THE MEANING OF THE DIFFERENT TRADITIONS
What do the traditions really mean? I see them as the standardization of ways to make tools for particular jobs. We may not know exactly what job the maker of a particular core-biface or flake tool had in mind. We can easily see, however, that he already enjoyed a know-how, a set of persistent habits of tool preparation, which would always give him the same type of tool when he wanted to make it. Therefore, the traditions show us that persistent habits already existed for the preparation of one type of tool or another.
This tells us that one of the characteristic aspects of human culture was already present. There must have been, in the minds of these early men, a notion of the ideal type of tool for a particular job. Furthermore, since we find so many thousands upon thousands of tools of one type or another, the notion of the ideal types of tools and the know-how for the making of each type must have been held in common by many men. The notions of the ideal types and the know-how for their production must have been passed on from one generation to another.
I could even guess that the notions of the ideal type of one or the other of these tools stood out in the minds of men of those times somewhat like a symbol of “perfect tool for good job.” If this were so—remember it’s only a wild guess of mine—then men were already symbol users. Now let’s go on a further step to the fact that the words men speak are simply sounds, each different sound being a symbol for a different meaning. If standardized tool-making suggests symbol-making, is it also possible that crude word-symbols were also being made? I suppose that it is not impossible.
There may, of course, be a real question whether tool-utilizing creatures—our first step, on [page 42]—were actually men. Other animals utilize things at hand as tools. The tool-fashioning creature of our second step is more suggestive, although we may not yet feel sure that many of the earlier pebble tools were man-made products. But with the step to standardization and the appearance of the traditions, I believe we must surely be dealing with the traces of culture-bearing men. The “conventional understandings” which Professor Redfield’s definition of culture suggests are now evidenced for us in the persistent habits for the preparation of stone tools. Were we able to see the other things these prehistoric men must have made—in materials no longer preserved for the archeologist to find—I believe there would be clear signs of further conventional understandings. The men may have been physically primitive and pretty shaggy in appearance, but I think we must surely call them men.