The Handaxe

The handaxe is without a doubt the most iconic man-made stone tool. They are objects of great beauty and harmony, designed and produced with great skill. Many are attracted to the regularity and symmetry of their form and amazed by the skill of the creator. When holding a handaxe you are left wondering if its form echoes the maker's imagination of the shape that lay hidden in the rough block of stone from which it was manufactured.

Handaxes were unquestionably used as tools but it feels like beauty and utility go hand-in-hand and there is evidence that some bifacial tools were made for aesthetic purposes, showing no evidence of use.

In contrast with pebble choppers, handaxes were crafted by striking flakes from both sides of a stone cobble or a large piece of stone struck from a large block. Initially the toolmaker may have used the cobble as a core for the production of sharp flakes that could be used as cutting tools.

After it was exhausted the core itself it may have become a suitable cutting tool that would comfortably fit the shape of the makers hand. The earliest handaxes from the Olduvai Gorge in Africa, dating back to around 1.6 million years ago, appear more like exhausted cores that are too big to be held in a human hand comfortably.

Shown on the right is a huge quartzite handaxe from the Sahara (Tamouchert, Mauretania), which with its 23cm in length and almost 2kg in weight would be very difficult to handle as a cutting tool. The Algerian handaxe next to it is a lot smaller (L=18cm) and does fit in the hand. It has no cutting edge but its tip may have been used to crush animal bones for marrow. Many old lake beds in the Sahara, uncovered by shifting sand dunes, are littered with handaxes , indicating that this desert was more habitable in Palaeolithic times than it is now.

The earliest handaxes outside of Africa appear around 0.9 million years ago in Southern Spain, hailing the first spread of homonids into Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and across Asia. Handaxes were in use for over a million years and their manufacture only ceased for good at the end of the Middle Palaeolithic, as recently as 50,000 years ago. No other humanly made object has ever been manufactured over such a long period of time or has spread over such a wide geographical area before the 20th century.

Apart from the North African biface in the middle of the bottom row, shown above is a selection of European handaxes with a range of shapes and forms. The bottom row includes French bifaces from various regions with from left-to-right: a large Lower Palaeolithic handaxe from the Claise valley (Le Grand-Pressigny; L=11cm) and Middle Palaeolithic handaxes from the Rance valley (Brittany); the Vézère valley and again the Claise valley. The smaller bifaces in the top row are: (left-to-right) Lower Palaeolithic handaxes from the Meuse valley (Limburg, Netherlands); Somer valley (Somerset, UK); Vézère valley (Dordogne, France) and a small Middle Palaeolithic handaxe (L=5cm) from the Orne valley (Caen, France).

Handaxe typology

Handaxes were the first human-made stone tools to be recognised as such and they were instrumental to the demonstration of the antiquity of humans by Boucher de Perthes in 1847. He was the first to refer to these implements as coupes de poings, (punch) a description reflected in many languages, like Faustkeil, in German, vuistbijl (Dutch) and handaxe. Today the most commonly term used is biface because of the lack of any clear functional connotations. As can be seen from the images above, bifaces come in various shapes and sizes (see also www.biface.fr) and many researchers have attempted to understand whether their various forms tell us anything about their specific uses or the cultural traditions that created them. Handaxe form probably relates to both use and culture but is also very likely to be affected by many more things, especially the type and the quality of the used raw materials and the skills of the individual maker.

With some confidence we can say that they may have served a variety of purposes from butchering animals to woodworking. As mentioned above some bifaces are thought to have been prepared for aesthetic purposes and may have played an important role in choosing a suitable mate. Several researchers have argued that creative intelligence of the human mind is also a product of sexual selection and the handaxe may be one of the first products of the evolving creative homonid mind.

The handaxe makers

Although at many sites the toolmakers' species identity remains ambiguous because of the lack of hominid fossils, many attribute the first handaxes to Homo erectus in Africa. Erectus and their ancestors are also thought to have been responsible for the spread of this technology across Africa and Europe and as far east as China.

The unique site of Boxgrove in Southern England gives us one of the best preserved glimpses in what life of these early European handaxe makers was like 500,000 years ago. Numerous bifacial tools and animal remains, including those of butchered horse, bison and rhinoceros, were found here in pristine condition. A human shinbone (tibia) and a tooth from another individial were found here too and are thought to belong to the European Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis. Several skillfully crafted bifaces, perfectly suited for dismembering large herbivores, are shown here (as displayed at the Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story exhibition in the Natural History Museum in 2014).

Most butchered remains are of complete carcasses and the cut marks appear to have been made before any gnaw marks were left by scavengers. Whether they actively hunted or scavenged, these butchers were able to secure a kill when it was still fresh.

Apart from the large number of handaxes found at the Boxgrove site (over 250) one of the most exciting finds, in my view, is that of the undisturbed knapping site showing the triangular scatter of flint flakes produced during the manufacture of these handaxes. It shows how the larger flint flakes fell close to the body thereby preserving the arrangement of the knappers legs in the fine silt deposits as she or he knelt down to produce the implements (source Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story, Dinnis & Stringer, 2013). Of course we can't be sure if any sexual division of labour existed in the production of these stone tools, however, I believe the indentation in the flint scatter pattern between the imprint of both legs (bottom left corner) hint that this knapper may have been male. By refitting the flint scatter and the void left by the tool in refitted flake core it sometimes it's even possible to identify the type and shape of the tool manufactured during these knapping events.

The handaxe and the development of the human brain

For a modern human to perfect the art of creating a handaxe requires many months, or even years. I have seen a modern flint knapper produce a perfectly symmetrical biface from a block of flint in about 15 minutes (see the end product in the picture at the beginning of this post). For some, such skill and the ability to imagine the shape of a perfect biface in the rough lump of flint like a sculptor is evidence of intelligent and complex thought. Some researchers even believe that the development of manual dexterity may hold the secret of communication and even human speech used perhaps for the transfer of handaxe producing skills. Recent Neurological research indeed shows that act of flint knapping activates the left hemisphere in a modern flintknapper's brain. Although this area of the brain is used for speech, it is still a big leap to conclude that Homo heidelbergensis could actually speak. For others, including myself, the repetitious chaîne opératoire or operational sequence of events leading to the production of the finished biface, which persisted for over a million years with little evidence of technological improvement, 'speaks' for the limited brain capacity of its creator. Perhaps rather like a weaver bird building an elaborated sophisticated nest over and over again for millions of years.

I believe it is more plausible that mastering fire was the big turning point in the cultural aspect of human evolution, providing warmth and protection wherever they travelled and allowing early humans to cook food. In addition to eating meat and marrow, cooking food provided an enormous calorie boost enabling the homonid brain to grow dramatically over a period of a few million years. It is hard to pin down when the control of fire may have 'sparked' the cultural revolution in human evolution but the earliest convincing evidence for this in Europe is 400,000 years old, in the shape of a series of hearths discovered at the Beeches Pit site in East Anglia. The advent of fire use in Europe also heralds a new revolution in stone age technology: pre-determined flake production. This 'prepared core' technology emphasises a more sophisticated and purposeful shaping a stone core enabling the knapper to create a flake of a more calculated shape and size.