But this Prehistoric Man was very brave, and he could do two things which none of the other creatures could do—he could laugh and he could think.
One day, he sat down on a rock, and took his head between his hands and thought and thought, and by and by he lifted up his head and said to his wife,—for of course he had a wife,—“I have it, my dear. If we are not as strong as the wild beasts, we must be a great deal more clever.”
So he got right up off the rock and set about being clever. And so did his wife. They were so clever that they hid themselves in trees and rocks where the wild beasts could not find them. And they found out the secret of fire.
The other creatures could not find out the secret of fire to save their lives, and they were dreadfully afraid of it. Then the Man and his wife made weapons out of stones, and bones, and they made dishes out of mud, and though these things weren’t a bit like our weapons or our dishes, they got along very well with them for many years.
In the earliest times of all, the Woman hunted and trapped the wild creatures, and fished, all by herself, but by and by she began to let the Man do the hunting and bring home the game, while she stayed in the cave house and kept the hearth-fire bright and took care of the children. She cooked the food that he brought home, and she made needles out of bones and sewed skins together for clothes for her husband and the children and herself. After a long time she began to plant seeds of the wild things that she found were good to eat, and to raise food out of the ground.
All these things they did, and many more that had never been done before,—and because they were so much more clever than all the beasts of the forest, the Prehistoric Man and his prehistoric wife lived a long time in a little peace and more happiness than you might at first think possible.
They taught their children all the clever things they had thought out, and these children, when they grew up, taught them to their children, and this went on for hundreds and thousands of years. Each generation learned new things and taught them to the next, until now we have houses and churches and villages and cities dotted over the whole earth, and there are roads going from everywhere to everywhere else. There are railroads and steam-cars and telegraph and telephone lines, and printing-presses, so that to-day everybody knows more about the very ends of the earth than Prehistoric Man could possibly know about what was happening fifty miles away from him.
And all these things we have to-day because the Prehistoric Man and the Prehistoric Woman did their part bravely and well when the earth was young.
This is a story about that far-off time. If you don’t believe it’s true, every word of it, just get out your atlas and find the places on the map. They are every one of them there.