Means of Existence.—To procure food and the necessary raw materials for the construction of a shelter and the making of clothes, man had to resort at an early stage to various tools, arms, and instruments, which rendered his hunting, fishing, and fruit-gathering expeditions more productive.[211]
We will glance rapidly, in the first place, at tools of a general character needed for all kinds of work. Among most uncultured peoples the raw materials used for making tools were, and are, stone, wood, bone, shell, horn. The metals—copper, bronze, iron, steel—only came later on. This does not mean that the knowledge of the use of metals is necessarily connected with a superior stage of civilisation. Thus most Negroes of Central Africa are excellent blacksmiths (Fig. [135]), though otherwise less advanced than certain peoples unacquainted with metals, like the New Zealanders or the Incas of Peru, for example (before the arrival of the Europeans).
We cannot dwell on the methods of working each of the materials from which tools may be made. It is enough to say that there are two principal methods of working stone—cutting and polishing. The chips are removed from a stone either by percussion with another stone (Fig. [54]), or by pressure with the end of a bone or piece of pointed wood (Fig. [55]). It was thus that the Europeans of the post-tertiary period obtained their flint tools (Fig. [84]), and to-day the same process may still be seen in operation, less and less frequently it is true, among the Eskimo when they are making their knives, and among the Fuegians and Californians when they are preparing their spear-heads or arrows, etc. (Figs. [56] and [73]). The process of polishing takes longer and produces finer tools (Figs. [71] and [112]). In Europe it succeeded that of stone-cutting, and it flourished among the peoples of Oceania and America before the arrival of Europeans. Polished tools are obtained by rubbing for a long time a chipped or unchipped stone against another stone with the addition of water and sand, or the dust of the same rock from which the tool is made.
As to metals, of the two methods of working them, forging, which can be adopted in the case of native metals, is more general amongst uncultured peoples than casting, which implies a knowledge of treating the ore. The Indians of America could forge copper, gold, and silver before the arrival of Columbus, but the casting of bronze or iron-ore was unknown to them. On the other hand, Negroes know how to obtain iron by smelting the ore, and from the very earliest times the peoples of Europe, Anterior Asia, China, and Indo-China were acquainted with the treatment of copper ore,[212] and obtained bronze by the amalgamation of copper with tin, and sometimes with lead or antimony (in Egypt, Armenia, the Caucasus, Transylvania).
FIG. 55.—Method of flaking stone by pressure;
the splinter (c) is severed by outside pressure on the stone
with a pointed bone (a).
(After Holmes.)
In the early stages of material progress the objects manufactured were not differentiated; the weapon of to-day became the tool of to-morrow, the agricultural implement of the day after. However, there are savages who have sometimes special instruments for cutting or chopping (axes, knives, saws of stone or shell), saws for scraping or planing (scrapers and raspers of stone, bone, shell, etc.), for piercing (awls of bone or horn, stone bits), for hammering and driving in (stone hammers), etc. As to the fastenings which keep together the different parts of the tools, these are chiefly bands (sinews, strips of hide or bark, plaited or spun cords) and the sticky preparations of various gums and resins. An axe or a knife is fixed to its handle by means of cords of plaited coco-nut fibres in Polynesia (Fig. [71]) and very rarely among Negroes (Fig. [74]), by resin in Australia and among the Hupa Indians of the Oregon (Fig. [56]), and by sinews or strips of sealskin among the Chukchi and the Indians of California (Fig. [73]).