This chert Acheulean handaxe is from Aisne, France, in the Seine River Basin.  Acheulean sites in the Seine Basin date to between ca. 337,000-550,000 years ago.

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This handaxe was collected before World War I by a tourist travelling from England.  Its precise location has been lost, but it was collected in the Aisne department within the upper part of the Seine River Basin.  The Acheulean site of La Celle is in the Seine Basin, south of the Somme, and dates to ca. 450,000-550,000 years ago.  Acheulean artefacts have been found in the Seine Basin at Soucy (ca. 337,000-374,000 years ago) and St Pierre lès Elbeuf (ca. 374,000 years ago).  Many of the hallmarks of Late Acheulean handaxe technology are demonstrated by this well-made medium-sized handaxe, including the symmetrical pear-shaped plan, the taper in cross section from near the base to a thin tip, and the combination of bold shaping flake scars and smaller trimming scars to shape the pointed tip.  The proximal ‘butt’ end of the handaxe is an unflaked original surface of the river-rolled chert cobble.  The cobble was relatively flat and thin prior to shaping.  Cortex extends half-way up both faces of the handaxe, and an unreduced cortical butt was a frequent attribute of handaxes made on cobbles.  The chert was relatively coarse-grained and the flake scars are heavily patinated.

See the annotations for technological details about this stone tool.

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Handaxes are the earliest and longest-used ‘designed’ tool in human history, emerging in the archaeological record in Kenya (Kokiselei) and Ethiopia (Konso) ca. 1.75-1.8 million years ago.  In North Africa, handaxes have been dated at Oued Boucherit in Algeria to 1.7 million years ago, and 1.3 million years ago at the Thomas Quarry site on the outskirts of Casablanca, Morocco.  The earliest handaxes were likely made by Homo erectus, with the later handaxes in North Africa and Europe made by Homo heidelbergensis (also known as Homo rhodesiensis).  Homo heidelbergensis is thought by many palaeoanthropologists to be the most recent common ancestor between modern humans like us and the Neanderthals.  Fossils of Homo heidelbergensis have been found in the Sahara Desert region dating from ca. 600,000-700,000 BP, contemporary with North African Acheulean stone technology.  The Acheulean period is thought to have ended about 170,000 BP, replaced by prepared core technologies, although handaxe manufacture persisted for longer in some regions.

By ca. 600,000-700,000, hominins began expanding out of the Iberian peninsula and crossed the Pyrenees Mountains into the region of modern France.  Famous handaxe sites in France include the type site for the Acheulean, St Acheul, in gravel deposits on the Somme River; Terra Amata, in Nice on the French Riviera; and La Noira, on a tributary of the lower Loire River.  By 500,000 BP, Acheulean hominins were living what is now southern Britain (the English Channel did not exist at this time), most notably at Boxgrove in West Sussex, which preserves the best-preserved Late Acheulean handaxe-making localities so far discovered.  Acheulean handaxe are found widely across the southern UK, including the famous finds at Hoxne, and a large modern sculpture of a handaxe commemorates the artefacts found in the Barnfield Pit near Swanscombe.

Handaxes were discovered by workmen quarrying the river gravels at St Acheul, Amiens, and Abbeville in the 1830s (the workmen called them langues de chat, or ‘cat’s tongues’), and the antiquarian Boucher de Perthes recognised that they were deliberately fashioned tools in 1842.  He was among the first researchers to recognise that humans were alive at the same time as extinct elephants and rhinoceros of the Pleistocene period.  He published his findings in 1847, but his observations were not widely accepted until finally vindicated in 1859 by the geologist Joseph Prestwich and antiquarian John Evans of the British scientific establishment.  This softened the ground for Charles Darwin’s model of evolution in On the Origin of Species in 1859, and, in 1871, his ideas on human evolution in The Descent of Man.