Wood is likely to have been used by primitive men for one purpose or another from the very earliest times. Even “half men” of the “missing link” type, it may be believed, would in case of need pick up a stick or wrench a limb from a tree to serve them as a club. But we do not know when human beings first began to fashion wood into definite implements by working it with their stone tools. Wood is too perishable a substance to have stood any chance of being preserved from so long distant a past.
Our knowledge of the first employment of wood is indirect. Many of the Mousterian chipped flakes are of such size and shape that they could have been operated much more effectively had they been mounted on a handle. Possibly therefore the process of hafting or handling had come to be practised in the Mousterian, although there is no specific evidence to this effect. In the Upper Palæolithic, wood was certainly used to a considerable extent. The harpoon and dart heads, for instance, must have had wooden shafts.
A true ax is not known from the Old Stone Age and seems to have been invented in the Neolithic. The distinctive factor of the instrument, upon which its utility largely depends, is the straightness and smoothness of the edge; and such an edge is best attained by the grinding process. Even the unground axes of the earliest Neolithic depended on a single stroke to provide them with the required straight cutting edge. We may believe, therefore, that the Palæolithic peoples worked wood in the manner familiar to us from the practices of many modern savage races. They split it, rubbed it, and burned it into shape, rather than trying to chop it.
77. Fire
One of the most fundamental of human arts is the use of fire. It is also one of the most ancient. Its occurrence is easily traced, at any rate in deposits that have not been disturbed by nature, through the presence of charred bones, lumps of charcoal, and layers of ash. Charcoal crumbles easily, but its fragments are practically imperishable. Its presence in considerable quantities in any station, particularly if the coal is accumulated in pockets, is therefore sure proof that the people who occupied the site burned fires for warmth, or cooking, or both purposes. The use of fire has been established throughout the part of the Palæolithic when men lived in caves and under rock shelters; that is, during the Mousterian and Upper Palæolithic.
The Chellean and Acheulean deposits are so much older and more open, and in many cases have been washed over so much by rainfall and by streams, that, if the men of these periods did use fire, as they may well have done, its evidences might have been pretty generally obliterated.
Whether early Palæolithic men knew how to make fire, or whether they only found it and kept it alive, is more difficult to say. They could easily have acquired it in the first place from trees struck by lightning or from other occasional natural agencies. Then, recognizing its value, they may well have nursed it along, lighting one hearth from another. Yet at some time in the Palæolithic the art of producing fire at will, by friction between two pieces of wood, is almost certain to have been invented. One may infer this from the general similarity of level of Magdalenian civilization to that of modern savages, all of whom practise the art of ignition. But in the nature of things it would be difficult to find evidence bearing on this point from more than ten thousand years ago. It can be assumed that man is likely to have lived first for a long period in a condition in which he knew and used and preserved fire, yet was not able to produce it.
78. Houses
Although Palæolithic man worked so much in stone, he did not build in it. Hence our knowledge of the kinds of shelters he made for himself is almost nil. There are Upper Palæolithic “tectiform” paintings which look as if they might be attempts to depict houses. It is clear, moreover, that in this period the general development of the mechanical arts was sufficiently advanced to allow of the construction of some sort of rude edifices.