We have no evidence to show which of these kind of tools was the earliest; but that they were employed for different uses there can be little reason to doubt. But have we any evidence to throw light on the way in which these several forms originated in the minds of men in the very low condition of mental development which we may suppose to have existed at the time?
About eight years ago, whilst examining the ancient British camps on the South Downs, I chanced to discover in the camp of Cissbury, near Worthing, a large flint factory of the neolithic age. There were some sixty or more pits from which flints had been obtained from the chalk, and these pits were full of the débris of the flint-workers. The factory was of the neolithic age, the most characteristic tool of which is the flint celt, a form which differs but slightly from the oval or almond-shaped palaeolithic form, but the cutting edge of which is more decidedly at the broad end. The débris, some six hundred or more specimens of which were collected, consisted chiefly of these celts in various stages of manufacture.
If any one will attempt to make a flint celt, as I have done sometimes (and Mr. Evans, from whom I learnt that art, has done frequently), he will find that it is difficult to command the fracture of the flint with certainty; every now and then a large piece will come off, or a flaw will be discovered which spoils the symmetry of the tool, and it has to be thrown away. In arranging and classifying the remains of this flint factory, I found that all the palaeolithic forms were represented by one or other of these unfinished celts, so much so as to make it doubtful whether some of them may not actually have been used like them.
A celt finished at the thin end, and abandoned before the cutting edge was completed, represented a tongue-shaped palaeolithic implement; a celt finished only on one side represented a palaeolithic side-tool; and a celt rudely chipped out, and abandoned before receiving its finishing strokes, represented almost exactly an oval palaeolithic tool, only differing from it in being somewhat rougher, and showing evidence of unfinish.
Taking a lesson then from this flint-worker’s shop of the later neolithic age, we see how the earlier palaeolithic forms originated. They were not designed outright, as the nineteenth-century man would have designed them for special uses, but arose from a selection of varieties produced accidentally in the process of manufacture. The forms were also suggested by those of the nodules out of which they were made. We see, by examining the outside surfaces that were left on some of them, how a long thin nodule produced a long thin celt, a broad thick nodule a broad thick celt, and so forth. Indeed, so completely does the fabricator appear to have been controlled by the necessities of his art, that in tracing these successive forms one is almost tempted to ask whether the principle of causation lay mostly in the flint or in the flint-worker, so fully do they bear out the statement of Dr. Carpenter and the other physiologists, that nothing originates in the free will of man.