A Palaeolithic Journey in the 21st Century
The most common sentiment I've faced while working on this project is an incredulous "Why?". Understandable.
In fact, it is more than understandable. It is safe to say that stone tools do not have a place in modern society. Over countless millennia, stone arrowheads have been replaced with steel ones and then bullets, stone hand axes with chainsaws, and so on.
Now, before I answer the why, I must confess that impulse played a big part. But is it not jarring to think that the technology we're using this very second came from just air, rocks, and water?
We, as a species, have come so far so fast that most of us cannot even begin to comprehend the extent of technology that goes behind our screens, much less know how to repair them. At that moment, I thought: "what better way is there to fully appreciate this feeling than to return to the basics?"
And that's exactly what I tried to do. I recreated (with varying degrees of success) rudimentary yet crucial tools of human survival spanning three different periods: the hand axe and the arrowhead.
A Brief Contextualisation
The hand axe is one of the most defining tools of the Palaeolithic Era. Ironically, it is extremely easy to pass by without noticing.
In fact, a particular piece called the "Yeoncheon JeonGok-Ri Hand Axe", which sparked countless archaeological expeditions in Korea, was only discovered by US Staff Sergeant Greg L. Bowen on one of his walks to a bumbling river quay. In short, to us laymen, the hand axe is that innocuous.
This raises the question: what is the difference between a palaeolithic hand axe and the every day rock?
How difficult would it have been for early man to conceive this iconic tool that marks a rock-wielding monkey from us?
With these questions questions in mind, I decided to make my own Acheulean Hand Axe from scratch.
The answer to the question asked above lies in a hand axe with a particular crafting style: the Acheulean Hand Axe.
There is some scholarly dispute as to what constitutes as "Acheulean".
Professor Gowlett, for one, argued in his 2006 paper, The elements of design form in Acheulian bifaces: modes, modalities, rules and language, that the "imperatives" include "a glob butt, forward extension, lateral extension around a major plane, and thickness adjustment."
I thought these characteristics to be commonly accepted distinctions of Acheulean hand axes. For my intents and purposes, I decided to keep the Gowlett definition of Acheulean characteristics in mind whilst creating my crude iterations of hand axes.
A Brief Contextualisation
We now move on from the palaeolithic era to the mesolithic, which directly translates to "middle-stone age" (mostly due to the shortage of rocks).
Compared to the rather obscure hand axe, the arrowhead from any age is substantially easier to spot amidst a pile of rocks as the the general silhouette of arrowheads have not changed drastically over thousands of years, despite there being some variations.
Arrowheads from the mesolithic era, which is said to have lasted from 10,000 BCE to 8,000 BCE ... actually happened to share similar traits with both neolithic or paleolithic arrowheads.
At this point, I hit a new realisation: what mattered most was the region. Take a look at the Swedish Point, for example. These points are almost identical to the trapezoidal points of the paleolithic era.
I then began to see just why there was so much conflict over the definition of what stone tools belong to what eras.
Ancient humans, landlocked or not, had constantly adapted their tools with respect to their surroundings without interacting with other prehistoric cultures.
What's more, I realised that arrowhead technology remained somewhat stagnant throughout the years. Sure, the variations must have added some merit, but the next big leap in long-range damage only came with the invention of gunpowder.
Now that's a new realisation: advancements accelerate over time.
It took humanity hundreds of thousands of years to move past arrows. But from there, took us less than a few hundred years to build weapons that would wipe out entire cities.
I've taken a stab at three stone tools from three different eras: Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic. And if I'm being completely honest, I've failed at all of my stabs. I took a good look at the pile of sharp, broken rocks lying all around my house. At first, I felt shame. I, a homo sapiens sapiens living in the most technologically advanced era in history, was incapable of replicating what my ancestors did a few million years ago.
As I started looking back at all my mistakes and minor successes here and there, I noticed something. In the larger scope of things, I had succeeded. I mean, of course, I failed to make any usable tools. However, at the same time, these failures helped me understand two things.
One: there is nothing simple about ancient technology. I have come to fully accept that these now-rudimentary tools were once examples of bleeding-edge (quite literally) technology at one point. In fact, I would have been exiled from ancient society for wasting their precious flint. And more importantly…
Two: there is nothing simple about ancient technology. Our ancestors who masterfully created and used these tools lived on a planet that provided us nothing but air, water, rocks and an environment did everything it could do to kill them. Then, somehow, somewhere around seven million years later, we sent multiple men to the moon. We’ve progressed in the realm of building tools to the point where recreating old tools has become disturbingly hard, let alone fix the technology we have today.
So…
I think it's about time that I came clean.
This project never really was about creating these crude stone tools (though I do think I introduced that idea in the introduction somewhere). In fact, I’d like to think of it as less of a project rather than a journey. I went into the project knowing that I would arrive at this exact conclusion: the conclusion that goes along the lines of “yes, we’ve come a long way” (or perhaps secretly hoped that I would be proven wrong). But the past few months were not wasted. After gaining this realization, I hoped that I could get more than information or progress proven by facts and numbers across. I wanted people to feel what I felt - the awe, the respect, and maybe perhaps some gratitude that we live in this era.
And now, as I peer at the light at the end of the tunnel, I just hope that I succeeded in doing just that.
Austin Moon
Montrose Terrace 7B Mount Rosie Road 7B Singapore 308059
SINGAPORE
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