Note 11 — Chapter III · Weapons, Tools, Pottery; Origin of the Use of Fire, Clothing, Ornaments; Early Artistic Efforts.

The processes employed by the cave-men were very simple. In one of the excavations superintended by him, M. Dupont11 picked up the radius of a horse bearing symmetrically made incisions executed with a view to getting off splinters of the bone. These splinters were rounded by rubbing either with chips of flint, or on such polishers as are to be seen in any of the museums; then one end was sharpened, and the other, if need were, pierced with a hole. It is astonishing to find some of them as fine as the steel needles of the present day, and with perfectly round eyes made with the help of nothing but a rough flint, and there would still be some doubt on the subject, if M. Lartet12 had not obtained exactly similar results by working on fragments of bone with the flints he had fouled in these excavations. Other experiments of a similar kind were no less conclusive, for Merk13 perforated all ivory plaque with a pointed flint which he used as a gimlet.