Indeed, so little do we know about the conditions attending the discovery of the arts of life that gave humanity its all-important start--the making of fire, the taming of animals, the sowing of plants, and so on--that it is only too easy to misread our map.

We know almost nothing of those movements of peoples, in the course of which a given art was brought from one part of the world to another.
Hence, when we find the art duly installed in a particular place, and utilizing the local product, the bamboo in the south, let us say, or the birch in the north, as it naturally does, we easily slip into the error of supposing that the local products of themselves called the art into existence.

Similar needs, we say, have generated similar expedients.

No doubt there is some truth in this principle; but I doubt if, on the whole, history tends to repeat itself in the case of the great useful inventions.

We are all of us born imitators, but inventive genius is rare.
Take the case of the early palaeoliths of the drift type.