Social conditions also remained practically the same, but food was more easily procured in consequence of slowly extending coöperation, and the method of its preparation by cooking made it more nourishing, consequently more of the children grew to manhood and womanhood, and the average of life was longer. The possession of effective weapons continued to render men less fearful, they became more and more erect and grew to a taller stature.
The inventions and improvement in conditions already described were the necessary and almost immediate results of the control and use of fire, and when this point was reached, further progress for many generations can scarcely have been considerable. Primitive man was not fertile in original ideas, nor inventive, except from accident aided by necessity, and the use of the bow and arrow, stone axe, baskets, weaving and pottery were to come many generations after the death of Longhead, Broken Tooth and their fellows of the fire-cave settlement. A method for producing fire by friction of wood upon wood, after the method of the fire-drill, which has been common to nearly all primitive peoples who have come under the observation of civilized men, probably came with the other later discoveries, but it was doubtless still longer before any clothing was used, and then, at first, it was most likely more for ornament than for comfort or any feeling of modesty.
However, the succeeding generations of the group described never lost the inventions of Longhead, and in after ages, when the idea of a Supreme Being or beings had been elaborated as a religion, he was deified and worshipped as a god and the founder of the tribe or people.
The descendants of Broken Tooth—for descent for many ages was still reckoned only in the female line—continued to be the weapon-makers and rulers of the tribe, and from them were the fire-priests always selected, when the worship of fire, with a consecrated priesthood and a more or less elaborate ritual, had been developed.
Many ages were to pass with a slow but continued upward progress before this group of fire-people entered even the lowest stages of barbarism, but certainly the discovery of the use and control of fire had much to do with the early progress of the rude people described, and whose individuals, we have assumed for the purposes of the story, were our own far away ancestors.
THE END
Works of
C. H. ROBINSON
