Fig. 14.—Flint Knife, found at Menchecourt, near Abbeville.
The third type (fig. 14) is that of knives. They are thin and narrow tongue-shaped flakes, cleft off from the lump of flint at one blow. When one of the ends is chipped to a point, these knives become scratchers. Sometimes these flints are found to be wrought so as to do service as augers.
The question is often asked, how these primitive men were able to manufacture their weapons, implements, and utensils, on uniform models, without the help of metallic hammers. This idea has, indeed, been brought forward as an argument against those who contend for the existence of quaternary man. Mr. Evans, an English geologist, replied most successfully to this objection by a very simple experiment. He took a pebble and fixed it in a wooden handle; having thus manufactured a stone hammer, he made use of it to chip a flint little by little, until he had succeeded in producing an oval hatchet similar to the ancient one which he had before him.
The flint-workers who, up to the middle of the present century, prepared gun-flints for the army, were in the habit of splitting the stone into splinters. But they made use of steel hammers to cleave the flint, whilst primitive man had nothing better at his disposal than another and rather harder stone.
Primitive man must have gone to work in somewhat the following way: They first selected flints, which they brought to the shape of those cores or nuclei which are found in many places in company with finished implements; then, by means of another and harder stone of elongated shape, they cleft flakes off the flint. These flakes were used for making knives, scratchers, spear or arrow-heads, hatchets, tomahawks, scrapers, &c. Some amount of skill must have been required to obtain the particular shape that was required; but constant practice in this work exclusively must have rendered this task comparatively easy.
Fig. 15.—Flint Core or Nucleus.
How, in the next place, were these clipped flints fitted with handles, so as to make hatchets, poniards and knives?
Some of them were fixed at right angles between the two split ends of a stick: this kind of weapon must have somewhat resembled our present hatchets. Others, of an oval shape and circular edge, might have been fastened transversely into a handle, so as to imitate a carpenter's adze. In case of need, merely a forked branch or a piece of split wood might serve as sheath or handle to the flint blade. Flints might also have been fixed as double-edged blades by means of holes cut in pieces of wood, to which a handle was afterwards added.