There are certainly a few cases in which flake tools did appear with few or no core-bifaces. The flake-tool group called Clactonian in England is such a case. Another good, but certainly later case is that of the cave on Mount Carmel in Palestine, where the blended pre-neanderthaloid, 70 per cent modern-type skulls were found. Here, in the same level with the skulls, were 9,784 flint tools. Of these, only three--doubtless strays--were core-bifaces; all the rest were flake tools or flake chips. We noted above how the Fontéchevade cave ran to flake tools. The only conclusion I would draw from this is that times and circumstances did exist in which prehistoric men needed only flake tools. So they only made flake tools for those particular times and circumstances. LIFE IN EARLIEST TIMES What do we actually know of life in these earliest times? In the glacial gravels, or in the terrace gravels of rivers once swollen by floods of melt water or heavy rains, or on the windswept deserts, we find stone tools. The earliest and coarsest of these are the pebble tools. We do not yet know what the men who made them looked like, although the Sterkfontein australopithecines probably give us a good hint. Then begin the more formal tool preparation traditions of the west--the core-bifaces and the flake tools--and the chopper-chopping tool series of the farther east. There is an occasional roughly worked piece of bone. From the gravels which yield the Clactonian flakes of England comes the fire-hardened point of a wooden spear. There are also the chance finds of the fossil human bones themselves, of which we spoke in the last chapter. Aside from the cave of Peking man, none of the earliest tools have been found in caves. Open air or “workshop” sites which do not seem to have been disturbed later by some geological agency are very rare. The chart on page 65 shows graphically what the situation in west-central Europe seems to have been. It is not yet certain whether there were pebble tools there or not. The Fontéchevade cave comes into the picture about 100,000 years ago or more. But for the earlier hundreds of thousands of years--below the red-dotted line on the chart--the tools we find come almost entirely from the haphazard mixture within the geological contexts. The stone tools of each of the earlier traditions are the simplest kinds of all-purpose tools. Almost any one of them could be used for hacking, chopping, cutting, and scraping; so the men who used them must have been living in a rough and ready sort of way. They found or hunted their food wherever they could. In the anthropological jargon, they were “food-gatherers,” pure and simple.