3D Models of Handaxes - Museum of Stone Tools

Handaxes

Handaxes are the iconic tool associated with our hominin ancestors. They are flaked bifacially—on two faces—with a sharp, knife-like edge between them.

Handaxes are relatively large, oval- or teardrop-shaped tools, and the elegance and simplicity of the best-made examples has intrigued archaeologists and artists alike. The British Museum’s History of the World in 100 Objects begins with a homage to a bifacial handaxe.

Handaxes were made by our early hominin ancestors from about 1.75 million years ago. Homo erectus made vast numbers of handaxes prior to going extinct ca. 108,000 years ago, but other archaic hominins made them too, including Neanderthals. Our own species—Homo sapiens—made handaxes during our early evolution in Africa, and in parts of North America and Australia handaxes were made and used in the recent past. Handaxes served as heavy cutting tools that could be held in the hand, and the flakes struck from them could serve as knives or scraping tools.

A handaxe was found by John Frere in association with extinct animals in 1797, helping lay the groundwork for the revolutionary idea that human history was an exceptionally long one. Early prehistorians were obsessed with handaxes, and the earliest documented attempts at flintknapping replication were to make handaxe forgeries to dupe 19^th century antiquarian collectors. During some 200 years of detailed fieldwork and research, archaeologists devised modern handaxe classifications that accomodate all shapes and sizes of these tools.

Handaxes are common on early hominin sites in Africa, Europe, and parts of West Asia, but are rare in East Asia. The ‘Movius Line’ separates these regions, and some archaeologists argue that the difference in handaxe abundance reflects a genuine difference in abilities between the hominin populations on either side of the line. Others suggest that the Movius Line reflects racist tropes common at the time it was proposed in the 1940s, and that subsequent research is skewed, causing it to persist.

Famous handaxe sites include Olorgesaille in Kenya, where huge numbers of handaxes have been found, and Boxgrove in the UK, where finely-crafted flint handaxes were recovered alongside the flakes removed to make them. A red quartzite handaxe found with Homo heidelbergensis bones at Atapuerca in Spain has been named ‘Excalibur’ after the Arthurian legend, and is said to be a ritual funeral offering.

The bifacial flaking necessary to make handaxes, and the recurring teardrop shape seen on many of them, suggest to many archaeologists that their emergence in the archaeological record reflects an important breakthrough in our ancestors’ cognitive abilities. Some archaeologists even argue that handaxes served an aesthetic or social role rather than a functional one, and their symmetry reflected an understanding of the ‘golden ratio’. Other researchers argue that the flintknapping skills to make handaxes were driven by sexual selection, much like a male bird’s brightly-coloured feathers—the so-called ‘sexy handaxe theory’. However, stone-flaking experiments have shown that simple, unguided stone-flaking will produce simple handaxes, compromising the assumptions of these more elaborate explanations.

In making a sophisticated bifacial tool like a knife or dagger, the stone typically passes through an early stage where it resembles a handaxe. These are ‘early stage bifaces’, which were then refined and thinned with further flaking. Given this, there is a danger that handaxes found in undated contexts were not made by early human ancestors, but are in fact discarded early stage bifaces from making other tools, much later in prehistory.