Episode 3. Acheulean Handaxes: When Stone Began to Take Shape

“What happened next? When was the next discovery?”

The youngest child was already eager for more.

“Nearly a million years passed.”

Their mouth fell open.

“And the next part of the story happens a million years later?”

“That happens in my stories sometimes.”

“What did you do all that time?”

“Lived.”

The children stared at me. Even I knew that answer had been too short.

In the years between, rivers changed course again and again. Forests dried, then grew dense once more. We moved wherever water and food led us. People I had watched being born grew old and died. The children they left behind grew old in turn. We broke stone, ate, suffered injuries, and moved on, repeating it all too many times to count.

“And you were the only one who kept living?”

The child who had been laughing a moment ago spoke more quietly now.

“Yes.”

I left it at that. I did not want to make light of a single death merely to explain a million years.

By then, breaking stone was no longer strange. We chose good rock and struck off a fresh flake when an edge went dull. When one person succeeded, the hands beside them copied the sequence. But the goal was always one edge for immediate use: something to cut meat now, or a point to push between bones now. If it cut and could be held, it was enough.

“So you spent all that time making the same stones?”

“Not exactly the same. Every stone had a different shape, and every break sent off a different flake. But what we needed was much the same: an edge to cut meat now, or a pointed tip to push between bones now.”

Then one day, I found myself shifting my grip on a stone that was already usable. Its edge was sharp, but one side was so thick that it twisted in my hand whenever I applied force. Before, I would have used it as it was. But the feel of another stone, one that had once rested comfortably in my palm by chance, would not leave my hand.

“A comfortable shape?”

“One that didn’t twist when I pressed down. A shape my hand understood at once—which end to hold and which to use.”

I put down the stone I had been using and chose another. One of my companions, a man with unusually long arms, sat beside me and watched. His real name is gone from my memory, so I call him Longarm.

When Longarm saw me discard a perfectly useful stone and begin striking a new one, he bared his teeth and laughed. The first time I knocked a piece from the end, he picked up the fallen flake and used it to cut meat. The useful part had gone to Longarm, while I was left holding what looked like a failure.

“That’s mean.”

The youngest child muttered.

“I felt much the same at the time.”

Still, I raised the stone again. I struck once, stopped to trace the newly exposed surface with my fingers, then turned the stone and hit the part that jutted out.

I did not know from the beginning where every blow should fall. Removing one flake revealed the next place that felt wrong. Once I struck there, another thick patch caught against my palm. I kept striking, turning, and feeling. Before, I had broken stone to get a single edge. That day, I spent longer on the changing stone as a whole than on any one edge it gave me.

By the time the sun hung low, the stone had grown longer and flatter. Its tip had narrowed. The middle was a little wider than my palm. The flake scars on its two faces roughly mirrored one another.

I used the new stone to split hide. Its long edge cut more with each pass, and with the thick parts removed, it no longer twisted in my grip. When I pushed the narrow tip between two bones, the joint opened more easily than before.

Only then did Longarm stop laughing. He looked from the flake he had been using to my stone and back again. Then he took mine and tested it on the meat. A little later, he picked up a fresh stone. Just as I had, he struck once, turned it over, and ran his hand across the surface.

The next day, two stones of similar shape lay before us.

“Were they identical?”

“No. The stones were different, and so were Longarm’s hands and mine. But with either tool, you could tell which end to hold and which to use without picking it up.”

“So that was when you started making identical handaxes?”

The girl asked.

“That conclusion goes too far. Similar forms had begun to recur. That doesn’t mean every tool followed a single standard size and shape.”

“Did you use a handaxe to chop wood?”

“Not only for that. The name makes it sound as if we used them just to chop wood, but we used them for all kinds of work. We split hide, cut meat, pried apart joints, scraped hard surfaces, and broke things open.”

One of the children raised a hand again.

“Did you have a blueprint for some other shape?”

“I can’t know for certain. Looking back now, I can use the word design. But if I told you there was a finished picture of a handaxe in my mind that day, I would be very close to lying.”

“Then how did you know what to fix?”

“I felt the thick places against my hand. I noticed which way the stone twisted when I pressed down, and where the last flake had come away. Fix one problem, and the next one became easier to see.”

Before, we broke a stone to get one edge we could use at once. Now, with every strike, we began looking for the next part to correct, reshaping the entire stone again and again. The aim of toolmaking was gradually shifting—from keeping a useful shape that happened to break off toward creating the form we wanted.

“So you had no blueprint, and you didn’t think the stone in front of you was finished either.”

“Exactly.”

I kept watching the way Longarm worked stone after that. Once he had an edge, he no longer stopped at once. He turned the stone over, searched for a thick place with his thumb, and struck again. The others copied that movement before they ever copied a finished tool.

The stones we made still varied. Some were long, some broad, and in unpracticed hands they sometimes broke halfway through. But the change was clear.

Before, the work ended when an edge appeared.

Now, even after a stone could be used, we turned it over one more time.

That one extra turn was where tools began to take shape.