Tool Use By Humans
In Oceania and America, shark teeth were commonly used for tools, especially on weapons such as clubs and daggers, but also as blades to carve wood and as tools for food preparation. For example, various weapons edged with shark teeth were used by the Native Hawaiians (see example here), who called them leiomano. Some types were reserved for royalty. The Guaitaca (Weittaka) of coastal Brazil tipped their arrows with shark teeth. The remains of shark tooth-edged weapons, as well as chert replicas of shark teeth, have been found in the Cahokia mounds of the upper Mississippi River valley, more than 1,000 km (620 mi) from the ocean. It is reported that the rongorongo tablets of Easter Island were first shaped and then inscribed using a hafted shark tooth.
Read more about this topic: Shark Tooth
Famous quotes containing the words tool and/or humans:
“One of the great reasons for the popularity of strikes is that they give the suppressed self a sense of power. For once the human tool knows itself a man, able to stand up and speak a word or strike a blow.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“Here we also see: what this divinity lacks is not only a sense of shame—and there are also other reasons for conjecturing that in several respects all of the gods could learn from us humans. We humans are—more humane.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)