The Need to Make Things

IF, BY some miracle, you could be transplanted backward in time to the days of our prehistoric ancestors, what would be the first thing you would do?
It makes no difference whether you are a banker, a farmer, a politician, or a factory worker, your first action, assuming that you didn't drop dead at the suddenness of the change, would be to search for food. The second would be to search for shelter both from the elements and from wild beasts. In other words, the two necessities of existence, which you now take so much for granted, would occupy your thoughts to the exclusion of everything else. Guessing what you would do after that depends on the particular kind of primeval wilderness to which you were transplanted. You might, for example, find yourself in a time and location in the past when the struggle for existence was fierce. Getting food and shelter would, in that case, occupy every waking thought until you met death under the claws of some carnivorous beast. And you wouldn't last long, either, for only the exceptionally skillful in the art of self-preservation lived even to middle age under such difficult conditions.