Читать книгу Art History For Dummies - Jesse Bryant Wilder - Страница 69

Before humans could make art, they had to be able to make tools. Apes use sticks as tools to knock down bananas, for example, but they don’t produce tools (or art). Our earliest ancestors got onto their feet about four million years ago. We don’t know what they did with their hands until two million years later, when the first primitive tools appeared in east-central Africa. These tools were simply stones with sharpened edges made by our ancestors Homo habilis (which means “handy man” or “able man”). Tools were slowly refined over the millennia from handy man’s rough-flaked stones used for cutting meat and pelts (about 2,000,000 BC) to the invention of the hand ax (about 1,300,000 BC) and the spear (about 1,000,000 BC). The bow and arrow were invented around 10,000 BC. Our forebears were slowly learning to master their environment — and art was just around the corner.