Francis Pryor - Britain BC - Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans

The stone tools used by the earliest people in Africa were fashioned from flakes and pebbles, and were probably used as choppers to break bones and to sever tendons to remove the meat. They are simple but effective, with a series of sharp cutting edges which were formed by removing flakes of flint from one side of a rounded pebble, using a hard stone as a hammer. The part of the pebble that was to be gripped when it was in use was left smooth and unworked. They may have been simple tools, but they weren’t that simple: if I were to ask an educated modern person with no experience of such things to make one, I strongly suspect that he or she would fail. For a start, the stone-toolmaker must know how to select the right sort of stone for both the tool and the hammer. If the stone for the tool isn’t flint, it should be as fine-grained as possible. The hammer should be hard, but not brittle; plainly, it should be resilient too. It’s also important to check that the stone to be used for the tool isn’t run through with hidden planes of weakness, perhaps caused by heat, compression or severe Ice Age frost, as these will cause it to disintegrate when struck even a light blow.

Now we come to the process of removing flakes. Again, this is far from straightforward. Put yourself in the toolmaker’s position: in one hand is a rounded, fist-sized pebble, and in the other is a hammerstone of similar size. Both are rounded, with no obvious points, bumps or protuberances. So how do you knock a flake off? A hard hit at the centre will either achieve nothing, or will simply break the stone in half. A softer blow around the edge will just glance off, rather like a bullet striking the rounded edges of a Sherman tank. I know that first blow is far from straightforward, because I’ve delivered it many times myself. I’ve spent hours and hours trying to perfect and then replicate its force and angle. It’s not easy to detach those all-important initial flakes cleanly. After that, it gets a little less difficult, because the removal of the first flakes leaves behind ridges, which make better targets and result in larger flakes that are simpler to remove.

Flint-working – or knapping, to use the correct term – is an art, a craft. 5 Even the crudest of pebble chopping-tools require considerable skill to make. Tools of this, the earliest tradition of flint-working, are remarkably similar from one site to another, which would suggest that the people who made them told each other about good sources of potential raw material, and passed on technological improvements as they happened. Alternatively, perhaps they communicated by example. Either way, the communication took place, which is all that really matters, because these tools were not only extraordinarily effective, they were important.

To my mind there is a vast divide between our earliest hominid ancestors and the closest of our African great ape cousins, the chimp and the bonobo. 6 It is true that apes can learn to use and even fashion tools; it is also true, as I have noted, that we arose from a common genetic stock. But the widespread adoption of something as complex as a stone-using technology could only have been accomplished by creatures who were both physically adaptive and who possessed mental capabilities that bear comparison with our own. Make no mistake, the earliest tool-using hominids were almost fully human: cross-bred ape-men they were not.

Pebble choppers were the main component of the earliest tool-using groups, but around 1.6 million years ago a new style of tool began to appear in Africa. Very soon it would be the tool of choice across the world. Possibly the best-known of all ancient archaeological artefacts, it’s known as the ‘hand-axe’. Like many archaeological objects it acquired its name early on, and we’ve been regretting it ever since. These tools may have been used in the hand, but they were never used for chopping down trees. So they weren’t axes as we know them. Perhaps the closest modern equivalent would be the light steel cleaver that’s used with such skill by chefs in Chinese kitchens.

Hand-axes come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but most are roughly heart-shaped. Their most distinctive characteristic is that flakes have been removed across the entire surface of both sides. This gives them a far thinner profile than a pebble chopper, and instead of one jagged cutting edge there are two, and they’re finer – and very much sharper. There’s also a very useful angle or point at the end opposite to the more rounded butt, which was the part that was gripped. These versatile tools, which were commonplace in the Palaeolithic, take great skill to produce: I could make a fairly convincing Bronze Age arrowhead out of flint, but I could never achieve a hand-axe. In addition to hand-axes, people at this time also made tools for scraping flesh off bone or hide. These scrapers had strong, angled working surfaces, and were also highly effective.

These earliest traditions of stone tools gave rise to a series of descendants of ever-increasing sophistication. Stone tool technologies in production gave rise to tens of thousands of waste flakes that litter the floor of Palaeolithic habitation sites to this day. Viewed in one way, it was a very wasteful technology. Then, about forty thousand years ago, some anonymous genius (I use the word advisedly) had the idea of fashioning a new range of tools from the flakes that had often previously been discarded as rubbish. 7 The new technology soon evolved ways whereby long, thin, sharp blades could be removed from a specially prepared piece of stone or flint, known as a core. These blades were razor sharp, but they lacked the strength and durability of hand-axes. They were, however, the appropriate tool for the job at hand, and could be produced with just one, very carefully directed blow. Mankind was taking the first tentative steps towards specialisation, and also – perhaps more worrying – he was acquiring a taste for lightweight, disposable implements. Our throwaway culture has roots that extend back a very long way indeed.

The final stages of the long prehistoric tradition of flint-working happened in Britain a mere six thousand years ago, with the introduction of polishing in the earlier Neolithic. This technology was very labour intensive. First, a rough-out for the axe or knife was flaked in the conventional way, then the cutting edge and any other surfaces that seemed appropriate were polished using a sand-and-water grinding paste or a finely grained polishing stone, known as a polissoir. Flint is very hard, and the process of grinding took a long time. The end result was, however, very decorative, and there can be little doubt that many polished flint axes were produced to be admired rather than used. Some indeed are made from beautiful ‘marbled’ or veined flint, which polishes up superbly but is so full of internal planes of weakness that it shatters on impact. An axe that broke when it first encountered a tree would not be selected by even the most inexperienced prehistoric lumberjack.

In Britain, the half-million-year-old tradition of making stone tools came to an end around 500 BC, in the first centuries of the Early Iron Age. By then the long, thin blades of the Neolithic to Palaeolithic periods had long gone out of use. Indeed, I suspect that the ability to produce them started to die out rapidly after about 1200 BC. The last flint tools reflect the widespread adoption of metal, which supplied people’s need for cutting implements. So flint was used to provide scrapers and strange faceted piercing implements, which were produced by bashing gravel flint of poor quality that partially shattered, leaving a series of hard, sharp points. These points were probably used to score bone and scour leather. At first glance these odd-looking tools of bad flint seem strangely ‘degenerate’ when compared with the hand-axes and blades of much earlier times. But in fact they were good tools for certain purposes – and they were cheap (in terms of effort) and easy to produce.