stone tools Archaeologists classify stone tools into
industries (also known as complexes or technocomplexes) that share distinctive technological or morphological characteristics. In 1969 in the 2nd edition of
World Prehistory,
Grahame Clark proposed an evolutionary progression of flint-knapping in which the "dominant lithic technologies" occurred in a fixed sequence from Mode 1 through Mode 5. He assigned to them relative dates: Modes 1 and 2 to the Lower
Palaeolithic, 3 to the
Middle Palaeolithic, 4 to the
Upper Paleolithic, and 5 to the
Mesolithic, though there were other
lithic technologies outside these Modes. Each region had its own timeline for the succession of the Modes: for example, Mode 1 was in use in Europe long after it had been replaced by Mode 2 in Africa. Clark's scheme was adopted enthusiastically by the archaeological community. One of its advantages was the simplicity of its terminology; for example, the Mode 1/Mode 2 Transition. The transitions are currently of greatest interest. Consequently, in the literature, the stone tools used during the
Palaeolithic are divided into four "modes", each of which denotes a different level of complexity and, in most cases, follows a rough
chronological order.
Pre-Mode I ;Kenya Stone tools found from 2011 to 2014 at the
Lomekwi archeological site near
Lake Turkana in Kenya are dated to 3.3 million years old and predate the genus
Homo by about 1 million years. The oldest known
Homo fossil is about 2.4–2.3 million years old compared to the 3.3 million year old stone tools. The stone tools may have been made by
Australopithecus afarensis, the species whose best fossil example is
Lucy, which inhabited East Africa at the same time as the date of the oldest stone tools, a yet unidentified species, or by
Kenyanthropus platyops (a 3.2 to 3.5-million-year-old
Pliocene hominin fossil discovered in 1999). Dating of the tools was done by dating volcanic ash layers in which the tools were found and dating the magnetic signature (pointing north or south due to reversal of the magnetic poles) of the rock at the site. ;Ethiopia Grooved, cut, and fractured animal bone fossils, made by using stone tools, were found in
Dikika,
Ethiopia, near (200 yards) the remains of
Selam, a young
Australopithecus afarensis girl who lived about 3.3 million years ago.
Mode I: The Oldowan Industry . The earliest stone tools in the era of the genus
Homo are
Mode 1 tools, and come from what has been termed the
Oldowan Industry, named after the type of site (many sites, actually) found in
Olduvai Gorge,
Tanzania, where they were discovered in large quantities. Oldowan tools were characterised by their simple construction, predominantly using
core forms. These cores were river pebbles, or similar rocks, that had been struck by a spherical
hammerstone, causing
conchoidal fractures, removing flakes from one surface, creating an edge, and often a sharp tip. The blunt end is the proximal surface; the sharp end is the distal. Oldowan is a percussion technology. Grasping the proximal surface, the hominid brought the distal surface down hard on an object he wished to detach or shatter, such as a bone or tuber. Experiments with modern humans found that knapping-naive participants can invent all four Oldowan knapping techniques, and that the experiment participants used the resulting Oldowan tools to access a money-baited box. The earliest known Oldowan tools have been found at Nyayanga on the Homa Peninsula in Kenya and are dated to ~2.9 million years ago (Ma), as well as from the
Gona and
Ledi-Geraru sites in Ethiopia, dated from around 2.6 million years ago, during the
Lower Palaeolithic. After this date, the Oldowan Industry subsequently spread throughout much of Africa, although archaeologists are currently unsure which
Hominan species first developed them, with some speculating that it was
Australopithecus garhi, and others believing that it was in fact
Homo habilis.
Homo habilis was the hominin who used the tools for most of the Oldowan in Africa, but at about 1.9–1.8 million years ago
Homo erectus inherited them. The industry flourished in southern and eastern Africa between 2.6 and 1.7 million years ago, but was also spread out of Africa and into
Eurasia by travelling bands of
H. erectus, who took it as far east as
Java by 1.8 million years ago and
Northern China by 1.6 million years ago.
Mode II: The Acheulean Industry Eventually, more complex Mode 2 tools were developed during the
Acheulean Industry, named after the site of
Saint-Acheul in France. The Acheulean was characterised not by the core, but by the
biface, the most notable form of which was the
hand axe. The Acheulean first appears in the archaeological record as early as 1.7 million years ago in the
West Turkana area of
Kenya and contemporaneously in southern Africa. The Leakeys, excavators at Olduvai, defined a "Developed Oldowan" Period, during which they believed they found evidence of an overlap between Oldowan and Acheulean. In their species-specific view of the two industries, Oldowan equated to
H. habilis and Acheulean to
H. erectus. Developed Oldowan was assigned to
habilis and Acheulean to
erectus. Subsequent dates for
H. erectus pushed the fossils back to well before the Acheulean; that is,
H. erectus must have initially used Mode 1. There was no reason to think, therefore, that Developed Oldowan had to be
habilis; it could have been
erectus. Opponents of the view divide the Developed Oldowan between Oldowan and Acheulean. There is no question, however, that
habilis and
erectus coexisted, as
habilis fossils have been found as late as 1.4 million years ago. Meanwhile, African
H. erectus developed Mode 2. In any case, a wave of Mode 2 then spread across Eurasia, leading to its adoption there.
H. erectus may not have been the only hominin to leave Africa; European fossils are sometimes associated with
Homo ergaster, a contemporary of
H. erectus in Africa. In contrast to an Oldowan tool, which is the result of a fortuitous and probably unplanned operation to obtain one sharp edge on a stone, an Acheulean tool is a planned result of a manufacturing process. The manufacturer begins with a blank, either a larger stone or a slab knocked off a larger rock. From this blank, they remove large flakes to be used as cores. Standing on a core on an anvil stone, they strike the exposed edge with centripetal blows of a hard hammer to roughly shape the implement. Then the piece must be worked over again, or retouched, with a soft hammer of wood or bone to produce a tool finely knapped all over, consisting of two convex surfaces intersecting in a sharp edge. Such a tool is used for slicing; a concussion would destroy the edge and cut the hand. Some Mode 2 tools are disk-shaped; others are ovoid; others are leaf-shaped and pointed; and others are elongated and pointed at the distal end, with a blunt proximal end, obviously used for drilling. Mode 2 tools are used for butchering; not being composite (having no haft) they are not very effective killing instruments. The killing must have been done some other way. Mode 2 tools are larger than Oldowan. The blank was ported to serve as an ongoing source of flakes until it was finally retouched into a finished tool. Edges were often sharpened by further retouching.
Mode III: The Mousterian Industry . This example is from La Parrilla (Valladolid, Spain). Eventually, the Acheulean in Europe was replaced by a lithic technology known as the
Mousterian Industry, which was named after the site of
Le Moustier in France, where examples were first uncovered in the 1860s. Evolving from the Acheulean, it adopted the
Levallois technique to produce smaller and sharper knife-like tools as well as scrapers. Also known as the "prepared core technique", flakes are struck from worked cores and then subsequently retouched. The Mousterian Industry was developed and used primarily by the
Neanderthals, a native European and Middle Eastern hominin species, but a broadly similar industry is contemporaneously widespread in Africa.
Mode IV: The Aurignacian Industry The widespread use of long
blades (rather than flakes) of the
Upper Palaeolithic Mode 4 industries appeared during the
Upper Palaeolithic between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, although blades were produced in small quantities much earlier by Neanderthals. The
Aurignacian culture seems to have been the first to rely largely on blades. The use of blades exponentially increases the efficiency of core usage compared to the Levallois flake technique, which had a similar advantage over Acheulean technology, which was worked from cores.
Expansion to the New World s from the Rummells-Maske Cache Site,
Iowa As humans
spread to the
Americas in the Late Pleistocene,
Paleo-Indians brought with them stone tools related to those that evolved separately from Old World technologies. The
Clovis point is the most widespread example of Late Pleistocene points in the Americas, dating to about 13,000 years ago. One of the earliest cases of tool use comes from the
Channel Islands (California), which were among the earliest places in North America to develop civilization. The tools found were drills, reamers, scrapers, abraders, spoke-shave, macroblade plane, burin, and wood-splitting wedges. These tools show that the people living there were skilled in woodworking. Other tools found on the Channel Islands were crescent-shaped and heat-flaked. In the
San Francisco Bay Area acorns found were often associated with grinding tools. Acorns show diachronic changes in tribal life as the tools for processing them evolved. Mortar tools, such as millingstones and
mortar and pestle, used to grind acorns, are dated to different periods at different locations. Central America, or
Mesoamerica, also has several unique stone-tool industries with their own specific cultural associations. One such industry is the Lowe industry, found in southern Mesoamerica near modern-day
Belize. These tools are versatile biface points defined by their basal thinning and barbed cutting edges. Ancient Mesoamericans, not unlike other stone-tool users, used a combination of multitools and tools made for specific purposes, such as cutting, scraping, whittling, and the making of other stone tools. One famous use of stone tools in Mesoamerica is the formidable
Macuahuitl, the
Aztec "sword" consisting of a flat board whose outside face is lined with
microliths. These weapons appear in the archaeological record as well as in many primary source depictions, such as the
Florentine Codex. Aztec warriors wielded these powerful weapons in war; however, they also held symbolic and political significance. Stones and stone tools in Mesoamerica held great power beyond their practical uses. In ancestral Maya traditions, axes and scepters were powerful tools of magic, and were wielded by gods and monarchs alike. Materials such as obsidian and flint are directly associated with certain gods like
Ītzpāpālōtl and play critical roles in powerful
divining magic. Mirrors were tools of divination in Maya tradition, and were often made out of obsidian. Stone tools were also the medium through which human sacrifice and bloodletting were performed.
Mode V: The Microlithic Industries Mode 5 stone tools involve the production of
microliths, which were used in composite tools, mainly fastened to a shaft. Examples include the
Magdalenian culture. Such a technology makes much more efficient use of available materials like flint, although it requires greater skill in manufacturing the small flakes. Mounting sharp flint edges in a wooden or bone handle is the key innovation in microliths, essentially because the handle protects the user from the flint and improves the device's leverage.
Neolithic industries axe from the Museum of Toulouse In prehistoric Japan, ground stone tools appear during the
Japanese Paleolithic period, that lasted from around 40,000 BC to 14,000 BC. Elsewhere, ground stone tools became important during the Neolithic period beginning about 10,000 BC. These ground or polished implements are manufactured from larger-grained materials such as basalt,
jade and
jadeite,
greenstone, and some forms of
rhyolite, which are not suitable for flaking. The greenstone industry was important in the
English Lake District, and is known as the
Langdale axe industry. Ground stone implements included
adzes,
celts, and
axes, which were manufactured by a labour-intensive, time-consuming method of repeated grinding against an abrasive stone, often with water as a lubricant. Because of their coarse surfaces, some ground stone tools were used for grinding plant foods and were polished not just by intentional shaping, but also by use.
Manos are hand stones used in conjunction with
metates for grinding corn or grain. Polishing increased the intrinsic
mechanical strength of the axe. Polished stone axes were important for the widespread clearance of woods and forests during the
Neolithic period, when crop and livestock farming developed on a large scale. They are widely distributed and were traded over long distances, since the best rock types were often very local. They also became venerated objects, and were frequently buried in
long barrows or
round barrows with their former owners. During the Neolithic period, large axes were made from flint
nodules by knapping a rough shape, a so-called "rough-out". Such products were traded across a wide area. The rough-outs were then polished to achieve a fine finish, forming the axe head. Polishing increased the product's strength and durability. There were many sources of supply, including
Grimes Graves in Suffolk,
Cissbury in Sussex and
Spiennes near
Mons in Belgium to mention but a few. In
Britain, there were numerous small quarries in
downland areas where flint was removed for local use, for example. Many other rocks were used to make axes from stones, including the
Langdale axe industry as well as numerous other sites such as
Penmaenmawr and
Tievebulliagh in Co Antrim,
Ulster. In Langdale, there are many
outcrops of the
greenstone that were exploited and knapped where the stone was extracted. The sites exhibit piles of waste flakes and rejected rough-outs. Polishing improved the
mechanical strength of the tools, so increasing their life and effectiveness. Many other tools were developed using the same techniques. Such products were traded across the country and abroad. ==Aboriginal Australian use==