From Egypt, Somaliland, and many other distant lands come examples which Sir John Evans finds "so identical in form and character with British specimens that they might have been manufactured by the same hands." And throughout the palaeolithic age in Europe the very limited number and regular succession of forms testifies to the innate conservatism of man, and the slow progress of invention.

And yet, as some American writers have argued--who do not find that the distinction between chipped palaeoliths and polished neoliths of an altogether later age applies equally well to the New World--it was just as easy to have got an edge by rubbing as by flaking.

The fact remains that in the Old World human inventiveness moved along one channel rather than another, and for an immense lapse of time no one was found to strike out a new line.

There was plenty of sand and water for polishing, but it did not occur to their minds to use it.
To wind up this chapter, however, I shall glance at the distribution, not of any implement connected directly and obviously with the utilization of natural products, but of a downright oddity, something that might easily be invented once only and almost immediately dropped again.

And yet here it is all over the world, going back, we may conjecture, to very ancient times, and implying interpenetrations of bygone peoples, of whose wanderings perhaps we may never unfold the secret.