ABSTRACT
Like many other parents, my wife and I have on several occasions been entertained by our children to something which they called a play. A few years ago when the children were aged respectively eight, five and three, they summoned us one evening to watch an epic, historical drama in three acts entitled People through the Ages’. Act I was called ‘Early People’. A wing chair with a rug thrown over it represented, we were told, a cave in which an Early Man and an Early Woman were then living. The man went off hunting leaving the woman alone. Immediately there appeared a diminutive Indian brave, armed with bow and arrow, who shot at the woman. The arrow went wide of its mark, but the woman shrieked and gesticulated in a manner which left us in no doubt that she had been wounded. The man returned and shot the Indian with his gun, saying he knew that guns weren’t invented yet: he ought to be throwing stones, but he thought that would be dangerous.
