Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
aesthetic sense (Oldowan tools, by contrast, dating back to circa 2.5
M.Y.A. look more like crudely broken rocks, though I should note that
some Oldowan stonework survives long into the “Acheulean”). The
oldest hand axes are about 1.5 million years old, and the youngest about
one hundred thousand.
17
That brings us to one of the most remarkable
features of such tools (if that is what they are): their relative uniformity
over vast reaches of time and space. Acheulean hand axes are found for
a span of 1.4 million years—more than fifty thousand generations—over
most of the range occupied by
Homo erectus
, from the Pleistocene
gravels of England (though not in Ireland, which was scoured clean by
glaciers) to the open-air sites of northern Spain (Torralba and Ambrona),
Algeria, and Morocco, to the famous
erectus
sites of east and southern
Africa and as far east as the Urals—and occasionally beyond, as indi-
cated by the recent finds at Nihewan and Bose Basin in southern China.
18
(Early hominids never seem to have crossed any significant body of
water; that does not occur until fairly late in the evolution of
Homo
sapiens
, circa forty or fifty thousand years ago, when humans voyaged
into Australia. The presumption is that oceangoing rafts do not exist
until that time.)
A second remarkable fact is how difficult it has been to come up with
an adequate sense of how to interpret “hand axes.” This is partly trace-
able to the lack of contemporary ethnographic evidence (Acheulean tools
have not been used for one to two hundred thousand years), but also to
the difficulties of understanding what life was like for creatures that may
have been quite different from us.
Homo erectus
is generally assumed to
have made these objects, but there are several other (albeit closely allied)
candidates, including
Homo habilis
,
Homo rudolfensis
,
Homo anteces-
sor
,
Homo heidelbergensis
, and
Homo ergaster
. The idea of the same
tool type being made and used by entirely different species is not one
that many cultural anthropologists are generally comfortable with—
which is one reason there is room to doubt whether the Acheulean is a
culture or tradition in any interesting sense. The term Acheulean itself
blends paleontological and ethnic categories, nature and culture, since
there are some who talk about the Acheulean as a people (strange, since
it may have embraced three or four different species), and others who
treat it more as a chronological or periodizing category (like Pleistocene),
and still others as simply a formal tool-type designation (Acheulean hand
