Looking back over the centuries we see a period many thousands of years ago when primitive man lived in caves or other rude habitations and was entirely without the implements which we now consider indispensable. The weapons with which he defended his wife and babes from the wild beasts and from his warlike neighbors were clubs, wooden spears with perhaps a bone or shell tip, and hatchets of chipped stone tied with thongs of hide into a split stick. He managed by ingenious snares and his crude weapons to provide game and fish for the support of his family.
He did not shave often, for his wife was not as particular in regard to his appearance as are modern women, but when such a thing happened, a piece of shell was his razor. The good wife had no steel needles with which to sew together skins for their crude clothing. If she darned her husband’s socks it is not recorded, nor did she use steel crochet hooks in making the “doilies” for their parlor table.
When grain began to supplement the wild game, fruit, and berry diet, it was broken between flat stones or ground in stone mortars. Fires were kindled after long and laborious twirling or rubbing together of two dry pieces of wood. With his stone hatchets and by liberal burning away of parts by fire he formed his canoes from trunks of fallen trees.
This was the “Stone Age,” and iron and steel were unknown and not to be heard of for many thousands of years.
In various parts of the world copper always has occurred “native”; i.e., in the metallic form and not in combination with other elements as an earth or ore. As the centuries rolled on, man eventually learned that this soft red metal could be pounded into thin-edged implements and that it made more useful tools than those of stone, which his ancestors had taught him to form. Some of these metal implements were hard and had fairly good cutting edges, made so by accidental or intentional presence of tin, and little did he dream that the twentieth century upon finding his buried bronze implements would think his crude alloy so wonderful and talk reverently of a “lost art of tempering copper.”
Implements of the Stone Age
Gold, too, became known to him because it also occurs “native.” Its melting point was low enough that he could fashion it into ornaments, idols, and other articles for religious purposes. But during the hundreds of centuries of the “Stone Age” and during much of this—the “Bronze Age”—copper, bronze, and gold were the only metals used. Though the smiths became very dextrous in casting and modeling these metals, they yet knew not iron or steel.
Implements of the Bronze Age