Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
17. A good visual display can be found at http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/
w/x/wxk116/axe.
18. See Ann Gibbons, “Chinese Stone Tools Reveal High-Bichard Potts, Yuan
Baoyin, Tech
Homo erectus
,”
Science
287 (2000): 1566; and Hou Yamei,
Richard Potts, Yuad Badyin, et al., “Mid-Pleistocene Acheulean-like Stone Tech-
nology of the Bose Basin, South China,”
Science
287 (2000): 1622-1626.
19. See Charles W. King,
The Natural History of Gems, or Semi-Precious Stones
(London: Bell and Daldy, 1870), 80, reporting on the views of Anselm Boetius
de Boodt in his 1609
De Gemmis et Lapidibus
.
20. Martin J. S. Rudwick dates the recognition of “prehistory” to the 1830s
(“The Antiquity of Man before
The Antiquity of Man
” (unpublished manuscript,
2001)).
21. Cited in Grayson,
Establishment of Human Antiquity
, 65.
22. See Charles Lyell,
The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man
(Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1863), 112-117. Lyell distinguished two types
of stone tools found in the pits at St. Acheul: a “spear-headed form” and an
“oval form,” the latter being “not unlike some stone implements, used to this
day as hatchets and tomahawks by natives of Australia”—the difference being
only in the fact that the edge on the Australian “weapons,” like European “celts,”
had been “produced by friction” and was generally “sharpened at one end only.”
Lyell speculated that such tools were “probably used as weapons, both of the
war and of the chase, others to grub up roots, cut down trees, and scoop out
canoes.” He also mentioned Joseph Prestwich's suggestion that such tools might
have been used for “cutting holes in the ice both for fishing and for obtaining
water,” an idea consistent with the notion that former times might have been
much colder (113-116).
23. Louis Figuier,
L'homme primitif
(Paris: Hachette, 1870), Figure 16. See also
Stephanie Moser,
Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins
(Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 127.
24. See Moser,
Ancestral Images
, 135.
25. Gabriel de Mortillet,
Formation de la nation francaise
(Paris: Alcan, 1897).
Mortillet in 1872 coined the term
Acheuléen
to designate the culture using his
coups de poing
; see his
Les premiers francais
(circa 1872). Workers digging up
the tools in the 1860s for early archaeologists called them
langues de chat
(“cat tongues”); see Louis Figuier,
L'homme primitif
, 3rd ed. (Paris: Hachette,
1873), 64.
26. The only known exceptions to the absence of combined tool use are a couple
of enigmatic grooved wooden objects found in 1997 in four-hundred-thousand-
year-old lignite (coal) deposits near Schoningen, Germany. The objects are about
forty centimeters long and have a notch for what might have been a blade. See
Hartmut Thieme, “Altpaläolithische Holzgeräte aus Schöningen,”
Germania
77
(1999): 451-487. This same site is where Thieme found the world's oldest-known
spears, 185 and 225 centimeters long javelin-like objects made from spruce heart-
wood. These remarkable finds have been used to restore a certain credence to
