipped stone implements, 

 mingled with the cracked bones of extinct animals in the caves of 

 France and Belgium proved that man had lived in the period when 



