Object

Hand axe

The longest-used tool design there has ever been — over a million years, across three continents, and nobody is certain what it was for.

A hand axe is a stone core worked on both faces to a symmetrical, usually teardrop-shaped tool with a continuous cutting edge. Made from flint, chert, quartzite or obsidian — whatever fractured predictably in the region — and made to essentially the same design from around 1.76 million years ago until perhaps 130,000 years ago.

That span is the remarkable fact. No other artefact type has been made for anything approaching that long, and the design travelled from Africa across Europe and Asia with very little change.

History

Associated with the Acheulean industry and with Homo erectus and its successors. The earliest are from Kokiselei in Kenya, around 1.76 million years ago.

What they were for is genuinely unsettled. Butchery is the best-supported use and is demonstrated by wear analysis. It does not explain the symmetry, which is worked far beyond what a cutting edge requires — proposals include a core to strike flakes from, a thrown weapon, and a display of the maker's skill and patience. The last of those is untestable and keeps being proposed because the symmetry is otherwise hard to account for.

Cultural significance

It is the object that establishes stone tools as a subject. John Frere recognised in 1797 that hand axes from Hoxne came from a period 'beyond that of the present world', which is one of the founding observations of prehistoric archaeology and was ignored for sixty years.

Its material is what makes it visible at all: everything else those populations made has gone. A million years of technology is known through the one material that does not rot.

Medium confidence Weak evidence

How we know: checked recently · only one source, so there is nothing to cross-check it against · stated directly by the source.

How this connects

Where a connection has been confirmed by an outside reference, that reference is named beside it.

is made of

Flint — rock · the commonest material where it occurs, and chosen for a fracture that a knapper can direct
Obsidian — rock · where volcanic glass was available, giving an edge sharper than surgical steel and far more fragile

is associated with

Stone Age — event · made to essentially one design for over a million years, which no other artefact type approaches

is used as

Abrasive — application · not as an abrasive but as the edge: the flaked edge is what the stone was selected for

is commonly confused with

Bronze socketed axe — object · a million years and two materials apart: one is a flaked stone core held in the hand, the other a cast bronze head on a haft

Sources

Wikidata
Wikimedia Foundation · Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication)
Material World
Our own writing

Questions this page answers

Where it comes from, and what it becomes

Follow Hand axe back to what it starts as, and forward into what it becomes. Each step is a documented one — a real route material takes, not a chain of inference.

Upstream — what it comes from

Hand axe → is made of (the commonest material where it occurs, and chosen for a fracture that a knapper can direct) → Flint → is sourced from (as nodules and bands within chalk and other limestones, the silica having come from sponge and diatom skeletons and been reprecipitated in the sediment) → Limestone → is sourced from (precipitated from it, mostly by organisms building shells and skeletons out of dissolved calcium and carbonate) → Seawater → is composed of (about 96.5 per cent by mass — seawater is 3.5 per cent dissolved solids and the rest of it is this) → Water
Hand axe → is made of (where volcanic glass was available, giving an edge sharper than surgical steel and far more fragile) → Obsidian
Hand axe → is made of (the commonest material where it occurs, and chosen for a fracture that a knapper can direct) → Flint → is composed of (silica in crystals too small to see, which is what gives it a conchoidal fracture and no grain to follow) → Quartz
Hand axe → is made of (the commonest material where it occurs, and chosen for a fracture that a knapper can direct) → Flint → is sourced from (as nodules and bands within chalk and other limestones, the silica having come from sponge and diatom skeletons and been reprecipitated in the sediment) → Limestone → is composed of → Calcite
Hand axe → is made of (the commonest material where it occurs, and chosen for a fracture that a knapper can direct) → Flint → is sourced from (as nodules and bands within chalk and other limestones, the silica having come from sponge and diatom skeletons and been reprecipitated in the sediment) → Limestone → is composed of (in young limestone, before conversion to calcite is complete) → Aragonite
Hand axe → is made of (the commonest material where it occurs, and chosen for a fracture that a knapper can direct) → Flint → is sourced from (as nodules and bands within chalk and other limestones, the silica having come from sponge and diatom skeletons and been reprecipitated in the sediment) → Limestone → is composed of (in nodules and cavities, strontium substituting for calcium and then separating out — the mineral's commonest sedimentary occurrence) → Strontianite

Downstream — what it becomes

Hand axe → is associated with (made to essentially one design for over a million years, which no other artefact type approaches) → Stone Age complete chain
Hand axe → is used as (not as an abrasive but as the edge: the flaked edge is what the stone was selected for) → Abrasive