The First Days of Man, as Narrated Quite Simply for Young ReadersKummer, Frederic Arnold
General
The First Days of Man, as Narrated Quite Simply for Young Readers
Kummer, Frederic Arnold
Cave dwellers -- Juvenile literature; Prehistoric peoples -- Juvenile literature
One day, after many trials, he at last drew something on a flat stone
that looked a little like a fish, and he ran to the cave with it and
showed it to his father. Tor's father, instead of being pleased, was
angry with him, and told him he had better go with the other boys and
learn to spear fish, and not waste his time trying to make pictures of
them. Tor's mother, however, liked the little drawing, and kept it in
the cave.
As Tor grew older he learned to draw many things with his sharp piece
of flint—figures of animals and birds, and some of them were so good
that his friends could tell what they were, and got him to scratch
others for them on bits of bone, or the handles of their knives. He
made larger drawings, too, on the walls of the caves, that looked like
bears, and mammoths, and wild boars.
After a time, he found a bed of smooth red and yellow clay along the
river bank, and used it, and the juice of berries, to colour the
figures he drew upon the cave walls. Some of these coloured drawings we
find even to-day, on the walls of caves in France and other countries,
and protected as they have been from the wind and rain, the colours of
these early crude pictures are as bright and clear as when they were
first made, fifty thousand years ago.
One day, while playing with some of the clay he had found along the
river bank, Tor began to roll a lump of it between his fingers, pleased
because it was so smooth and easy to shape. At first he made only round
balls, rolling them under his hand on the top of a flat stone, but
presently he found that he could press a hollow in the lumps of soft
clay, making something that looked like the cup-shaped shells of the
large nuts which the tribe used for carrying water. Very carefully Tor
smoothed and patted his lump of clay until he had formed a little round
bowl, thick and clumsy, but still large enough to hold several drinks
of water. The thought that he had made something new pleased him, and
he took it home with him and put it on a ledge of rock in the cave.
Then he forgot all about it.
When his mother found it, in the morning, it was quite hard and dry.
She did not know what it was, at first, but Tor told her how he had
made it from the river clay, and she was so pleased that she took it
down to the stream with her, and showed it to some of the other women,
who had come to fetch drinking water in bowls made of the shells of
large nuts. But when Tor's mother came back to the cave with the clay
bowl full of drinking water, it got soft and began to lose its shape,
which made the other women laugh at her, and at Tor, for trying to
make a drinking cup out of mud. Then Tor's mother became angry, and
threw the bowl into the fire which she had made before the cave, to
cook fish for breakfast. And Tor she sent away to the hills about the
valley, to gather eggs from the nests of the wild fowl which lived
there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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