Tools made by striking stone against stone to get a sharp edge. The oldest known, from Kenya, are about 3.3 million years old and may predate the genus Homo; for over three million years stone was the main material of hominin technology.
Boswell: "I think Dr. Franklin's definition of Man a good one—'A tool-making animal.'" Johnson: "But many a man never made a tool; and suppose a man without arms, he could not make a tool."
—— James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), entry for 7 April 1778
History
Stone tools are implements shaped by knapping or grinding stone. The basic act is to strike a fine-grained core of flint, chert or basalt with a hammerstone so that a sharp flake breaks away along a shell-like (conchoidal) fracture. In 2015 Sonia Harmand and colleagues reported cores and flakes about 3.3 million years old from Lomekwi 3 in West Turkana, Kenya, several hundred thousand years older than the earliest known fossils of Homo, though some specialists still doubt the site's stratigraphy and dating. Oldowan tools from Gona in Ethiopia, about 2.6 million years old, long counted as the earliest secure evidence; similar tools from Nyayanga in Kenya, reported in 2023 and dated between 3.0 and 2.6 million years ago, lay beside teeth of Paranthropus. By about 1.76 million years ago Acheulean handaxes appear at Kokiselei in Kenya. Their makers had to hold a symmetrical shape in mind and work both faces in many steps, and the form persisted for more than a million years. Stone tools left Africa with early humans, reaching Shangchen in Shaanxi, China, by about 2.12 million years ago. Neolithic farmers added ground-stone axes, sickles and querns, and the first metalworkers beat native copper with stone hammers. In 1836 the Danish antiquary Christian Jürgensen Thomsen arranged his museum's artefacts into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, and the Stone Age got its name.
Connections
Consequences2
- The Origins of Agriculture (Neolithic Revolution)enablesGround-stone axes, sickle blades and grinding stones made clearing, reaping and processing grain possible
- ForgingenablesThe first metal forging was hammering native copper with stone hammers
Sources
- Sonia Harmand et al., 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya (Nature 521) (2015)
- Thomas W. Plummer et al., Expanded geographic distribution and dietary strategies of the earliest Oldowan hominins and Paranthropus (Science 379) (2023)
- Christopher J. Lepre et al., An earlier origin for the Acheulian (Nature 477) (2011)
- Zhaoyu Zhu et al., Hominin occupation of the Chinese Loess Plateau since about 2.1 million years ago (Nature 559) (2018)
Open questionspartly uncertain
- The stratigraphy and dating of Lomekwi 3 are still disputed.
- Who made the earliest stone tools is unknown; Kenyanthropus, Australopithecus, Paranthropus and early Homo have all been proposed.
- The Nyayanga tools are dated to a range of 3.0 to 2.6 million years ago.
- No hominin fossils have been found at Shangchen.
- Franklin's phrase "a tool-making animal" is known from Boswell's report and does not appear in Franklin's own writings.
Why it matters
Stone tools matter first because they unsettle the order of "human" and "technology". If Lomekwi and Nyayanga hold up, the first knappers were not necessarily members of Homo, and technology came before the human. Jane Goodall's observation at Gombe in 1960 of chimpanzees trimming grass stems to fish for termites made the same point from another side, so Franklin's definition was in trouble from the start. The Acheulean handaxe matters for its form: a shape that had to be planned, made in sequence and learned by watching and practice lasted a million years, which implies that the passing-on of skill was already a stable social institution. Stone also distorts the record. Wood, cordage and hide have nearly all perished, so the deep past is written mainly in stone, and the very name "Stone Age" carries that bias of survival; wood and fibre probably mattered far more than the surviving evidence can show.