Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
For many years after Frere's discovery, and subsequent work by
Boucher de Perthes, it was argued that (what we now call) Acheulean
tools were axes or hatchets—a not implausible suggestion given their
symmetry, size, and cutting edge, which generally extends around the
entirety of the tool.
22
In the nineteenth century, it was often suggested
that these were weapons of some sort (recall Frere's account) used by
primitives to defend themselves against ferocious beasts, and perhaps
also to wage war against one another. Typical is Louis Figuier's 1870
L'homme primitif
, which shows club- and ax-wielding savages from “the
period of extinct animals” fending off an attacking cave bear.
23
Axes in
the nineteenth-century European ethnographic imagination were often
accoutrements of medieval armor, supplemented by non-Western images
of dress or habit. This was consonant with older images of early man
as Adam or Hercules (with club and skin) or the more or less noble
savage—all of which were recycled for use in “man of the Stone Age”
representations.
24
The idea of a “Stone Age man with hafted axe” was
also consistent with the nineteenth-century urbanist equation, primitive
= woodsman, an equation visible in countless early illustrations: Pierre
Boitard's “Fossil Man” (1861),
Harper Weekly
's “Neanderthal” (1873),
Henri du Cleuzieu's “Pithecanthropus” (1887), Léon Maxime Faivre's
“Deux mères” (1888), Anandee Forestier's “Modern Man, the Mammoth
Slayer” (1911), and many others.
The problem with this view, as subsequent studies showed, was that
none of the axes used in the Lower Paleolithic show any evidence of
having ever been hafted (there are no notches, for example). This was
already recognized in the nineteenth century, when Gabriel de Mortillet
(1821-1898), an early French Darwinian, identified Acheulean hand
axes as
coups de poing
—“blows of the fist”—the idea being that such
instruments would be held in the hand to chop or dig or to butcher large
animals.
25
The absence of hafting or any other kind of combined tool
use prior to about fifty thousand years ago (hook with string, hoe with
handle, knife with wooden grip, and so on) has been used to argue that
something changed in the cognitive regimen of humans about that time—
a conceptual falling-into-place that allowed some new type of inventive,
recombinant capacity.
26
Kathy Schick and Nicholas Toth in the 1990s provided experimental
archaeological support for the idea that Acheulean hand axes (and
Oldowan tools) could have been used to process large animal carcasses,
