Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
35. Nineteenth-century scholars and collectors typically chose canonically beau-
tiful, “perfect” examples of teardrop hand axes to reproduce in their texts. This
stemmed partly from a concern to convince the reader that these were in fact
objects formed by human hands: Charles Lyell in his 1863
Antiquity of Man
, for
example, began his discussion with a refutation of “the doubt [that] has been
cast on the question whether the so-called flint hatchets have really been shaped
by the hands of man” (112). The topic also sports a prominent, gold-embossed
relief of a handsome hand ax on its back cover, right above a similarly orna-
mented image of the surface of a mammoth tooth.
36. Nicholas Toth, “The Oldowan Reassessed: A Close Look at Early Stone
Artifacts,”
Journal of Archaeological Science
12 (1985): 101-120.
37. A. J. Jelinek put forward this theory in “The Lower Paleolithic: Current
Evidence and Interpretation,”
Annual Review of Anthropology
6 (1977): 11-32.
The argument against what has been called the “blade dispenser theory” is that
there are also Acheulean forms that resemble picks or cleavers, which one would
not expect if the objects in question were simply used-up cores. There is also the
difficulty that most hand axes are not in fact exhausted; you can still get blades
from them (personal communication, John Gowlett).
38. Richard Klein,
The Dawn of Human Culture
(New York: John Wiley and
Sons, 2000); and Alan Walker and Pat Shipman,
The Wisdom of the Bones
(New York: Knopf, 1996). An interesting piece of anatomical evidence here,
developed by Walker and Ann MacLarnon, is the narrowness of the vertebral
canal of the
erectus
spinal column, which suggests that this creature may not
have had the chest-cavity nervous links and musculature required for lan-
guage. The implication:
Homo erectus
was unable to speak. See Ann MacLarnon,
“The Vertebral Canal,” in
The Nariokotome Homo Erectus Skeleton
, ed.
Alan Walker and Richard Leakey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993).
39. See Kawai, “Japanese Monkeys”; Galef, “Tradition in Animals”; Andrew
Whiten and Christophe Boesch, “The Cultures of Chimpanzees,”
Scientific
American
, July 2001, 60-67; and Christophe Boesch and Michael Tomasello,
“Chimpanzee and Human Cultures,”
Current Anthropology
39 (1998):
591-614.
40. The literature here is vast. Some key texts would include: Derek Bickerton,
Language and Species
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), and
Lan-
guage and Human Behavior
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995); and
William Noble and Iain Davidson,
Human Evolution, Language, and Mind
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
41. The end of the Acheulean is as puzzling as its persistence; it might well be
that the evolution of “modern” humans (
Homo sapiens
) circa 150,000 years ago
was made possible by the making and use of new tool types (the opposite might
just as well be true). It is also possible that the transition from only one type of
tool to tool-kit “choice” was connected to the rise of language about this time.
This is very much terra incognita.
