Indigenous Australians were grinding axe edges at least 44,000 years ago
Humanity's first axes had no handles at all: chipped stone hand axes go back roughly 1.6 million years. The leap to polished, ground edges happened first in Australia, where fragments from Arnhem Land date back at least 44,000 years, long before the technique appeared anywhere else.
Mechanically, an axe is a wedge on a lever. The blade concentrates force along a thin edge and the head drives in behind the first cut, while the handle multiplies the swing. Felling axes have a narrow, acute edge angle; splitting axes are blunter. Early chipped hand axes appear in the later Oldowan about 1.6 million years ago, in southern Ethiopia around 1.4 million, and at Olduvai Gorge in deposits of 1.2 million years. Ground-edge axes appear in Japan around 38,000 years ago, and in Europe hafted axes, fixed with wedges, birch tar and rawhide, are known from about 6000 BC.
Because stone can be traced to its quarry by thin sectioning, axe heads map prehistoric trade, and Neolithic Europe had axe factories that roughed out thousands of blades. Metal came next: copper, sometimes mixed with arsenic, then bronze, with flat blades gradually evolving into flanged, winged and socketed forms. In parts of Papua, stone axes are still made today.
Axes also carried sacred weight. Some Neolithic types show almost no wear and may have been offerings. In Minoan Crete priestesses used the double axe, the labrys, in ceremonies, and in 1998 a complete one turned up at Cham-Eslen in Switzerland, its 120-centimetre haft wrapped in decorated birch bark and its blade of antigorite from the Gotthard area. In Yoruba tradition a double-headed axe stands for Shango, god of thunder, and Norway's coat of arms shows a lion holding the axe of King Olaf II.
Folk belief was inventive. Farmers who found stone axes took them for thunderbolts and kept them to protect buildings from lightning, which has skewed where archaeologists find them. A thrown axe was said to turn away hail, and one buried upright under a doorway to keep out witches. Basques still compete at log-chopping in a sport called aizkolaritza, from their word for axe.
Source: Axe
