I had a couple of questions from Daniel – who is 6-years-old – yesterday afternoon. One of the questions is quite profound, the other, profane. I’ll let you guess which is which. NB: Freud is our dog.
Question 1: What would happen if I put my finger in Freud’s bottom and took it out and smelt it and licked it?
Question 2: How did people make the first tools when they didn’t have tools to make them with?
Rachel,
I suppose the answer for Daniel on question one is ,” You could get a nasty disease”, but can someone help me with the answer to question two!
I was laughing so hard after the first question that Daniel asked, “Will I get sick?”. So I said yes, probably. For the second question, I said early humans used stones to make tools. I don’t know whether this is correct.
You are correct Rachel.
Here is the earliest man-made [sic] object in the British Museum, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/ykHw5-oqQEGFnvat1gavxA. It is a stone chopping tool that would have been made by using one stone as a hammer to chip off flakes from another one.
Sticks probably also served as tools (perhaps instead of a finger for certain purposes – although the earliest humans did not have poodles) but even if preserved as fossil objects, it is hard to tell that a stick was ever anything more than a stick. We know that chimpanzees use sticks as tools, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1006_041006_chimps.html, so it seems likely that early humans did too.
That’s great, thanks. I’ll show Daniel the photo of the stone chopping tool this afternoon.
rachel.blog 
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