This is a paleolithic hand axe aka Acheulean hand axe. It's an extremely ancient tool.
It first appears in the archaeological record about 1.75 million years ago and disappears around
300,000 years ago. An absolutely huge expanse of time. It's easy to think of these tools in
a very utilitarian way after all it's a big pointy rock and the hominins that made them,
homo erectus and homo heidelbergensis were very capable hunters, able to kill
big dangerous animals like hippos, baboons stuff like that stuff you don't want to fight.
But if we only view these things in a utilitarian way then there are some
quirks in the archaeological record which are difficult to explain. This has led some
anthropologists to speculate that these hand axes may have played a role in sexual selection.
...very nice
and that our ancestors ability to produce them may have in some way lay within their very genes.
It's too interesting, it's too crazy, too much fodder for daydreaming.
We've got to talk about them.
So what is the connection between these prehistoric pointy rocks
and prehistoric pointy.......
The debate really revolves around their appearance. As you can see they're incredibly
symmetrical. The creators of these tools put a lot of time and effort into making them this way
and quite frankly that was probably an unnecessary amount of effort if their
purpose was to butcher animals and work other materials like wood for example. Sharp flakes,
just a simple sharp flake, is perfectly capable of doing both of those things.
Not only are they symmetrical but some of them are absolutely
massive. the best example of this is probably the great hand axe from Furze Platt over
in Britain. I mean look at the size of this thing, it is absolutely enormous.
It's a little bit difficult to believe that the hominin that created this
absolutely gargantuan hand axe was thinking just in very straightforward utilitarian terms. I mean,
it seems like they are displaying their abilities somewhat, displaying their prestige as a napper.
It's an absolute beast.
Other hand axes seem to have been made to deliberately display fossils right in the
center and again if you imagine all the steps that go into producing a hand axe,
selecting the raw material, and reducing it down by 20 or 30 steps in a very simple hand axe, 50,
60, 70 steps in a more advanced one. It's hard to imagine that they did not deliberately
make the choice to preserve that fossil in the center of the hand axe. It's a little bit too
perfectly aligned, perfectly symmetrical.
These hand axes are also very common for the time period, a very common tool and
very distinctive. It's probably the only tool that an archaeologist could see and immediately
identify right away, they're that common that distinctive. Despite how common they were though
many seemingly were never used, they have no wear patterns along the edges.
So how can our ideas around sexual selection explain some of these quirks? Well to answer
that we have to imagine the society that old homo erectus here lived in. They almost certainly
lived in large groups with complicated social structures. Even chimpanzees who had brains half
the size, a third of the size of homo erectus, live in complicated groups with friendships and
alliances and politics and all these things are constantly changing. There's every reason to
believe that the society that homo erectus lived in was every bit as complicated. Within such
groups males are likely to have competed for the attention of females. As we still try and do now
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but how could an erectus a heidelbergensis, how could these ancient humans differentiate
themselves from the competition? Maybe they did that by producing a wicked sick hand axe.
Firstly to produce a good hand axe requires good stone it suggests that you're familiar with the
resources in your area and implies that if you can find good stone maybe you can find
other resources, food, shelter, water, the things that you would need on a daily basis to survive.
Producing a hand axe also shows that you have the ability to think of a plan, think far enough ahead
you know 50, 60 steps ahead but also have the cognitive flexibility to adjust as you go along.
Rocks aren't uniform. They may have had an idea of how the hand axe was going to
nap and shape up when they began but it can behave in unpredictable ways and you have to
constantly adjust and make decisions as you're napping to create this symmetrical object.
Being so cognitively flexible is of course a major advantage when you're trying to survive.
And of course it can also just display generally that you're in good health,
you have good strength, you have good hand-eye coordination. Good stuff, all good stuff.
What about the fact that so many of these hand axes were seemingly unused,
how can sexual selection explain that? Well let's suppose that the sexual selection is
correct. In that scenario homo erectus would have had a problem. Unlike a peacock's tail,
a hand axe isn't attached to their body therefore someone could come along and steal your hard work,
and even though you're the sexy knapping hand axe stud, they're stealing your goodies and
masquerading themselves as king of the castle. Perhaps therefore part of the
seduction, part of the allure, the attraction, was not just holding a hand axe but being seen
to make them. Perhaps these homo erectus women were not easily fooled, you know? They had to
they had to see the production to believe it. As a result perhaps this encouraged a bit of
overproduction on the part of some horny homo erectuses, you know, who are really trying to
to prove their ability to the ladies? We don't know, we don't know, these are just ideas.
If there's one major flaw of this sexual selection uh hypothesis is that it assumes that
men made all of these hand axes. WE DO NOT KNOW THAT! It's important to be clear we have
absolutely no idea who made them. However, we can say this with some certainty. The
creators of these hand axes spent a lot of time and effort making them symmetrical,
making them huge, making them interesting and beautiful they had to have had a reason to do that
and wanting to impress and show off to a potential sexual partner is not an unreasonable idea.
As I said at the start hand axes were produced for around 1.5 million years. That's around 100,000
human generations. To use a technical term, that's a bloooooooody long time. It's almost unfathomable
how long a period of time that is. Despite this, their form remains remarkably consistent
throughout that entire time. It's not to say that there weren't any changes, there were.
As time progressed they got thinner, more flakes were removed, they just got more sophisticated you
could say. But this teardrop, oval shape remained consistent for that whole time period. If the
ability to produce hand axes was passed from one generation to another through observation
and learning and copying then that is just an absolutely colossal amount of time, isn't it?
It has led some anthropologists to wonder if our DNA wasn't playing a role in the production
of these tools. What if the shape remained consistent because the tools fulfilled the
same role for that entire time period? It's possible but what role would that have been?
It's likely that these tools didn't have any single purpose and they could have been used
for butchering and working other materials and all sorts of tasks. There are a wide variety of flakes
and designs of tool that probably could have accomplished everything that homo erectus and homo
heidelbergensis were doing. We also have to keep in mind the really varied environments that homo
erectus and homo heidelbergensis lived in. You can find these tools in South Africa, in Britain,
in India, even now in China. That is a vast region with different
climates, different prey, different resources, but the same tool. It's important to note that
anthropologists aren't suggesting that there is a really specific set of genes that perfectly
imprinted this exact design into the brain of every homo erectus. Think of it more
like a predisposition. Genes that encouraged tools to be worked bifacially, on both sides,
genes that pushed for symmetry. Things like that. You might think that this tool is is just too
complex for genes to have played a role like that but is it really so different to a bird's nest?
When a bird is making, a nest at every step of the way they have to make decisions regarding
materials and design and form and construction and the location of the bird's nest,
all of these very complicated things that have to be decided. But no one teaches the bird how
to do this. Somewhere within their DNA they are prompted to carry out these instructions.
Even though they have to make many decisions along the way it is their DNA that is the driving force
behind the construction of these nests. Homo erectus and homo heidelbergensis might have made
these hand axes in a similar way. Even though they had to make dozens of decisions to produce them,
their DNA could have been compelling them over and over again towards this same shape.
It basically boils down to this do you think that these ancient hominins these archaic humans
could have produced this really distinctive tool across 100,000 generations and three
continents without some form of prompt? If you think they could have, then that's fine. But I
think there is reason to be skeptical that it was passed down just through education and learning.
Now this theory about genetics playing a role in the production of hand axes is not perfect, of
course. Critics would argue that the variation we see in the Acheulian, even though it's uh subtle,
is a sign of different cultures "cultures" and and different techno complexes, and uh really we're
just over combining these stone tools into this category. Um but the anthropologists that did uh
the research and wrote the papers on this sexual selection and genetics are not professing to
have a monopoly on the truth or to have uncovered some crazy universal secret, some universal secret
about the history of humanity. It's just about proposing hypotheses that can make sense of the
patterns we see in the archaeological record and as time goes on and our research expands
and our knowledge expands those hypotheses will become more plausible or less plausible.
That's all we're doing it's just uh
it's just food for the noggin really. See you guys thanks for watching.