It happened at least 12,000 years ago, probably three times as far back as that, and possibly much earlier. Whenever they came, the sound they made cracking two stones together was the first noise of human technology as surely as the roar of an engine is today. Paleolithic tools...rocks shaped and sharpened to stab, slice, scrape, or stun....constituted the single most important innovation that ancient people brought here. With such tools, and with the imagination behind them, these first immigrants launched the first American Revolution.

THROUGH INDIAN EYES

James J. Cassidy Jr.

Good food for thought Red, that analgy for the first gas engine in apropriate. What do you DO with it.

The discovery channel had a documentary of human evolution starting in the good old African days, one statistic I particularly found interesting [ and almost hard to believe ] was that in the European habitation phase, they say it took THOUSANDS [ very plural ] of years before the first stone implement [ gas engine ] was even put on a crude stick...

So here we are in 1800 with a 100% animal powered world to space travel in 2000 and trying to phase out the gas engine !!