ARTS AND HANDICRAFTS 317 



laborious manner, which they did by covering it with ashes. 

 Apparently also they conveyed it from one settlement to 

 another ; the cooking of food by means of fire was their concern 

 also such as the roasting and baking of meat on the open fire, 

 roasting in holes between hot stones, the baking of bread into 

 cakes and loaves, and later, when man had learnt how to make 

 pottery, the cooking in pots over the fire or by means of hot 

 stones plunged into the water. 



Handicrafts. The larger number of the known European 

 examples of " fire " places furnish also the evidences of human 

 handicrafts. Even before the discovery of fire, however, man 

 was not entirely without defensive aids against the beasts of the 

 field. Lucretius was probably right when he said : " Nails, 

 hands and teeth were the oldest weapons, but there were also 

 clubs of wood and stone". Here man surpassed the higher 

 apes and the anthropoids merely in the possession of a more 

 developed and useful thumb. Kaatsch supposes that probably 

 man's tree-climbing ancestors used instruments of stone and 

 wood ; but the supposition becomes very questionable when we 

 consider the capabilities of the primates in this respect at the 

 present time. It is probably baboons which Darwin l describes 

 as opening hard nuts by breaking them with stones, using 

 stakes as levers wherewith to prize up rocks, and employing 

 sticks and stones as weapons. Brehm, 2 however, thinks it 

 doubtful if the chimpanzee, or any other anthropoid, can use 

 any sort of weapon, as their rolling gait on the two hind-legs 

 does not permit of free movements ; the force necessary for 

 throwing, or hurling, a weapon properly would involve such a 

 movement of the arms as to cause any ape to lose his balance 

 and fall to the ground. The acquirement and employment of 

 tools is therefore a prerogative of man, and due to his power 

 of standing firmly and uprightly on his two legs. 



A pure Stone Age, however, in which man employed stone 

 and nothing else for making his tools and weapons, certainly never 

 occurred. It is much more probable that wood and bones 

 were used either previously to, or simultaneously with, stone. 

 Many writers describe a Wood and Shell Age preceding the 

 Stone Age, a view for which much may be said, especially as the 



1 Darwin, loc. cit., v., p. 104. 2 Brehm, Tierleben, 5., p. 25. 



