J.M. Roberts’ 1987 Hutchinson History of the World contains this arresting sentence:
At one site in Spain the mind of what one scholar called a ‘primitive Archimedes’ has been seen at work three hundred thousand years ago, directing the removal and use of the tusks of slaughtered elephants as levers to shift the carcasses for cutting up.
The scholar seems to be archaeologist François Bordes, who had written in his 1968 book The Old Stone Age that the Acheuleans of Torralba-Ambrona had killed elephants half engulfed in mud, “and that a primitive Archimedes had the idea of using their tusks as levers for shifting their enormous bulk and making it easier to cut them up.”
From what I can understand, the evidence for butchery at these sites is now thought to be ambiguous, but it’s a striking image nonetheless.
Completely unrelated, but similarly notable: In Days With Bernard Shaw, his 1948 memoir of his friendship with George Bernard Shaw, Stephen Winsten remembers Shaw remarking, “Leonardo da Vinci ruled his notebooks in columns headed fox, wolf, bear and monkey and made notes of human faces by ticking them off in these columns.” I can’t confirm this either, but it seems worth recording.
