The teardrop hand axe served our ancestors for well over a million years
In 1797 John Frere sent two worked flints from Hoxne in Suffolk to London, arguing they came from a very ancient period indeed, made by people without metal. He was ignored. Those were Acheulean hand axes, a toolmaking tradition that began around 2 million years ago and outlasted almost any human invention since.
Named after Saint-Acheul, a suburb of Amiens in northern France where finds turned up in 1859, the Acheulean is recognised by oval and pear-shaped hand axes linked to Homo erectus and descendants such as Homo heidelbergensis. Acceptance came slowly. Jacques Boucher de Perthes gathered axes alongside fossil bones near Abbeville between 1836 and 1846 and was scorned, until his critic Marcel Jérôme Rigollot found more tools at Saint Acheul and the geologist Joseph Prestwich examined both sites.
The key innovation was shaping stone symmetrically on both faces. A maker first roughed out the form with a hard hammerstone, knocking flakes off alternately from each side, then thinned it using softer hammers of bone or antler for greater control. Waste flakes and flake tools show the craft demanded planning one or two steps ahead. Loren Eiseley estimated the average useful cutting edge at 20 centimetres, against 5 for older Oldowan tools.
Dating keeps pushing the origin back. Radiometric dates from volcanic ash at Konso in Ethiopia give about 1.5 million years; Kenyan finds described in 2003 reach 1.76 million, and Ethiopian discoveries reported in 2023 about 1.95 million. The tradition spread out of Africa into Asia and Europe, where Spanish hand axes exceed 900,000 years, well before the once-assumed arrival around 500,000 years ago.
Wear on axes from Boxgrove in England, around 480,000 years old, points mainly to butchering animals. Yet some sites hold hundreds of oversized, apparently unused axes, a lasting puzzle. The more refined Levallois technique appeared in Europe roughly 320,000 years ago and had replaced the Acheulean there by around 125,000 years ago.
Source: Acheulean
