The World's Foundations; or, Geology for Beginners · Ch. XXI · Unit 3: Part II: Reptiles, chalk, mammals, ice and people
23. The age of man
Goal: Your child can explain the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, and why the book is careful about bones found together in caves.
You'll need
- The book, open to this chapter
- A stone, something made of bronze or brass (an old key, a coin or a bell), and something of iron or steel (a nail)
- A notebook for a "rock journal" and a pencil
What's in the book
Chapter XXI comes to the remains of people at the top of the rock layers. It warns that rough flint tools are easily confused with naturally chipped stones, explains the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages and that they came at different times in different lands, and describes human bones found alongside extinct animals in caves. It mentions the dodo as an animal that died out within history.
The lesson, step by step
A question to start
SayIf you had no metal at all, what would you make a knife or an axe from?
Read the chapter together
Read Chapter XXI (pages 195 to 202).
Note for you: on pages 196 and 197 the book uses 1880s words and attitudes about some peoples of the Pacific islands and Africa. You may skip that paragraph or talk about how people wrote then.
Be careful with tools
The roughest and earliest flint tools of human workmanship approach so closely to the roughly chipped flints of Nature's workmanship, which exist by tens of thousands, that the one may often be mistaken for the other ;
Ask: How might you tell a stone chipped by a person from one chipped by nature? (Look for many careful chips, a useful shape, many alike in one place.)
Three ages
the life of Man upon earth has been by common consent divided into three ages — The Stone-Age, the Bronze-Age, and the Iron-Age.
Lay out your three objects in order: stone, bronze, iron. Explain: bronze is a mixture of copper and tin, softer and easier to melt than iron; iron needs a much hotter fire.
Not everywhere at once
It must not be supposed that at any one time a Stone-Age was over all the earth,
Ask: Why might one land reach the Iron Age long before another?
History and before
The book compares going back in English history to walking from daylight into twilight and then night, where written records stop and geology must take over. Ask your child to retell this picture.
Tell it back
Ask: Why might bones of people and bones of extinct animals end up together in a cave without having lived at the same time? (A flood may have washed them in and mixed them up.)
What we know now
Modern humans appeared in Africa about 300,000 years ago, and stone tools made by earlier human relatives are much older still. People did live alongside mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses and cave bears: cave paintings in France show mammoths, drawn by people who saw them. The dodo, which the book mentions, died out in the late 1600s.
Afterwards
Notice it this week: look for things in your home made of stone, of bronze or brass, and of iron or steel. Which is most common?
Answers to the book's problems
A floodwater may have washed bones in from outside and mixed them, so finding them together does not prove they lived at the same time. Different peoples found out how to work metals at different times, so one land could be in its Iron Age while another was still in its Stone Age.
Worked out for this site from the scan. If a number in your copy differs, trust the book.