Archaeologists find oldest ever ground-edge stone axe The world's oldest known ground-edge axe has been discovered in Australia's remote north Kimberley region, pushing back the date of the invention to some 49,000 years. It is estimated to be 10,000 years older than the previous oldest axe of its type, also found in Australia in 2010. The oldest so-called hafted axes - those …
"It is made by spending hundreds and hundreds of hours rubbing the axe against fine-grained material until you have a polished edge," Professor O'Conner says.
"The smooth surface of the axe head was unnatural and was achieved according to tests through an estimated 800 strokes against sandstone."
It wouldn't take me 'hundreds and hundreds of hours' to perform 800 grinding/polishing strokes on a small axehead. I suggest that these ancient humans invented the tea break and went too far with it.
I think a slight amount of journalistic exaggeration has crept into the narrative.
If you read the linked PDF it actually says the following:
The only morphological feature that is unique to the axes
is the highly polished ground surface. These smoothed
surfaces are created by extensive abrasion with another
rock and cannot be incidentally produced by other
knapping actions such as platform preparation.
Grinding basalt to a polished bevel has been experi-
mentally shown to take 1.5–5 h depending on the
character of the base stone and abrasive agent being
used (Dickson1980).
Even in optimal conditions hundreds of forceful strokes are
required to create the smoothed bevel. Our experiments
and comparative measurements confirm this proposition
(my emphasis)
Yes, an hour or two agrees with my estimate, and I've knapped and polished stone artifacts by hand. (Hey, everyone needs a hobby. And it's quite relaxing, except when a piece you've spent several hours shaping breaks. But then you get to make two pieces instead.)
What's interesting to me is that while a polished axehead surface has some advantages (easier to clean and to slide along when scraping hide, for example), they probably aren't a compelling reward for the labor in themselves. Polishing is a leisure-time activity. That axehead was made by someone who wanted it to be nice.
Edit: Chris G points out some other advantages to a ground head that I hadn't considered.
I think some of the Aussie spiders will have been around a lot longer than that. Waiting. Waiting for us. They've been honing their skills ever since. Waiting for shoes to be invented. Waiting for dunnies to be invented. They knew we'd stupidly give them places from which to ambush us, the patient little eight-legged bastards.
Hand axes are more often used to dismantle dead prey than to render it dead in the first place. If you're going to get that close to your target with a rock in your hand, might as well just bash it with any old thing lying around.
Now, a hafted axe - that gives you a lever arm, so there's more reason to use it as a weapon. Though again you might just use a stick rather than risk the axe you spent hours making.
Edit: From other comments, it looks like I misread the article and this was a hafted (which I mistyped as "shafted" in the first version of this post) axe. Haven't looked at the original paper to confirm, though.
While such discoveries are valuable and to be treasured in the difficult business of reconstructing our past, it doesn't seem surprising that we used complex tools only 50,000 years ago. Language is much older and we know that tools are often used by apes (and even some birds).
Complex tools are different from simple tools. Yes we shouldn't be too 'specist' (still not sure about this term) and clearly the genuses Homo and Pan need to be merged, but spending hours or even many minutes altering a material to make a more useful tool is very different from what tool use has been observed in birds.
I'd also point out that this is rather embarrassing to those who would prefer to forget that Australia has any history prior to the First Fleet.
Icon, cos axes lead to cutlasses. Now that's technology.
"it doesn't seem surprising that we used complex tools only 50,000 years ago"
If I remember my history correctly, the significance of this isn't so much that complex tools were found from 50,000 years ago, it's more that the use of ground rather than chipped stone tools is used to define the dividing line between the mesolithic and neolithic periods in a given region. This has many other implications i.e. in many cultures it marked the change from nomadic hunting and gathering to domestication of plants and animals - the beginning of farming.
A quick bit of searching confirms my recollection that the Neanderthals had a range in europe/central asia, see e.g.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/photogalleries/neanderthal/
Not sure what Homo thingius lot might have predated the current native-Australian population, if any. But afaict, not Neanderthals.
The interesting thing to know would be whether this was created by the Neanderthals who were living in Australia at the time, or the "Aboriginals" who invaded the country and killed them all off?
No Neanderthals in Australia; they were confined to the Northern Hemisphere. You may be thinking of Mungo man and/or whoever made the Bradshaw rock art. They were gracile rather like modern aborigines, but their mtDNA indicates they are cousins to, rather than ancestors of modern humans.
I've got two stone age cutting implements (both found by chance at the edges of ploughed fields), one is a knapped but not ground knife the other is half of a beautifully smooth, ground axehead. Both are still sharp. They may not cut wood as well as a £17.99 B&Q axe but they sure have lasted longer.
Human beings have only been on the planet for about 4,000 years haven't they?
Never mind that, our Solar System is definitely no older than 10,000 years.
Surely this is evidence that aliens have visited the planet and left stuff for us to find?
This science stuff is easy!
Human beings have only been on the planet for about 4,000 years haven't they?
I'd be intrigued to know where you get your dates from...
Construction of the Step Pyramid at Djoser in Egypt has been carbon dated to around 2667BC which is 4683 years ago, and humans were around a long time before that.
Interesting fact: The date of Cleopatra's birth is nearer in time to the invention of the iPhone, than it is to the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
Construction of the Step Pyramid at Djoser in Egypt has been carbon dated to around 2667BC which is 4683 years ago, and humans were around a long time before that.
Indeed, and the first human settlement at Çatalhöyük dates back to ca. 7,000 years before present.
Dunno why you received a downvote, so have an upvote from me.
Interesting fact: The date of Cleopatra's birth is nearer in time to the invention of the iPhone, than it is to the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
An Even More Interesting Fact is what Cleopatra said to Mark Anthony: "Not tonight; it's my pyramid."
"The world's oldest known ground-edge axe has been discovered in Australia's remote north Kimberley region, ..."
Yep.
"...pushing back the date of the invention to some 49,000 years."
Nope.
Either "...the KNOWN date of the invention..." or "...to AT LEAST some 49,000 years."
It's impossible to prove that there's not an older one to be discovered tomorrow.
Unfortunately, we need to be clear because the Paleoanthropologists seem to be unaware of this simple distinction in what's known and what's not known. There are probably a dozen of them, right now, writing papers that'll hinge on the date being 49,000 years ago, as opposed to 'at least' 49,000 years ago.
I'm no archeologist but what do you use an axe for, even that you've spent time polishing, when the scale shows only a 5mm edge? How small was the shaft - a twig perhaps? How did you physically tie it on? Even ye olde hand axes had cutting edges inches across for the dismembering of ye even older hairy bison,or felling of ye ancient great Eucalyptus or whatever ... Perhaps they were cave-cabinet makers producing fine dovetails?
Looks more like the basalt equivalent of a sharpened flint flake knife to me (held between the fingers to cut meat, skin etc) ... but I'm no expert.
"The flake is small: 0.16 g in weight, 10.9 mm long (percussion length), 5.17 mm width (at mid-point of length), and 1.4 mm thick (at intersection of length and width)."
boffin: "we found a fragment from an axe (which took a few hours to grind)"
journalist: "they found an axe (which took hundreds of hours to grind)"
so the Abos hit a technological high point with a polished stone axe before anyone else, and then never progressed further over the next 30,000+ years. Doesn't make sense
Oh, I dunno. I'd say the invention of the keel and rudder on boats more than 17,000 years before present, and the aerofoil (returning boomerangs) were pretty significant.
The reasons Australia's aborigines didn't "progress" beyond the stone age are several. First, there was almost always an abundance of food somewhere within walking distance. The population never grew beyond the capacity of the land to feed the population because ritual warfare kept the population in check. Hunter-gathering requires only a fraction of the effort expended by the average agrarian society. Most of the day could be spent getting inebriated, fornicating, sitting around telling lies... A bit like Friday night at the pub every day.
Geoffrey Blainey's Triumph of the Nomads makes interesting reading.
The significance of a ground and hafted axe demonstrates the fact that these guys had a good understanding of the materials they were using. A flaked stone head tends to have concave edges and very little shoulder to back up the edge, meaning an edge that would frequently chip and need reflaking. Whereas a ground edge would more likely be convex, so allowing better support to the cutting edge abd a relatively longer life and when worn a simple 'hundred' hour rub to get the edge back.
Hafting means much more energy going into each bite so a stronger edge would help to enable heavier use.
Stone Age doesn't mean stupid.
Having ground a few volcanic stone axes experimentally in Aranda (ACT), I can verify it takes around 40 minutes to several hours to get a ground edge onto a flaked volcanic cobble. This is using sandstone, with sand as grit and water as lubricant. Also, wood contains silica so the polish so characteristic of stone axe edges is probably use-polish, rather than 100s of hours of grinding using progressively finer polishes. PS Stone "axes" are really more like "slow nibblers". Which explains the enthusiastic take-up by Aboriginal people of the (far superior) steel hatchets, even ahead of the early British settlement frontier in NSW, recorded by John Oxley.
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