ABSTRACT
In all ages and on all continents man has confided his knowledge and his memories to stone. But even earlier, in the Palaeolithic (literally ‘ancient stone’), homo habilis sought stone of the finest quality to fashion his first tools. By brutally striking one stone against the other he occasionally succeeded in producing a sharp edge. Homo habilis was not very skilled in this work for it has been calculated that a kilo of flintstone produced little more than ten centimetres of cutting edge. Later, homo erectus succeeded in producing four times as much and homo sapiens sapiens, about a hundred thousand years ago, seven hundred times as much.Yves Coppens, author of this curious statistic, thinks that it provides a criterion for measuring the progress of man’s intelligence, which evolved in exponential fashion. An intelligence that kept in step with his cruel destructiveness of stone. Prehistoric man, not a very aggressive being but wishing to express himself, used the cutting edge of one stone to engrave another. In other words, art and writing were born out of this fratricidal confrontation between stones.
