Leaf of stone,
Lethal stone,
Pointed stone,
Slender stone,
Sharp stone,
Stone that can kill...
Spearhead stone.
Hunters are hunting,
Surrounding their prey -
It doesn't stand a chance:
The painful roar of fear scarring the sky
As they hurl death at a bison, a bear or a bellowing
mammoth,
Staggering, bewildered to its knees;
A collapsing hulk of muscle and visceral slaughter,
Maiming the air with its plaintive cry;
The last of its kind, weary of the chase,
Weary of the primitive struggle to survive
As a hail of spears pierce its flesh,
The last of a line, weary of being hunted... by men.
People have been on the move,
Walking across plains, walking across mountains, walking
across continents.
People have been exploring, searching, finding new lands,
Discovering new places to live and thrive:
There are tribes of people out there in the world now,
Treading the soil of a bright green planet, verdant and
fruitful,
Tribes of people trudging their weary journeys,
Curious to explore the limits of their imagination,
Forever crossing new horizons, stepping into new landscapes,
Leaving their footprint behind as they march forward,
Leaving the mark of mankind wherever they go.
Now man has the upper hand, and will have forever more,
Now man has the edge, and need not fear the claw and tooth,
The random savage death, the wild instinctive kill
That tears like a rush of fateful wind through the long
savannah grass,
That falls like heavy rain from the twisted canopy of jungle
trees;
An animal struggle of muscle and jaw, biting terror into the
brain...
Now man decides what may live or die,
Man is master of his destiny:
A human master with a spear in his hand.
While the planet was thawing, the tribes had been hunting.
While ice had been melting, the families of men had been
walking,
Walking across a bridge of ice into a continent empty of
people,
A lonely Eden
of newness, brimming with promise,
And every step they took was a discovery,
Every mountain scaled revealed another horizon of
possibility,
Every river forded brought them nearer to the heart of a new
beginning:
A planet of plenty was shrinking
A planet of ice was becoming a planet of water,
A planet of life was becoming a planet ordered by life...
The life of a hunter, trapped like a fly in amber on an empty
continent
As his bridges fade behind him like dreams,
Like dreams dissolving in the salty waters of a careless
ocean.
And the bewildered immigrants forget where they came from,
They forget the family they left behind,
And begin to wonder how they came to be here,
Wonder if they fell from the sky like a meteor,
A fiery spark of creation forged in a star,
Forking down from the Heavens to seed the earth?
Wonder if they came from the earth itself,
Burrowing upwards through the mother's womb to the light,
Clawing their way to creation through her soil and loam,
To stand upright upon the very clay that moulded their
flesh?
And maybe they even arrived on the back of a great water
beetle,
It's iridescent wings beating life into existence:
A melding of air and water, making matter of man.
And the broken shaft of a spear lies abandoned on the
ground,
Trodden underfoot by a dying mastodon,
A leaf of stone buried in time,
Waiting for someone to find it so that the story can finally
be told
Of how a race of people walked across a bridge of ice
And forgot that it was ever there,
Of how a tribe of hunters made America their home,
And surrounded by a sanctuary of seas,
Knew nothing of another world where other hunters were busy
building ships.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/hLAME-wiTyaZU2KQf-P5vA
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