The story of flintknapping is one which is two and a half million years in the telling. Homo habilis is the best candidate for the earliest flintknapper. H. habilis was knocking flakes off of stones too make sharp cutting tools in Africa 2.5 million years ago! Opinion on what they were doing next is split three ways. One camp believes that the flakes were the tools, another says "No, the cores are the tools", and the third think that the first two camps should get together and admit that both flakes and cores were probably used for different tasks. These early tools belong to the Oldowan Tradition, and are named for the Olduvai Gorge where the Leakeys did so much of their work.

The next big advance in stone working came with Homo erectus. These clever folks were around about a million years after H. habilis broke the first rocks. In Europe they were making the famous Acheulian Hand-axes - those multipurpose teardrop shaped tools. These babies were made on standardized flakes using bifacial flaking! That means that smaller flakes were removed from both faces of the tool, in a way that creates a lens shaped piece. Unifacial flake removal, on the other hand remove flakes from only one surface, which will make a half moon shaped cross section. Using this technology H. erectus was able to craft a cutting edge unlike any the world had ever seen before. They dice, they slice, puree and chop, you can lob them, dig with them and bludgeon your neighbor with them! The Swiss Army knife of the Paleolithic. (Paleolithic comes from the Greek words for "old" and "stone", so paleolithic simply means Old Stone. There is a tendancy for scientists to use words from classical languages so that they sound impressive and confuse the public into thinking they are talking about something hopelessly complex and therefore very important.*) Anyhow, back to H. erectus, these people spread out of Africa into the Middle East and from there into Europe, India and Southeastern Asia. Their peculiar hand-axes, however, do not show up very often in Asia. In fact the choppers and chopping tools found in the neighborhood of China were so crude looking that some people thought that the H. erectus living in the area were particularily backward. In fact, these crude stone tools were probably used to create a sophisticated organic technology based on wood, fiber and bamboo tools, which do not preserve very easily in the Archaeological record. Homo erectus were also the first people who we know of who were using fire. Thanks guys!

Not to be outdone by our Homo erectus ancestors the Neandertals made some significant contributions to stone working. H. erectus were in the habit of knocking flakes off of cores and then working that flake into a tool. The neandertals got it into their head to try it the other way around, the prepared the core and then knocked a finished tool off in one blow. Think of it like this, if an apple is analogous to a core, then H. erectus would cut the apple into quarters and then peel each quarter individually, whereas a neandertal would peel the apple first and then cut it up. This process of preparing cores is called the Levallois technique by archaeologists. It is diagnostic of the Mousterian Period, which is the chunk of time when Neandertals were the most popular people on the planet (ca 200,000 - 30,000 years ago) Other items in the Mousterian toolkit were scrapers, denticulates (tools with teeth like saws), and projectile points (spear points).

Around 40,000 years ago (or so) things started changing - Big Time. Most of the Neandertals were gone and anatomically modern Homo sapiens (us) came on the scene in a big way. There is a lot of debate over how old Homo sapiens are and how they were related to Neandertals. But this is way beyond the scope of this flintknapping page. So, how did stone technology change? Well, for starters blades were introduced. A blade is a flake which is more than two times as long as it is wide and which comes off of a specially prepared core. The great thing about blades is that they can make a little bit of stone go a long way. If you start with a core the size of your fist you might be able to produce one small Acheulian Hand axe. The same core might produce a half dozen Levallois flakes, but depending on the size of the blades, H. sapiens could produce scores, if not hundreds of blades!

Try this Link to learn more about the Prehistory of Flintknapping.

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