China entered the Neolithic age roughly more than 10,000 years ago, and the physical strength of human beings was not as good as that of many beasts, but the most important reason for being able to become the lord of all things was to use natural materials, make tools and weapons, hunt wild beasts, grow crops, and adapt to the needs of daily life. In nature, the most abundant and easily used materials are probably wood and stone. Hunting wild beasts, stone is far more effective than wood. The cracked stones, with their sharp edges and corners, are also an ideal cutting tool, facilitating the cutting down of trees, stripping of animal skins, and increasing the variety of materials that can be used in everyday life.
Sharply angular stones can be used as a lethal attack weapon. When humans two or three million years ago knew how to make tools by cracking stones, they entered the Paleolithic. The oracle bone 'stone' character, the glyph, shows humans' emphasis on using "sharp stones with edges", depicting a corner of the sharp edge of the rock. Later, the ancients also used stone tools to dig traps for catching wild beasts, avoiding the danger of directly fighting with wild beasts, so they added a pit next to the word to express the use of stone tools for excavation.
A false loan word for the grinding stone axe "Father"
Figure 1 Ground Stone Axe, 14.9 cm long, collection of the Royal Ontario Museum of Canada. Qinglian Gang type, about 3300 BC to 2500 BC
In the Neolithic Age, stone tools are mainly grinding, in terms of use, the shape is more ideal, the use tends to be single-minded, can enhance the sharpness of the blade, reduce the rebound force when using, and facilitate a greater role.
The production of stone tools began with weapons such as spears, darts, and hammers, and gradually took into account the necessary tools of life, such as cutting tools, scrapers, hoes, shovels and sickles to facilitate farming, and finally created the status of axes, guizhang, and huang pei. Before the invention of bronze, the most frequently used tools were stone weights and axes. The cutting surface is presented as a horizontal one, called "jin"; the cutting surface is presented as a straight one, called "axe". The original glyph of the word "axe" was the word "father", and the oracle bone glyph was as if one hand held a stone axe, and the axe had been reduced to a straight line. The glyph of the golden text is very expressive, the axe is the shape of the upper sharp and lower square arc, which is to depict the thickness of the side, and the section can only play an effective role in reaching this thickness. Both the glyphs of the oracle bone and the gold script indicate that the stone axe was not originally equipped with a wooden handle, and was directly held in the hand. However, when using such a stone tool to strike, the rebound force easily hurts the palm, so the stone axe with the handle was later improved. The oracle glyph of the word "jin" is the shape of a stone hammer with a wooden handle. In the early days, when people used stone axes, they directly tied the handle (handle) on the stone axe, and later improved it into digging a small round hole in the stone axe, using a rope through the hole and binding the handle to make the stone axe firmly fixed. As shown in Figure 1, the grinding stone axe, this overall grinding very even stone axe has frequent wear marks, the hole is drilled from both sides, belongs to the early drilling technology; from the size point of view, it should be equipped with a short handle and one-handed use of stone axes.
Figure 2 Stone cymbal, height 17 cm, width 16.7 to 19.3 cm, thickness 0.7 cm, pore diameter 6.4 cm, Liangzhu culture, 3300 BC ~ 2000 BC
Figure 3 Various types of ground stone axes, 8 to 20 cm long, Neolithic period to Shang Dynasty, 3000 BC to 1000 BC
The father word was later borrowed to refer to "father", in order to distinguish the original meaning of "stone axe", in the glyph of the stone axe (father) was added "jin" to become the word "axe". The image of the stone axe is used to refer to the father, which some believe to have a special meaning: the stone axe denotes the authority of the man over the woman, or the father over the child. In fact, it may simply indicate the division of labor between the sexes that originated in the Neolithic era. The stone axe was the main tool for cutting trees and hoeing the ground in that era, and even in the early Bronze Age, it was still the main tool used by men when working. In a matrilineal clan society, there is no reciprocal marriage relationship, the son does not know his father, and the mother mainly assumes the responsibility of raising the child and controls the economic results of the child's labor. At that time, women had the right to inherit property, and men's status was not particularly noble. Children refer to their mother's multiple partners or brothers as fathers simply because they are the principal members of labor and do not contain particular affection or reverence, let alone questions of authority. In the Shang Dynasty, there were no separate titles for fathers from uncles, uncles, uncles, etc., and all of them were called fathers. In the Zhou Dynasty, a more comprehensive humane title was gradually established.
Photo: Xu Jinxiong's "The Story of Chinese Characters and Cultural Relics"
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The Story of Chinese Characters and Cultural Relics (4 volumes)