THE 
AMERICAN NATURALIST. 
VoL. x11. — MOVEMBER, 1879. — No. 11. 
HOW OUR ANCESTORS IN THE STONE AGE MADE 
THEIR IMPLEMENTS. 
BY B. B. REDDING. 
LINT, obsidian, chert and other hard stones having a con- 
choidal fracture, manufactured into forms to be used as axes, 
chisels, knives, scrapers, spear and arrowheads, are found in nearly 
all parts of the world. They are almost the only remains of a 
race of people who inhabited the earth at a period so remote that 
they were contemporaneous with the wooly elephant, the cave 
bear, the Irish elk and other animals now extinct. These imple- 
ments are often found in connection with the remains of these and 
other fossil animals. In one instance in Denmark a stone arrow- 
head was found imbedded in the bone of a deer which has been 
so long extinct that the species is only now known from its fos- 
sil remains. The people who made these stone implements lived 
in Palestine, ages before Tubal Cain, and in Egypt long before the 
first Pharaoh; their flint knives, axes and arrowheads have been 
found in Europe from Greece to Norway, and from France to the 
steppes of Russia; in Asia from India and the Malay archipelago 
to Japan and Kamtchatka; in America from Greenland and 
Alaska south through the United States, the West Indies, the val- 
ley of the Amazon and Peru to Terra del Fuego. They seem to 
' prove that man was originally a savage, that he lived by fishing 
and the chase, and that civilization has been a long, slow and 
tedious process of evolution. 
There is great similarity in these stone weapons and imple- 
ments wherever found throughout the world. A spearhead or 
Scraper, an arrowhead or celt from England, could not by its 
_ Shape or peculiarity of manufacture be distinguished from similar 
VOL, XIII.—NO. XI. 45 
