The First Days of Man, as Narrated Quite Simply for Young Readers

MANY hundreds of years had passed, since Ka-Ma and his wife Tula left the valley, and the tribe of the cave people had grown very large. The whole valley was now filled with the...

FOR a long time after Ka-Ma and his wife came to live beside the sea, his children and his children's children continued to use rafts, made of logs tied together, for floating o...

KA-MA was a young man who was very restless and unhappy in the valley. Ever since a child he had heard the story of Tul and Ni-Va, and how they went out from the valley and foun...

The place where they landed was a little harbour at the mouth of a small river, with high cliffs on either side of it, and a narrow beach at their feet. They managed to catch so...

THE Stone Age on earth lasted for a very long time; much longer than you would think, as you read this story. From the time when Ra made his first stone-pointed spear many, many...

It made them angry not to be allowed to leave the valley with the hunting men, so they planned in secret to make a trip by themselves. The weather was warm, now, for the spring...

WHEN Mother Nature got ready to send Fire to the cave men, she called Heat and Cold and Wind and Rain to her and explained what she wanted them to do.

MA-RA, the grandson of Ra, was out looking for food. It was the chief thing the cave men did. When they had plenty, they would lie in the sun and sleep, but when food was scarce...

A COLD wind blew through the valley where the Ape-Men lived, and the trees and bushes were brown and bare of fruit. The rays of the Sun, which used to come down straight and hot...

"Wait and see," Mother Nature replied, "and while you are waiting, just keep your eye on that funny little animal running about there in the woods—the one with the long arms and...

TOR-AD lived many hundreds of years after Tul and Ni-Va made the first boat. He was not called Tor-Ad at first, but just Tor, which in the language of the cave people meant a Tu...

ADH had been dead a long time, now, and Ra was his great-great-great-great-grandson. He was called Ra because that was the word the Ape-Men used to mean big, or strong, and Ra w...

IN the valley where the Ape-Men lived the weather began to get colder and colder, year after year, and they were having a hard time to find enough to eat. There were thousands a...

RA-NA was a wise old man who had dwelt in the valley for nearly a hundred years. He was lame, having had his leg almost torn off by a bear while hunting in the marshes, but his...

IN the beginning, millions of years ago, before there were any men, or animals, or trees, or flowers, the Earth was just a great round ball of fire, bright and dazzling, like th...

"The trees and plants and grass are doing nicely," she said, "and so are the fish. Now we must get some animals on land, and you, Ocean, must attend to it for me."

MOR and his men at last made up their minds to sail out across the Great Water and see what was on the other side. The island people were very strong and brave, and thought it m...

AMONG a people whose whole life was spent in fighting, and in killing animals for food, weapons were the most important things. We have seen how the cave men used clubs and spea...

That night, Ka-Ma cooked some fish over the hot coals, and he and all his family had a feast. Later on he showed his children how to preserve fish by smoking them, the way his p...

WHEREVER he went, Adh carried about with him a club. He had found himself a new one, now that his first was broken, and this new club was short and heavy, with a great hard knob...

DURING all these long centuries, many, many thousands of years, the people from the valley where Adh and his wife first lived had been spreading far out over the surface of the...

AS Ka-Ma's children grew up, he taught them all the things he knew, how to make weapons and tools of stone, how to dry and season wood, for spear handles, and bows and arrows, h...