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Tool found in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania
1.2–1.4 MILLION YEARS OLD
What do you take with you when you travel? Most of us would embark on a long list that begins with a toothbrush and ends with excess baggage. But for most of human history, there was only one thing that you really needed in order to travel – a stone handaxe. A handaxe was the Swiss Army knife of the Stone Age, an essential piece of technology with multiple uses. The pointed end could be used as a drill, while the long blades on either side would cut trees or meat or scrape bark or skins. It looks pretty straightforward, but in fact a handaxe is extremely tricky to make and, for more than a million years, it was literally the cutting edge of technology. It accompanied our ancestors through half of their history, enabling them to spread first across Africa and then across the world.
For a million years the sound of handaxes being made provided the percussion of everyday life. Anyone choosing a hundred objects to tell a history of the world would have to include a handaxe. And what makes this stone axe so interesting is how much it tells us, not just about the hand, but about the mind that made it.
The Olduvai Gorge handaxe doesn’t, of course, look anything like a modern axe – there’s no handle and there’s no metal blade. It is a piece of volcanic rock, a very beautiful grey-green, in the shape of a teardrop. It’s a lot more versatile than a modern straight axe. The stone has been chipped to give sharp edges along the long sides of the teardrop, and a sharp point at one end. When you hold it up against a human hand, you are struck by how closely the two shapes match, although this one is unusually large and is too big for a human hand to hold it comfortably. It has also been very beautifully worked, and you can see the marks of the chipping that have shaped it.
The very earliest tools, like the stone chopper we looked at in Chapter 2, strike us as pretty rudimentary. They look like chipped cobbles, and they were made by taking one large piece of stone and striking it with another, chipping off a few bits to make at least one sharp cutting edge. This handaxe is a very different matter. Simply watching a modern knapper at work shows just how many skills the maker of our handaxe must have possessed. Handaxes are not things you knock off: they are the result of experience, of careful planning and of skill, learnt and refined over a long period.
As important for our story as the great manual dexterity needed to make this chopper is the conceptual leap required – to be able to imagine in the rough lump of stone the shape that you want to make, in the way a sculptor today can see the statue waiting inside the block of stone.
This particular piece of supreme hi-tech stone is between 1.2 and 1.4 million years old. Like the chopping tool in Chapter 2, it was found in East Africa, at Olduvai Gorge, the great cleft in the savannah in Tanzania. But this comes from a higher geological layer than the chopping tool, which was made hundreds of thousands of years earlier, and there’s a huge leap between those earliest stone tools and this handaxe. It’s here that we find the real beginnings of modern humans. The person who made this we would have recognized as someone like us.
All the carefully focused and planned creativity required to make this axe implies an enormous advance in how our ancestors saw the world and how their brains worked. The handaxe may also contain the evidence of something even more remarkable: this chipped stone tool may hold the secret of speech, and it may have been in making things like this that we learnt how to talk to one another.
Recently, scientists have looked at what happens neurologically when a stone tool is being made. They have used modern hospital scanners to see which bits of the brain are activated as knappers work their stone. Surprisingly, the areas of the modern brain that you use when you’re making a handaxe overlap considerably with those you use when you speak. It now seems very likely that if you can shape a stone you can shape a sentence.
Of course, we have no idea what the maker of our handaxe might have said, but it seems probable that he or she would have had roughly the language abilities of a seven-year-old child. Whatever the level, this early speech would clearly have been the beginnings of a quite new capacity for communication – and that would have meant that people could sit down to exchange ideas, plan their work together or even just gossip. If they could make a decent handaxe like this one, and transmit the complex skills involved in the process, it is possible that they were well on the way to something we would all recognize as society.
So, 1.2 million years ago we could make tools, like our handaxe, that helped us control our environment and transform it – the handaxe gave us better food as well as the ability to skin animals for clothing and strip branches for fire or shelter. Not only this: we could now talk to each other and we could imagine something that wasn’t physically in front of us. What next? The handaxe was about to accompany us on a huge journey; because with all these skills, we were no longer tied to our immediate environment. If we needed to – even if we just wanted to – we could move. Travel became possible, and we could move beyond the warm savannahs of Africa and survive, perhaps even flourish, in a colder climate. The handaxe became our ticket to the rest of the world, and in the study collections of the British Museum you can find handaxes from all over Africa – Nigeria, South Africa, Libya – but also from Israel and India, Spain and Korea … even from a gravel pit near Heathrow Airport.
As they moved north out of Africa, some of these early handaxe-makers became the first Britons. The archaelogist and British Museum curator Nick Ashton elaborates:
At Happisburgh, in Norfolk, we have these thirty foot cliffs, composed of clays and silts and sands, and these were laid down by massive glaciation around 450,000 years ago. But it’s beneath these clays that a local was walking his dog and found a hand axe embedded in these organic sediments. These tools were first being made in Africa 1.6 million years ago, arrived in southern Europe and parts of Asia just under a million years ago. Of course the coast then would’ve been several miles further out. And if you’d walked along that ancient coastline, you would have arrived in what nowadays we call the Netherlands, in the heart of Central Europe. At this time there was a major land bridge connecting Britain to mainland Europe. We don’t really know why humans colonized Britain at this time, but perhaps it was due to the effectiveness of this new technology that we call the hand axe.