14 INTRODUCTION 
Since it is impossible to fix the length of time, if any, which 
separates the New Stone from the Copper Age, we can make 
no adequate guess as to how many generations of men and how 
many centuries of time were needed to transform the bent 
into the barbed hook. Perhaps Aineolithic experts can. 
Extant examples from Egypt of both furnish, however, 
some chronological data. If the argument from silence, or 
rather from non-survival in one particular country, be not 
pressed unduly, these tend to prove that so far from their being 
twin brethren, the birth of the bent anteceded that of the 
barbed hook by at any rate the number of years which separated 
the Ist from the XVIIIth Dynasty, before which the occurrence 
of a barbed hook is rare. 
The first implement of fishing, be it what you please, was 
no split-cane Rod, nor the “ town-like Net ’”’ of Oppian, but 
some simple device created by the insistent necessity of pro- 
curing food. With our primitive ancestors, as with the com- 
panions of Menelaus, often “was hunger gnawing at their 
bellies,’’ a hunger accentuated at one period by the retreat 
further into the primeval forests or at another by the actual 
decrease of the animals, which had hitherto furnished the 
staple of Man’s sustenance. 
Fortunately other data more ancient and more authori- 
tative than the Egyptian or Sumerian as to priority of 
‘implement help the quest of Archzologists. 
Blazing their trail backwards in the half-light of non- 
historical forests, they hap on many a cache of ancient devices 
in the settlements of the New Stone Man. Pausing merely to 
examine these, they cut their way through yet denser and 
darker timber, until eventually they emerge at an opening 
wherein once stood the ultimate if scarcely the original store- 
house, whence Neolithic Man drew and in the course of long 
travel bettered his materials—the dwelling place of the Old 
Stone Man. 
To this store-house we too must press, tarrying only at 
the caches to note cursorily Neolithic betterment or invention. 
The dwelling place is one of many mansions, or rather of many 
rude caverns dotted over Europe. 
