A History of the World in 100 Objects (6 page)

What do you take with you when you travel? Most of us would embark on a long list that begins with a toothbrush and ends with excess baggage. But for most of human history, there was only one thing that you really needed in order to travel – a stone handaxe. A handaxe was the Swiss Army knife of the Stone Age, an essential piece of technology with multiple uses. The pointed end could be used as a drill, while the long blades on either side would cut trees or meat or scrape bark or skins. It looks pretty straightforward, but in fact a handaxe is extremely tricky to make and, for more than a million years, it was literally the cutting edge of technology. It accompanied our ancestors through half of their history, enabling them to spread first across Africa and then across the world.

For a million years the sound of handaxes being made provided the percussion of everyday life. Anyone choosing a hundred objects to tell a history of the world would have to include a handaxe. And what makes this stone axe so interesting is how much it tells us, not just about the hand, but about the mind that made it.

The Olduvai Gorge handaxe doesn’t, of course, look anything like a modern axe – there’s no handle and there’s no metal blade. It is a piece of volcanic rock, a very beautiful grey-green, in the shape of a teardrop. It’s a lot more versatile than a modern straight axe. The stone has been chipped to give sharp edges along the long sides of the teardrop, and a sharp point at one end. When you hold it up against a human hand, you are struck by how closely the two shapes match, although this one is unusually large and is too big for a human hand to hold it comfortably. It has also been very beautifully worked, and you can see the marks of the chipping that have shaped it.

The very earliest tools, like the stone chopper we looked at in
Chapter 2
, strike us as pretty rudimentary. They look like chipped cobbles, and they were made by taking one large piece of stone and striking it with another, chipping off a few bits to make at least one sharp cutting edge. This handaxe is a very different matter. Simply watching a modern knapper at work shows just how many skills the maker of our handaxe must have possessed. Handaxes are not things you knock off: they are the result of experience, of careful planning and of skill, learnt and refined over a long period.

As important for our story as the great manual dexterity needed to make this chopper is the conceptual leap required – to be able to imagine in the rough lump of stone the shape that you want to make, in the way a sculptor today can see the statue waiting inside the block of stone.

This particular piece of supreme hi-tech stone is between 1.2 and 1.4 million years old. Like the chopping tool in
Chapter 2
, it was found in East Africa, at Olduvai Gorge, the great cleft in the savannah in Tanzania. But this comes from a higher geological layer than the chopping tool, which was made hundreds of thousands of years earlier, and there’s a huge leap between those earliest stone tools and this handaxe. It’s here that we find the real beginnings of modern humans. The person who made this we would have recognized as someone like us.

All the carefully focused and planned creativity required to make this axe implies an enormous advance in how our ancestors saw the world and how their brains worked. The handaxe may also contain the evidence of something even more remarkable: this chipped stone tool may hold the secret of speech, and it may have been in making things like this that we learnt how to talk to one another.

Recently, scientists have looked at what happens neurologically when a stone tool is being made. They have used modern hospital scanners to see which bits of the brain are activated as knappers work their stone. Surprisingly, the areas of the modern brain that you use when you’re making a handaxe overlap considerably with those you use when you speak. It now seems very likely that if you can shape a stone you can shape a sentence.

Of course, we have no idea what the maker of our handaxe might have said, but it seems probable that he or she would have had roughly the language abilities of a seven-year-old child. Whatever the level, this early speech would clearly have been the beginnings of a quite new capacity for communication – and that would have meant that people could sit down to exchange ideas, plan their work together or even just gossip. If they could make a decent handaxe like this one, and transmit the complex skills involved in the process, it is possible that they were well on the way to something we would all recognize as society.

So, 1.2 million years ago we could make tools, like our handaxe, that helped us control our environment and transform it – the handaxe gave us better food as well as the ability to skin animals for clothing and strip branches for fire or shelter. Not only this: we could now talk to each other and we could imagine something that wasn’t physically in front of us. What next? The handaxe was about to accompany us on a huge journey; because with all these skills, we were no longer tied to our immediate environment. If we needed to – even if we just wanted to – we could move. Travel became possible, and we could move beyond the warm savannahs of Africa and survive, perhaps even flourish, in a colder climate. The handaxe became our ticket to the rest of the world, and in the study collections of the British Museum you can find handaxes from all over Africa – Nigeria, South Africa, Libya – but also from Israel and India, Spain and Korea … even from a gravel pit near Heathrow Airport.

As they moved north out of Africa, some of these early handaxe-makers became the first Britons. The archaelogist and British Museum curator Nick Ashton elaborates:

At Happisburgh, in Norfolk, we have these thirty foot cliffs, composed of clays and silts and sands, and these were laid down by massive glaciation around 450,000 years ago. But it’s beneath these clays that a local was walking his dog and found a hand axe embedded in these organic sediments. These tools were first being made in Africa 1.6 million years ago, arrived in southern Europe and parts of Asia just under a million years ago. Of course the coast then would’ve been several miles further out. And if you’d walked along that ancient coastline, you would have arrived in what nowadays we call the Netherlands, in the heart of Central Europe. At this time there was a major land bridge connecting Britain to mainland Europe. We don’t really know why humans colonized Britain at this time, but perhaps it was due to the effectiveness of this new technology that we call the hand axe.

Around 50,000 years ago something dramatic seems to have happened to the human brain. Across the world, humans started to create patterns that decorate and intrigue, to make jewellery to adorn the body, and to produce representations of the animals that shared their world. They were making objects that were less about physically changing the world than about exploring the order and the patterns that can be seen in it. In short, they were making art. The two reindeer represented on this piece of bone form the oldest artwork in any British gallery or museum. It was made during the end of the latest Ice Age, around 13,000 years ago. It is alarmingly delicate: we keep it in a climate-controlled case and hardly ever move it, because with any sudden shock it could just crumble to dust. It’s a sculpture about 20 centimetres (8 inches) long, carved from the tusk of a mammoth – evidently from towards the end of the tusk, because it’s slim and slightly curved. It was made by one of our ancestors who wanted to show his own world to himself, and in doing so he relayed that world with astonishing immediacy to us. It is a masterpiece of Ice Age art, and it’s also evidence of a huge change in the way in which the human brain was working.

The stone tools we looked at previously raised the question of whether it is making things that makes us human. Could you conceive of being human without using objects to negotiate the world? I don’t think I can. But there’s another question that follows quite quickly once you start looking at these very ancient things. Why do all modern humans share the compulsion to make works of art? Why does man the tool-maker everywhere turn into man the artist?

The two reindeer in this artwork swim closely, one behind the other, and in positioning them the sculptor has brilliantly exploited the tapering shape of the mammoth tusk. The smaller, female reindeer is in front with the very end of the tusk forming the tip of her nose; and behind her, in the fuller body of the tusk, comes the larger male. Because of the ivory’s curve, both animals are shown with their chins up and their antlers tipped back, exactly as they would be when swimming, and along the undersides their legs are at full stretch, giving a marvellous impression of streamlined movement. It’s a superbly observed piece – and it can only have been made by somebody who has spent a long time watching reindeer swimming across rivers.

So it’s surely not merely through chance that it was found beside a river, in a rock shelter at Montastruc in France. This carving is a beautifully realistic representation of the reindeer which, 13,000 years ago, were roaming in great herds across Europe. The continent at this time was far colder than it is today; most of the landscape consisted of open, treeless plain, rather like the landscape of present-day Siberia. For human hunter-gatherers in this unforgiving terrain, reindeer were one of the most important means of survival. Their meat, skin, bones and antlers could supply pretty well all the food and clothing they needed, as well as the raw materials for tools and weapons. As long as they could hunt reindeer they would survive, and survive comfortably. So it’s not surprising that our artist knew the animals very well, and that he chose to make an image of them.

The larger, male reindeer displays an impressive set of antlers, which run along almost the whole length of his back, and we can sex him quite confidently, as the artist has carved his genitals under his belly. The female has smaller antlers and four little bumps on her underside that look just like teats. But we can be even more specific than this: we’re clearly looking at these animals in the autumn, at the time of rutting and the migration to winter pastures. Only in the autumn do both male and female have full sets of antlers and coats in such wonderful condition. On the female’s chest the ribs and the sternum have been beautifully carved. This object was clearly made not just with the knowledge of a hunter but also with the insight of a butcher, someone who had not only looked at his animals, but had cut them up.

Mammoth carved from a reindeer antler about 12,500 years ago

We know that this detailed naturalism was only one of the styles that Ice Age artists had at their disposal. In the British Museum there is another sculpture found in that same cave at Montastruc. By a happy symmetry, that may not be coincidence: where our reindeer are carved on mammoth tusk, the other sculpture is of a mammoth carved on a reindeer antler. But the mammoth, although instantly recognizable, is drawn in a quite different way – simplified and schematized, somewhere between a caricature and an abstraction. This pairing is no one-off accident: Ice Age artists display a whole range of styles and techniques – abstract, naturalistic, even surreal – as well as using perspective and sophisticated composition. These are modern humans with modern human minds, just like our own. They still live by hunting and gathering, but they are interpreting their world through art. Professor Steven Mithen, of the University of Reading, characterizes the change:

Something happened in the human brain, between say 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, that allowed this fantastic creativity, imagination, artistic ability, to emerge – it was probably that different parts of the brain became connected in a new way, and so could combine different ways of thinking, including what people know about nature and what they know about making things. This gave them a new capacity to produce pieces of art. But Ice Age conditions were critical as well: it was a very challenging time for people living in harsh, long winters – the need to build up really intense social bonds, the need for ritual, the need for religion, all these related to this flowering of creative art at the time. Part of the art is an overwhelming sense of delight and appreciation and celebration of the natural world.