[Illustration: _Our first machine, the spear-thrower, as used by early man and certain later peoples in the New World as well as the Old. An invention difficult to conceive and effect, it marked an important step forward in man’s use of his brain and his body. In effect, it extended the length of the human arm by at least two feet and therefore its power by perhaps 50 per cent. (After Harrington, 1933.)_] [Illustration: THE FIRST PAINTINGS _Although prehistoric engravings of animal figures on bone had been discovered in European caves as early as about 1840, and engravings on cave walls in the sixties, it was not till 1878 that paintings were found. The discoverer was a child. While Marcelino de Sautuola was searching among the debris on the floor of the cave of Altamira, near Santander, in Spain, he heard his little daughter cry_ “Toros! Toros!” _and saw her point to polychrome paintings of bison and other animals on the roof of the cave. One of them appears at the top of this page. The other painting shown is from the French cave of Font-de-Gaume. These two caverns contain the finest lineal art of early man, chiefly Magdalenian. (The bison after Cartailhac and Breuil, 1906; the deer after Capitan, Breuil, and Peyroni, 1910.)_] The history of even the simplest of man’s tools from the hand ax to the arrowhead is long, interesting, and puzzling. It is hard to say what many of the tools were used for, or indeed what they were _not_ used for. The hand ax would obviously be best for grubbing out roots and tubers, yet, like most of the implements of early man, it must have served a variety of other purposes also. Until the Mousterians began to make spear points, 90,000 to 150,000 years ago, all man’s implements—even what we call his scrapers—were pretty generalized. Later, with the Aurignacians and the Magdalenians, came artifacts that were obviously blades or knives or chisels or harpoons. The tool to make other tools appeared, and this we must add to the list of man’s prehistoric achievements: speech, fire making, stone chipping, pressure flaking, and carving and painting. The attempt of science to record and interpret the story of early man in the Old World has been an extraordinary triumph over the obstacles of half a million years of prehistoric darkness. Hundreds of men and women, laboring long and ingeniously, have won to an almost miraculous success, and the end is not yet in sight.