1.1b TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY IN THE STONE AGE

• Technology is as old as man himself. Not only the development of manual activity but also the development of speech guided man's earliest tool-making activities: the evolution of speech, which "gave everything a name," perhaps helped to differentiate man's world. Different tools of special types came to be used for hunting, fishing, and the making of clothes and shelters.
• Two elements governed man's technical progress: (1) discovery, the recognition and careful observation of new natural objects and phenomena, is a very subjective event until it leads to some practical application shared by others either directly or indirectly; and (2) invention, however, is a mental process in which various discoveries and observation are combined and guided by experience into some new tool or operation.
• Man's earliest conquest was fire, which was the most important discovery of Paleolithic man, who not only warmed his body but also applied fire to the preparation of food.
• As foraging, hunting, and fishing began to provide a wide range of food supply, tool-making outgrew its elementary stage.
• Man did not use stone tools only; he also used less durable materials such as wood, bone, and ivory which unfortunately have disappeared
• Only gradually, by the dawn of the Bronze Age (about 2500 B.C.), did flint mining become a separate profession, with miners living on the spot year round and probably fashioning flint tools to be traded by itinerant hawkers.
• All these products---flint, hard stone for tools, and salt together with the semi-precious stones which the prehistoric tribesmen admired, as well as sea-shells from the East---constituted the objects of trade over relatively long distances.
• Man gradually tamed such animals as roamed about his settlements or camps and which sometimes may have been scavenging. . At the same time, the deforestation and cultivation of larger areas of virgin soil began to cause extermination of wild species and to make the domesticated ones more dependent on man's care. Technology also improved in the agriculture, development of writing, urban and building revolution aspects.