1. Toolmaking: Handwork
2.6mya to 10kya
Palaeoanthropology came to be scientific over the course of the 20th century. Each decade after the Second World War saw the adoption of new testing methods, while successive generations of paleoanthropologists and associated experts challenged older lines of enquiry. Among the most harmful beliefs was that humans are inherently immoral animals, charged as it is with Christian theology (especially original sin). The anatomist Raymond Dart’s 1953 article, The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man, placed humanity among the ‘deadliest Carnivora’. His image of bone-club wielding ape-thugs was popularised by the journalist Robert Ardrey in African Genesis (1961). Taking this Killer Ape Theory deeper into pop culture, Stanley Cubrik’s film 2001: A Space Odessey (1968) - inspired by Ardrey - depicted the ‘dawn of man’ as a bloodthirsty revelation. Cold war audiences couldn’t help believing their human ancestors shared their Hollywood-stoked bellicosity.
But the popularity of this belief in human violence is misguided. For one, Dart may have had unresolved trauma. He had been something of a professional renegade after the discovery of the first Australopithecus africanus fossil in Africa, which had indicated validity in Darwin’s African origin theory. But Dart had earlier been a medic on the Western Front in 1918. Did the battlefield follow him home as it did many others, like J. R. R. Tolkien? For another, the evidence supports the view that humanity has been about cooperation and coordination, much less the violence that arose following the Neolithic and Urban revolutions. As we will see, widespread human violence came from food surpluses, social hierarchy, technological inequality and empire; largely foreign concepts to hominin hunter-gatherers. The violence, however, remained less widespread among members of the species when compared to other animals.
It had been believed from Kenneth Oakley’s 1949 work, Man the Tool-maker, that the defining attribute of Homo was that it alone could make tools. But it’s now appreciated that many animals make and use tools, and that Australopithecus made stone tools some 1 million years before Homo habilis, although this is an outlier. Nevertheless, consistent evidence of stone tool manufacture and use by late Australopiths began 2.6mya. If bone-clubs were the technological starting point, the evidence is unlikely to ever be strong given the vulnerability of such fossils. To be able to make tools hominins needed hands and intelligence. (As we will see in the next blog post, larger brains were fuelled by eating meat and cooked food.) The industries of flintknapping are ranked Mode I to V, from most primitive to most sophisticated tools immediately preceding the neolithic (i.e. the new stone age; ‘lithic’ meaning related to stone). This covers a timescale of 2.6mya to 10kya. In archaeology, an ‘industry’ is a group that use the same tools, reflecting a process of manufacture, trade networks and cultures.
Mode 1 tools were made by the Oldowan industry in Africa typically from river pebbles knapped at one side of one end and were used to strip flesh off bones. These tools were used from 2.6mya to 1.7mya, having been twice inherited since the late Australopiths, first by the habilines and then by Homo erectus. The latter spread Mode 1 toolmaking as far as modern-day Indonesia. Mode 2 tools – the first to be designed and mass produced – were made by the Acheulean industry, beginning in Africa, from 1.7mya. The tools came in numerous shapes but all are essentially hand axes than can be used for slicing, chopping and cutting. As yet, stone tools are not being used for killing. That changed with Mode 3 tools. From around 400kya the Mousterian industry of Homo heidelbergensis and Homo neanderthalensis used hammers made of bone or antler to make stone tools that came to a sharp point, suitable for use as part of a spear. The oldest known composite tool is a javelin. Homo sapiens first began heat treating stone tools 72kya at modern-day Pinnacle Point, South Africa. The first humans to live on the European peninsula were the Aurignacians. The industry named for them made Mode 4 tools: stone blades of myriad functions in use from 50kya-10kya (possibly beginning in Africa 100kya). From 35kya, an array of microlith Mode 5 tools were manufactured for use in spears and arrowheads that came to be used widely.
Reading list
Ian Tattersall, Understanding Human Evolution, Cambridge University Press, 2022.
