How to distinguish prehistoric tools of ancient people from ordinary stones

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

About those distant times that were not included in any chronicle, is now known only thanks to archaeological finds - more precisely, stone tools made by man thousands and millions of years ago. They do not look like modern instruments, and in general sometimes resemble ordinary stones. How do scientists manage to distinguish a simple cobblestone from the most valuable historical evidence of human evolution? Can any of us determine which of the stones the hand of a hominid, the ancestor of modern man, touched?

Life in the Paleolithic era, about which very little is known

99 percent of human history is occupied by the Paleolithic - the time during which people passed the evolutionary path from their ape-like ancestors to Homo sapiens, engaged in agriculture. The boundaries of the Paleolithic are quite mobile, but it is believed that it began no later than 2, 6 million years ago. At that time - and perhaps even earlier - the first stone tools already existed, helping to get food and, in general, to survive.

Any economic activity developed very slowly, for hundreds of thousands of years, the ancestors of modern man have kept the same way of life. The people of the Paleolithic were engaged in hunting and gathering, even about fishing it was not yet discussed - except about its primitive forms. But in order to get food, already then they used tools of labor - stone. The main mineral from which stone tools were obtained was flint (a type of quartz), but in rare cases archaeologists were able to find tools from other rocks, including jasper. shale, sandstone. Thousands of Paleolithic sites around the world have made it possible to classify them according to different "stone industries", each with its own regional features and characteristic features of making tools - according to methods and degree of complexity. The oldest of these industries was pebble.

The people of the Early, or Lower, Paleolithic did not know how to grind or in any other similar way to process stone tools. They acted in a primitive way - they split the stone and used the resulting stones or chips. This is how axes, spearheads appeared, then grain grinders and furrier's tools, anvils and stone vessels. It was established that already in the Paleolithic times there were special “workshops” for the production of stone tools - at these sites, scientists find a large number of artifacts at once: initial blanks and the characteristic shape of the fragments. And yet - how exactly can one understand whether the stone is really a valuable Paleolithic artifact, and not a simple cobblestone of natural origin?

Do museums around the world contain stone tools?

To say that the answer becomes clear to archaeologists the first time would be an exaggeration. Although, of course, one cannot discount the qualifications, experience and even intuition of the researcher. The stone is very carefully examined, paying attention to its shape, cracks are evidence of multiple blows, and not a single one that caused a split.

The very location of the find is of great importance - a stone discovered at the site of an already known Paleolithic site has extremely high chances of being a historical artifact. Sometimes archaeologists are lucky and manage to find a stone in the immediate vicinity of finds of organic origin, which can be subjected to the radioisotope method of research. Alas, establishing the age of the mineral itself in this way will not give anything: the stone could have existed for millions of years before it was found and used by a Paleolithic man.

Any self-respecting researcher will conduct an "investigative experiment" by trying to split a similar stone as the distant ancestors of modern man did. By the way, it is believed that they could achieve the result in two ways: by hitting each other with stones in their hands or breaking a stone placed on a support with another. The second method is not only more complicated in execution - it was peculiar to humans: the first was also used by monkeys, which, by the way, also creates certain difficulties for researchers. Indeed, in order to determine whether the found tool belongs to the achievements of the human mind, experience and intuition are also required.

What exactly was made of stone

The oldest stone tools are more than three million years old, samples weighing up to one kilogram have been recently discovered in Kenya. The first pebble tools are called choppers, however, they were used until the onset of the Bronze Age. Choppers differ in that they have chips on one side, but if such chips are on both sides, the stone is called chopping.

To get such a weapon, it took 10-15 blows of a stone on another stone - this was also established by scientists during experiments. In the process, flakes could remain, they sometimes also went into use and were used for the needs of the Paleolithic people, for example, becoming "scrapers", tools for processing animal skins. As a matter of fact, in Paleolithic studies it is a stone that has undergone secondary processing after splitting - the stage of removing small chips - is considered to be a tool of labor. One of the most numerous varieties of Paleolithic products is bifaces, or hand axes. They were obtained as a result of numerous chipping on both sides. The weight of the found bifaces is up to two and a half kilograms, and the length of such "axes" reaches twenty centimeters.

Stones that accidentally fall into our field of vision can be tacit witnesses to the long past of mankind or direct participants in events that took place in ancient times. It is unlikely that one found specimen of a stone tool will revolutionize science, but even here sensations are possible: for example, an ancient chopper or biface may appear in the same cultural layer and even in the immediate vicinity of stones of already cosmic origin. This, by the way, has already happened.

And this is how, according to the sculptor-archaeologist, portraits of people look like, who lived several thousand years ago.