The exquisite handaxe, my favorite

Last week I showed you the chopping stone tool, today we move onto the Bi-face or Handaxe.

These are a couple of very nice specimens I picked up close to my house.

They are in various phases of manufacture, two were discarded as failures and never used.

The third was heavily utilized.

This is the flip side of the tools pictured above.

The two with the large lumps circled were discarded because the flaking process was incomplete. The (arrows) flakes from the sides broke away prematurely during manufacture and so the large lump of stone towards the middle could not be removed successfully.

The blue curve in the lower one shows finer chips that broke off after manufacture and indicate the tool was used quite extensively.

A successfully made tool is nice and narrow, the precursor to a blade, the circled area shows once again the finer breakage from heavy use.

The handaxe is the Swiss army knife of the stone age and has a very common oval to egg like shape

The pointed end is narrower and has a finer, blade like profile, used for fine cutting work, the more rounded base is more robust and used for heavier chopping work.

When chopping it is held like below and the damage due to use corresponds exactly.

When cutting with the sharper point, it is held between fingers and thumb, as below and corresponding finer damage can be also be seen there.

These are found throughout the world and were manufactured over a period millions of years, with only little variation over that entire period.

They represent such a useful tool that no major modifications were tried/necessary or there was a technological/intellectual stagnation during this phase of stone implement evolution.

This basic bifacially flaked tool, once developed, survived relatively unchanged up to a few 10's of thousands of years ago.

With time, they did become smaller and more intricate. Beyond a certain time span and intricacy they evolved into other more custom and single purpose tools.