#stone tools

Flint handaxe, dated to between 500,000 and 180,000 years ago (Lower Paleolithic). The axe belongs to the Acheulean lithic culture, associated with early hominins such as Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis. Acheulean handaxes have been found at sites such as Boxgrove in southern England, as well as roughly contemporary sites in Africa; they were ultimately supplanted by the more sophisticated Levallois stone tools of the Mousterian culture associated with the Neanderthals.

This handaxe was found in Hampshire, England, UK. It is now in the British Museum.

Early humans used animal bones to craft tools — more than a million years earlier than scientists previously thought, according to new research published this week. A group of researchers from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Indiana University made the discovery in East Africa. Ignacio de la Torre, co-director of the excavation and a CSIC researcher, says the bone tools are from the Acheulean period, which is known as the age of the hand axes — tear-shaped tools with a sharp point made from stone. "Now, we have a human species here that is able to innovate, to create an innovation by applying a knowledge they know they have or the working of stone," de la Torre tells NPR.

5. Hand Servants

By José-Manuel Benito Álvarez (España) —> Locutus Borg - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1605723

Named for Saint-Acheul in northern France, the Acheulean, or Mode II is characterized by pear-shaped and oval tools and lasted from about 1,950,000 through about 125,000 years ago, with pockets that continued until about 50,000 years ago. These dates are based on dating volcanic ash or by testing the magnetostratigraphy, that is checking the alignment of magnetic minerals deposited to find out where the north pole was at the time they were laid down, or dating of organic material in the same layers as the tools were found. Based on these techniques, it appears that Acheulean tools originated in Africa and spread through Eurasia by 800,000 years ago.

One of the major improvements of the Acheulean tools over the Oldowan is the use of a 'soft hammer' that could be made of wood, bone, or antler, allowing more control over how the tool is finished and allowing for dulled tools to be resharpened. The tools were worked on both sides, allowing large flakes to be processed into tools as well as the cores that the Oldowan used.

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To make these tools, large flakes would be removed by a hammerstone, as with the Oldowan tools, but this would be taken a step further to work both faces of the core, with smaller flakes being removed, working to the soft hammer to remove thinner and smaller flakes to reach the desired shape. This would require the toolmaker to consider several steps ahead and to appropriately judge the flaws of the material they were using to successfully knap a tool.

Researchers have found collections of hundreds of tools, many too large to be used easily, and many unused, as far as we can tell. Knowing exactly why this happened is not possible, but researchers have a few theories as to why this happened. It might have been that these tools held some type of social clout. They might have played a part in identity or that they were a display of skill and prowess and were discarded once their purpose was met. This led one researcher to refer to these tools as 'the first commodity: A marketable good or service that has value and is used as an item for exchange'.