When I think of prehistory, the first image that always comes to mind is a caveman. I see a man dressed in hardly anything at all but ragged cloth to cover up parts of his body that, supposedly, even in pre-historical times, society has deemed indecent. He looks fairly unkept, probably in need of a shave, and if he were to speak, all one would hear is gibberish. His left hand proudly holds up a club$^1$. He, along with all other pre-historic humans, exist in a society guided by the need to survive.
Throughout my education, I've been taught that survival among pre-historic beings was always top priority. And in order to survive, one absolutely needed to eat. As expressed by and aligned with Stoczkowski's words, "the search for food" was a standard part of the everyday existence as a pre-historic being, executed with the ultimate goal of survival. Searching for food in this time was often reduced ****to hunting and gathering, each of which required specific tools. My understanding of the purpose of tools was for this reason—to have an easier time obtaining food in order to survive—rather than so much for the sake of protection against "attacks from powerful animals," as Stoczkowski states in his essay.
Our respective understandings are similar in that they both recognize that the development of tools were motivated by survival. Yet, in the case of my understanding, the creation of tools was a logical and uncomplicated development to make acquiring food in order to survive easier. In Stockzkowski's analysis, though, tools were needed to defend against an atrocious and cruel world in order to, once again, survive. The difference in my understanding of the development of tools and Stockzkowski's is quite interesting, as it taps into the larger disparity between my comprehensive education on pre-historic times and the narratives that Stockzkowski explores. Overall, Stockzkowski's essay paints a vicious and grueling depiction of pre-historic times in contrast to the simple, generally elementary and straightforward pre-historic lifestyle I was taught growing up.
Today, I question why the association of pre-historic times and simple-minded lifestyle was so consistent throughout my K-12 education. As we've talked about frequently in lecture concerning evolution, humans are obsessed with the concept of progress; we so desperately want to believe that every single day we are moving towards a better, more advanced future. Progress relies on starting somewhere, normally a less-desirable place, and moving in the direction of a better, more-desirable place. Since we have declared today's society as highly civilized and advanced, it is essential, following the rules of progress, that we declare pre-historic times as simple, focused solely on the necessity to survive by relying on the most basic thought processes. The epistemologies concerning pre-history demand that we declare the past as simple in order to pay tribute to today's progressive$^2$ world.
Another idea I wanted to touch on in this response that I'd love to unpack further in future prompts: Why men? We are taught to think of Man as the first human—the word is literally embedded in the name caveman. We are taught, as mere children, that Man is the default, that Man is the start of society. The patriarchy feeds and thrives off of this type of language and biased Westernized education.