Acheulean Hand Axes: The Longest-Used Tool in Human History

The Acheulean hand axe is a teardrop-shaped stone tool, worked on both faces, that early humans made for more than 1.5 million years, from about 1.76 million years ago until roughly 130,000 years ago. First appearing in East Africa, it spread across Africa, western and southern Asia and Europe, and was made by several human species. Named after Saint-Acheul in northern France, it is the longest-used tool design in human history and one of the first signs of planned, standardised craftsmanship.

What is a hand axe?

A hand axe, also called a biface, is a stone tool shaped by removing flakes from both faces of a block of stone or a large flake. The result is usually pear-shaped, oval or pointed, with a thinned cutting edge running around much of its outline. Typical examples are about 10 to 20 centimetres long, though some are much larger or smaller.

Hand axes are the signature of the Acheulean industry, which also includes cleavers (bifaces with a broad, straight cutting edge), heavy picks and many ordinary flakes. Archaeologists sometimes call it “Mode 2” technology, following the scheme of the archaeologist Grahame Clark, in contrast to the simpler core-and-flake tools of the Oldowan, or “Mode 1”.

Despite the name, hand axes were not hafted axes. Most were held directly in the hand, and their uses were varied.

Origins in East Africa

The oldest known Acheulean tools come from Kokiselei 4, a site in West Turkana in northern Kenya. In 2011 a team led by Christopher Lepre published dates showing that the hand axes and picks there are about 1.76 million years old. Hand axes from Konso in southern Ethiopia, dated to about 1.75 million years ago, are almost as old, and Acheulean tools appear at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania by about 1.7 million years ago.

The new technology appeared at about the same time as Homo erectus (or Homo ergaster), a species with a larger brain and body than earlier hominins. Most researchers think that Homo erectus invented and spread the Acheulean, although Oldowan-style tools continued to be made alongside it.

A key innovation was the deliberate production of large flakes, often more than 10 centimetres long, struck from big boulders. These flakes were then shaped into hand axes and cleavers. This required the toolmaker to plan several steps ahead and to imagine the final shape inside the raw stone.

Spread across the Old World

From East Africa the Acheulean spread through much of the continent, from South Africa to the Maghreb. Olorgesailie in southern Kenya, excavated by Louis and Mary Leakey from 1942, preserves thousands of hand axes on ancient land surfaces dating to between about 1.2 million and 500,000 years ago.

Outside Africa, Acheulean tools are found at ‘Ubeidiya in the Jordan Valley, Israel, where they date to roughly 1.4 million years ago. At Attirampakkam in southern India, hand axes were dated in 2011 to about 1.5 million years ago, among the oldest outside Africa. At Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel, about 780,000 years old, Acheulean toolmakers left traces of controlled fire, plant foods and fish.

Hand axes reached Europe later. Some of the oldest European examples, from sites in Spain, France and Italy, are about 900,000 to 650,000 years old. After about 500,000 years ago the Acheulean became widespread in western Europe, including Britain.

In East Asia hand axes are rarer. In 1948 the American archaeologist Hallam Movius drew a line, later called the Movius Line, separating the hand-axe regions of Africa, western Asia and Europe from East Asia, where he saw only simpler tools. Later finds in China, such as hand axes from the Bose Basin dated to about 800,000 years ago, have weakened this division, though it remains a real difference in how common hand axes were.

Saint-Acheul and the discovery of deep time

Hand axes played a central role in proving that humans had existed far longer than once believed. In 1797 the English antiquarian John Frere described flint hand axes found with the bones of extinct animals at Hoxne in Suffolk, and suggested in a letter to the Society of Antiquaries that they belonged to a very remote period. His idea attracted little attention at the time.

In the 1830s and 1840s the French customs official Jacques Boucher de Perthes collected hand axes from gravel pits in the Somme valley at Abbeville, together with bones of extinct mammals. He argued that they were the work of humans who lived before the biblical Flood, but most scholars dismissed his claims. Similar finds were made in the gravels of Saint-Acheul, near Amiens.

The breakthrough came in 1859. The geologist Joseph Prestwich and the archaeologist John Evans visited the Somme pits, saw a hand axe in place in undisturbed gravel at Saint-Acheul, and reported to the Royal Society in London that humans had lived alongside extinct animals. In the same year Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. The French prehistorian Gabriel de Mortillet later named the industry “Acheulean” after the site in his classification of the Palaeolithic.

Boxgrove and other key sites

Boxgrove, in an old quarry near Chichester in West Sussex, is one of the best-preserved Acheulean sites in the world. Excavations led by Mark Roberts from the 1980s uncovered an ancient land surface about 500,000 years old, where hominins had knapped flint and butchered large animals such as horse, deer and rhinoceros.

At Boxgrove, archaeologists found scatters of flint flakes lying exactly where they fell as people made hand axes. By refitting the flakes, they could reconstruct individual knapping sessions. A horse shoulder blade with a round hole was interpreted as possible evidence of a spear wound, although this is debated. In 1993 and 1995 the excavators found a human shinbone and two teeth, attributed to Homo heidelbergensis, which are among the oldest human remains in Britain.

Other famous finds include the Swanscombe skull from Kent, found in pieces in 1935, 1936 and 1955 in gravels with Acheulean tools and dated to about 400,000 years ago. At the Sima de los Huesos in Atapuerca, Spain, excavators found in 1998 a single red quartzite hand axe, nicknamed “Excalibur”, among the bones of at least 28 individuals about 430,000 years old.

Making and using hand axes

Making a hand axe was a demanding task. The knapper first had to choose a suitable stone, such as flint, quartzite or lava, and then rough out the shape with a hard hammerstone. Later Acheulean knappers often finished the tool with a “soft hammer” of bone, antler or wood, which removed thinner, flatter flakes and produced a straighter, sharper edge.

Experiments by modern flintknappers show that an experienced worker can make a good hand axe in less than half an hour, but learning to do so takes many hours of practice. Brain-imaging studies of people learning to knap have found that the task involves regions linked to planning and to some aspects of language, which has led some researchers to suggest that toolmaking and language may have evolved together. This remains a hypothesis.

Many later Acheulean hand axes show careful symmetry in both outline and cross-section, beyond what is strictly needed for cutting. A hand axe from West Tofts in Norfolk was shaped around a fossil bivalve shell (Spondylus), left in the centre of one face. Such pieces have prompted debate about whether toolmakers had an aesthetic sense.

The evidence points mainly to butchery. Microscopic wear on hand axes from Boxgrove and other sites matches cutting meat and hide, and cut-marked bones are common at Acheulean sites. Large hand axes are effective for removing meat from big animals, such as horses, rhinoceroses and elephants. Wear on some tools also shows woodworking and cutting plants.

More speculative ideas have also been proposed. In 1999 Marek Kohn and Steven Mithen suggested that well-made hand axes might have advertised the skill and fitness of their makers to potential mates. The suggestion that hand axes were thrown like discuses has little support. Most archaeologists see them as all-purpose cutting tools that could be carried and resharpened.

The makers and the end of the Acheulean

Over its long history, the Acheulean was made by several human species. Homo erectus produced the earliest hand axes in Africa and probably carried the technology to India and the Near East. In Europe and Africa, later hand axes were made by Homo heidelbergensis and related populations. Late Acheulean tools in Europe were made by early Neanderthals, and in Africa the last hand axes may have been made by populations ancestral to, or including, early Homo sapiens.

From roughly 400,000 to 200,000 years ago, toolmakers in Africa and Europe increasingly used prepared-core methods such as the Levallois technique, in which a core is shaped so that a flake of predetermined size and form can be removed. These methods mark the Middle Stone Age in Africa and the Middle Palaeolithic in Europe. Hand axes became rarer, though they persisted in some regions until about 130,000 years ago, and similar bifaces were still made by some Neanderthals afterwards.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 1.76 million years ago: Acheulean hand axes and picks are made at Kokiselei, West Turkana, Kenya.
• c. 1.5 to 1.4 million years ago: The Acheulean appears in India and the Levant.
• c. 780,000 years ago: Acheulean toolmakers use fire at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel.
• c. 500,000 years ago: Hominins knap flint and butcher animals at Boxgrove, England.
• c. 400,000 to 200,000 years ago: Prepared-core technologies gradually replace hand axes.
• 1797: John Frere reports hand axes from Hoxne, Suffolk.
• 1859: Prestwich and Evans confirm the antiquity of the Saint-Acheul and Abbeville finds.
• 2011: The Kokiselei dates push the origin of the Acheulean back to 1.76 million years.

Why it matters

The hand axe is the first human artefact that clearly follows a mental template, a shape planned in advance and reproduced across continents and generations. Its extraordinary stability over more than a million years, and its spread with Homo erectus and its successors, make it the defining technology of the Lower Palaeolithic. Its discovery in the river gravels of Britain and France also helped establish, in 1859, that human history reaches back far into the past.