Page 172 - Russian History Viewed through Distorted Mirrors, Vol. 1

Nicolai Levashov. Russian History Viewed through Distorted Mirrors. Vol. 1

and saw appeared — made of the bones of animals and sharp stones — and people
learned to use them, did the first dwellings created by man appear.

Dampness, cold and lack of light, etc., is inevitable in a dug-out. Therefore the
next step in the development of house-building is to make totally wooden ones. The
fact that there are plenty of trees in the forests greatly facilitated the matter. Building
a wooden house requires considerable improvement of the “carpenter’s tools” and
more sophisticated building technology. Someone invented the log cross binding, and
learned how to make the flat log butt-ends before laying one log onto another, some-
one thought out how to chink a log cabin using dry moss, someone — how to make a
door, doorway, windows, roof, stove, internal wall to divide the dwelling into rooms,
etc. This is not the most important thing to understand now. What we really should
realize is that man, in order to survive in the conditions of the Temperate Zone, was
forced to build a house and to invent instruments and building technologies.

Man borrowed from nature, attentively observing it, and he also created some-
thing new. One person did the job better than another and the real talent and natural
shrewdness was revealed in the third one when he worked with wood. Gradually the
experience was accumulated: which tree to choose and how to use it for building. As
a result, the wooden houses which were built by different people began to differ very
much. Some people succeeded in building beautiful, comfortable and warm houses;
the houses of others could fall down when the first wind blew. Therefore, at a certain
moment, professional carpenters and joiners appeared — they began to build homes
not only for themselves, but also for other people, getting for their labour the prod-
ucts of those for whom they built homes. Other skilled craftsmen, using their talent,
made implements for them. And so on, and so forth…

Certainly, it is very pleasant to stay in a warm and comfortable house, but… one
has to eat! Food should be available for the whole period of the cold time. Vegetables
and fruits ripen only in the warm time of the year and, although it happens at a differ-
ent time, it is necessary to pick them and preserve them for a longer period. For this
purpose it was necessary to build something for their storage close to the house.
Moreover, not all fruits can be stored for a long time; therefore, it was necessary to
invent methods for storing them as long as possible. In addition, the amount of sup-
plies even for one family for the whole cold period must be pretty large and, in prin-
ciple, it would be difficult to collect such an amount of fruits and vegetables in their
natural environment. For this they had to “comb” large forest areas. The greater the
number of families which lived together, the larger the territory that had to be cov-
ered, in order to pick the necessary amount of forest fruits, needed to be. Therefore,
the only way out was to grow food. This required clearing trees from a place close to
the house to make fields and vegetable gardens, studying the biological cycles of
plants and trees and inventing tools for land cultivation and everything concerned
with it.

Hunting has always played an important role in man’s life, but when man began
to lead a settled way of life many wild animals went as far as possible from human
habitation. Therefore, in the course of time, hunting became more difficult and hunt-
ers had to go further and further away from home. Thereupon, they began to hunt

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