Tools made of stone

Spanning the past 2. These sites often consist of the accumulated debris from making and using stone tools. Because stone tools are less susceptible to destruction than bones, stone artifacts typically offer the best evidence of where and when early humans lived, their geographic dispersal, and their ability to survive in a variety of habitats. But since multiple hominin species often existed at the same time, it can be difficult to determine which species made the tools at any given site.

Most important is that stone tools provide evidence about the technologies, dexterity, particular kinds of mental skills, and innovations that were within the grasp of early human toolmakers.

Explore some examples of Early Stone Age tools. The earliest stone toolmaking developed by at least 2. More About the Azilian Tradition. Blades were critical for making deep holes, including deep wounds in prey animals, but they were also useful in other ways, and represented a huge improvement in the amount of cutting edge that could be gotten from a piece of superior stone. One estimate suggests that two pounds of stone provides about four inches of cutting edge as a handax, but up to 75 feet of cutting edge when turned into blades.

That is an increase of about times. It is important to remember that cutting edge length is not the only property that matters in tools, of course.

If it were, our kitchens would have only long knives. The blade tool seen above from both front and back in the illustration with the yellow background is quite typical for late Paleolithic times, and represents a considerable degree of skill in its production. The one with the red background is a modern imitation, made of high-grade obsidian.

Notice the intensive "retouching" that sharpens the edge by removing tiny chips of stone. People never stopped chipping stone into tools. Modern campers make crude modifications in a pinch, and hobbyists often try to reproduce earlier forms, often with great success, although their productions rarely show signs of heavy use.

Furthermore, not every chipped or abraded stone is an artifact. Archaeologists have long realized that products of natural forces —wind abrasion, river-polishing, bashing in rapid river flows or rock slides, breakage through repetitive heating and cooling— could break or polish stones in ways that sometimes looked very much like crude artifacts.

The name "ventifact" or "geofact" or sometimes " aeolith " is given to such an object. The hand-ax-like dark stone at the right is an example, from an exhibit of "ventifacts" from Antarctica at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum. At the left is an artifact from the newly excavated Gault Site, about 30 miles north of Austin, Texas. The find caused excitement because of its early, pre-Clovis dates. For more on Clovis tools, click here. The picture here is from a brief note in Science News August 4, p.

However the similar looking item at the right is a Ventifact, from the same Carnegie Museum exhibit as the one above. There is little doubt about the human origin of the one at the left, but as it appears in a mere magazine photo, even an expert might be confused. And to a lay eye, the two items look convincingly similar. We should not be surprised if stones we spade up in our gardens turn out to be natural products, and we should be forgiving when even professional archaeologists, even today, are occasionally unsure.

It is important to remember that we have stone tools because they are easily preserved. In contrast, especially for very early periods, it is rare for archaeologists to find examples of tools made of materials more easily lost to decay. Such items range from flexible plant fibers used for clothing, basketry, fencing, or shelter thatch, to dense but ultimately impermanent materials like wood, bamboo, ivory, antler, or bone.

Many, probably most, tools used in the Paleolithic were surely NOT made of stone. The modern Amazonian toothed knife shown at right is made of bone, with the teeth carefully notched into it.

The modern Costa Rican arrow points shown at the left are wooden. The modern Icelandic "letter opener" below right is made from a sheep's horn with a wooden handle with bark partially removed and partially retained. The "cutting" edges have not been sharpened but could have been. Similar tools made and used in the early Paleolithic would almost surely not survive to modern times.

We do in fact have some bone and wood tools from late Paleolithic times. But even the earlier Lower Paleolithic surely had non-stone tools. It seems inconceivable that a form such as Homo habilis would have made the stone choppers that we find but would never have used a stick to pick his teeth, or that Homo erectus would have hunted with a stone-tipped thrusting spear, but would never have done anything with a pointed wooden pole.

We know that wood and bamboo can produce remarkably sharp points and that they are still used as skewers today. Why should we imagine skewers to be a modern or even an Upper Paleolithic discovery? Curators at the Wangfujing Paleolithic Site Museum in Beijing wisely included a life-sized waxwork above showing a wooden spear being sharpened with a stone scraper as a reminder of this.

In fact, at that site dated at 22, - 23, BC a fair number of bone and wood tools were recovered, including the bone burin at the left below and the bone points possibly awls at the right. The picture at the left shows Ancestral Puebloan Anasazi awls made from turkey bones from New Mexico, probably dating from about AD The picture at the right shows a scraper made from an antelope leg bone, also Ancestral Puebloan. Although less durable, these bone artifacts are comparable in function to some of the stone ones shown higher up the page.

We must also remember that most tools, whether of stone or of other materials, could serve many purposes, and that broken tools could sometimes still have utility as something other than what was originally intended, just as modern people use old toothbrushes to clean all sorts of non-teeth.

Furthermore, some tools identical in form may originally have been intended for different functions. Much of what we know about life in the Stone Age comes from the weapons and tools they left behind. Interestingly, a key discovery from early tool and weapon finds is that they were tailored for right-handed people, which suggests that a tendency towards right-handedness emerged very early on.

Though people from the Stone Age had different scrapers, hand axes and other stone tools, the most common and important were spears and arrows. These composite tools — named because they were made of more than one material — normally comprised of a wooden shaft tied to a stone at the top using plant fibres or animal sinews.

Spears were simple but deadly and effective. They were made of wood which was sharpened into a triangular, leaf shape and were widely used as a weapon in wars and hunting by both riders and bare-foot hunters.

Spears were either thrown or pushed into an animal or enemy in close combat. Arrows were made of wood and had a sharpened, pointed head. The tail was often made of feathers, and explosive materials were occasionally also added to the end. Similar to spears and arrows, axes were also widely used and were sharpened into a point against a rock. Though they had a more limited range, they were highly effective when in close combat and were also useful when later preparing an animal as food, or when cutting through wood and undergrowth.

Stone tools are the oldest surviving type of tool made by humans and our ancestors—the earliest date to at least 1. It is very likely that bone and wooden tools are also quite early, but organic materials simply don't survive as well as stone. This glossary of stone tool types includes a list of general categories of stone tools used by archaeologists, as well as some general terms pertaining to stone tools.

A chipped stone tool is one that was made by flint knapping. The toolmaker worked a piece of chert, flint, obsidian , silcrete or similar stone by flaking off pieces with a hammerstone or an ivory baton. Actively scan device characteristics for identification.

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