The Universal Story
By / August 30, 2022

From Handaxes to more Handaxes: Humanity’s First Tools

Tools are core to being a human. Almost everything every modern human does is completely reliant on some form of technology – cars, planes, internet, laptops, manufacturing, agriculture. Despite the complexity and diversity of our modern tools, it is easy to take them for granted. So what were the first tools humans used? How did we make them?

Humanity’s first tools were these wonderful things called “hand-axes”. They were basically rocks that had been sharpened into a blade. The pointy bit at the end was used for cutting and the round bit at the other end was held in someone’s hand. They were not generally attached to a haft like a modern ax, instead, they were just held in the hand and used to butcher animals and break open bones to get the marrow.

However, over time, these hand-axes got more and more sophisticated, with one hand ax being used to sharpen another, to maintain a blade.

If you are looking to understand the development of humanity, there is almost no better way to do that, than to understand the evolution of human tools. Let’s dive in.

Humanity’s first tools: Hand-axes

These are the tools that were used by any human ancestor, Australopithecus Afarensis lived roughly 3 million years ago. These were found in Ethiopia and are one of the earliest recognizable tools created, part of what is referred to as the “Oldowan” or “Mode I” stone tool industry, named after the site in Tanzania where the tools were first found in the 1930s. There is a distinct beauty to these tools – they are humanity’s first attempts to really shape the world (see our posts on early human tools here) (Image: D Descouens, Wikimedia).

Imagine for a moment, you need to cut something. You want to remove a bit of meat from a deer to cook it. However, you don’t have a knife. You don’t have any of the tools of a kitchen, or any modern objects at all. Just your natural environment of rocks and wood. How would you do it?

Your first thought is probably metal – but you can’t actually get that until you make it from some ore. That requires fire and all sorts of complex stuff, so that’s off the table. Your second thought is maybe wood, a splinter can be sharp can’t it?!? But that won’t work, it will never cut quite well enough slice. So you are probably left with stone.

You go and grab a rock to try and use it. It’s obviously very blunt. So you hit it against something to try and sharpen it. It just sort of splits in half and crumbles. It didn’t work. So you grab another rock, one that looks a bit harder. But now, this one is too hard! You can’t chip it at all.

The point of all that, is, if you are in a natural environment, building things is really really hard. We take for granted that we have lots of hard things, lots of sharp things and lots of flat things around us. But early humans had none of this. They had to make their tools with almost nothing.

The earliest human tools were hand-axes. Basically large river pebbles that had a few hunks knocked out of them by another river pebble. You could use them to crack open bones and do some very basic butchery, but not much else. From here on, its easy to imagine how things developed. People started getting better at making these tools by selecting rocks more carefully. They also started to build tools, to help make these tools – it’s almost impossible to develop a good sharp blade using one rock. Instead, you make one blade, use it for a while, then when you come across another promising rock, you use the old blade to sharpen it. That’s why these rocks are generally considered part of a “rock industry” where ancient humans all carried around a couple of these blades with different levels of sharpness, ready to trade or improve on their collection at any moment.

The main tools of the stone age, were increasingly sophisticated hand axes carved from specific types of rock. The far left is an Oldowan tool, probably made about 3 million years ago by Australopithecines in Africa. Then they get increasingly sophisticated until you get to the far right, an extremely sharp flint knife, probably made in the last 20,000 years in Europe (Images: Wikimedia, more details here).

Researchers classify the tools into five separate categories, the earliest being in category one, getting more sophisticated to category 5. They are:
– Mode I tools – the ones we discussed above;
– Mode II tools came from Europe. They were the first tools that were double-sided, aka “bi-faced”;
– Mode III started to make sharped tools, also in Europe. They were similar but smaller and sharper – more like knives;
– Mode IV tools started about 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, and they are now properly sharp, using very hard quartz based stones; and
– Mode V are known as the ‘microlith industries” – very small blades were created, which were then attached to hafts to create properly intimidating weapons.

It is easy to look down on these tools. We are very used to tools looking a particular way: shiny and metallic. However, these tools are incredibly hard to make. Researchers working in the field often take years to develop the skill to be able to replicate even some of the more basic tools. There are a wide variety of different techniques that were used. There is the basic knapping technique where you use one larger rock to knock of flakes from the blade. Then there is the more advanced Levallois technique – which involves taking a larger stone and knocking a single large flake off the top of it to create a smaller blade. A completely different technique was used by the Acheulean Industry. Some of the later blades, particularly those made of quartz and obsidian were sharper than most modern knives, actually able to cut in-between cells without damaging the tissue. For this reason, certain surgical knives for particularly delicate surgeries are still made from similar glass compounds.

There are also some weird and wonderful theories about what these tools were used for. A lot of the ones that we have discovered, do not have a lot of wear on them. Some have therefore theorised that a lot of these handaxes were not used often and instead were ritual objects, traded and used to attract mates by early humans (much like iPhones today).

These stone tools really summarise all of humanity. The slow, careful and incremental experimentation and improvement on these tools so clearly maps to the expansion of human consciousness and the development of the human mind and creativity. It is a wonderful and beautiful thing.

These are the “microlith” weapons that people developed in Europe roughly 15,000 years ago. They are small rocks attached to a stick, to create some form of spears or arrowheads. It is actually incredibly hard to do this. Attaching a sharp rock to a stick in a way that will not result in it falling off is almost impossible. You need to treat the stick with some form of adhesives like a tar or honey and then generally wrap it in some twine. Different cultures had all sorts of different ways of doing it, you can see how diverse they are from just this picture (Image: W Mina, Researchgate).

Other tools? Halfted axes and spears

The oldest hafted axes came from Australia, roughly 45,000 years ago. This is massively in advance of everywhere else – they turn up in Japan 35,000 years ago, but really they generally come along after agriculture 10,000 years ago. They were manufactured by grinding a basalt stone against other rocks to create a sharper ground edge – see “World’s earliest ground-edge axe production coincides with human colonization of Australia” (Image: ANU).

Evidence around wooden tools is very difficult to find. Wood and bone are much more fragile and therefore generally don’t survive anywhere near as long as stone and metal. However, it is basically guaranteed that early humans were using wooden and bone tools, as regularly as stone ones throughout the stone age from more than 1 million years ago.

Our best evidence is an incredible trove of spears called the Schöningen spears. They are a set of nine spears from over 400,000 years, so they actually pre-date the Neanderthal extinction. The spears are amazing and have a quality that is equivalent to modern tournament javelins. The weight distribution is incredibly precise, they have most of the weight in the front 1/3rd of the spear’s length (like modern javelins) to allow them for form a neat arc through the air. Reconstructions of these spears can be thrown over 70 metres and the ends have been hardened with fire. They only managed to survive because they fell into a very wet and muddy environment called a bog, that preserves wood incredibly well. We at The Universal Story, consider these spears one of the luckiest finds in all of the archeology. We don’t really have any other wooden tools surviving within 100,000 years of them.

The Schöningen spears – probably the luckiest archeological find in all of history. The set of nine spears was discovered in a mine in Germany in the 80s. They are estimated to be 400,000 years old. That date is just incredible. We barely have any other wooden tools that are 50,000 years old. They pre-date the neanderthals. And they are so sophisticated, they have clearly been diligently worked into formidable weapons – comparable to modern Olympic javelins – with the majority of the weight in the front third of the spear (Image: Smithsonian Institution)

The oldest hafted axes came from Australia, roughly 45,000 years ago. This is massively in advance of everywhere else – they turn up in Japan 35,000 years ago, but really they generally come along after agriculture around 10,000 years ago. They were manufactured by grinding a basalt stone against other rocks to create a sharper ground edge.

Toolmaking really explodes once humans settle down and start building things. Hammers, chisels, ramps and wedges all are only really useful once you start building huts and houses. You need an ax to chop down trees, some scrapers to flatten bits of wood and remove bark, blades to cut, bits of rock to make fishing nets sink.

   
 This picture shows several different types of stone tools that were collected from settlements in Europe around the alps from 5,000 to 5000 BC. Most of them were found on the Auvernier site on Lake Neuchatel in western Switzerland. The artifacts represented in this picture include 1 broken battle axe, 6 celts, 7 end-scrapers, 7 arrow points, 2 sickle blades, 1 side-scraper/knife, 1 net sinker and 4 spindle whorls – see more here.

So what can we learn from all of this?

We all have an image of what tools look like. We imagine the things you go down to the hardware store to buy – hammers, spanners, screwdrivers, etc. However, those are incredibly advanced tools that took humanity millennia to develop and understand. Each one of them has an incredible history behind them, with people all over the world slowly incrementing, experimenting and improving on the tools of their ancestors. They were created with the most basic of materials – rock and wood through thousands of generations of struggle. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Nowhere is that clearer, then in the history of human tools.

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