The domestication of plants and the art of tilling the soil effected a great revolution in prehistoric society. The wandering life of the hunter and the herder now gave way to a settled mode of existence. Cities were built, and within them began to be amassed those treasures, material and immaterial, which constitute the precious heirloom of humanity. This attachment to the soil of the hitherto roving clans and tribes meant also the beginning of political life. The cities were united into states and great kingdoms were formed, and the political history of man began, as in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates.
Early man seems to have realized how much he owed to the art of husbandry, for in the mythologies of many peoples some god or goddess is represented as having taught men how to till the soil and to plant the seed. It seemed to man that for so great a boon he must be beholden to the beneficence of the gods.[1]
11. The Formation of Language.—Another great task and achievement of primitive man was the making of language. The earliest speech used by historic man, as Tylor observes, "teaches the interesting lesson that the main work of language-making was done in the ages before history."
The vastness of this work is indicated by the rich and intricate nature of the languages with which history begins, for language-making, particularly in its earhest stages, is a very slow process. Periods of time like geologic epochs must have been required for the formation out of the scanty speech of the first men, by the slow process of word-making, of the rich and copious languages already upon the lips of the great peoples of antiquity, the Hamitic
- ↑ So thorough was prehistoric man's search for whatever in the plant world could be cultivated for food that historic man has not been able during the last 2000 years from the tens of thousands of wild plants to discover any species comparable in value to iny one of the staple food-plants selected and domesticated by primeval man (De Candolle, Origin of Cultivated Plants, p. 451). It is interesting further to note that while early man exploited the organic kingdoms, that is to say the animal and vegetable realms, he made few and slight requisitions upon the forces of the inorganic world. It was reserved for the men of the later historic age to domesticate, so to speak, the powerful agents steam and electricity and by their utilization to effect revolutions in modern society like those effected in prehistoric times by the domestication of animals and plants.
