TIME ABOUT A million and a half years ago, some fotten genius of the hominidworld did an ued thing. He (or very possibly she) took oone and carefully used itto shape ahe result was a simple teardrop-shaped hand axe, but it was the world』sfirst piece of advaeology.
It was so superior to existing tools that soon others were following the ior』s lead andmaking hand axes of their owually whole societies existed that seemed to do littleelse. 「They made them ihousands,」 says Ian Tattersall. 「There are some places inAfrica where you literally 』t move without stepping on them. It』s strange because they arequite intensive objects to make. It was as if they made them for the sheer pleasure of it.」
From a shelf in his sunny workroom Tattersall took down an enormous cast, perhaps a footand a half long a inches wide at its widest point, and ha to me. It was shapedlike a spearhead, but ohe size of a stepping-stone. As a fiberglass cast it weighed only afew ounces, but the inal, which was found in Tanzania, weighed twenty-five pounds. 「Itwas pletely useless as a tool,」 Tattersall said. 「It would have taken two people to lift itadequately, and eve would have been exhausting to try to pound anything with it.」
「What was it used for then?」
Tattersall gave a genial shrug, pleased at the mystery of it. 「No idea. It must have had somesymbolic importance, but we only guess what.」
The axes became known as Acheulean tools, after St. Acheul, a suburb of Amiens innorthern France, where the first examples were found in the eenth tury, and trastwith the older, simpler tools known as Oldowan, inally found at Olduvai Ge inTanzania. In older textbooks, Oldowan tools are usually shown as blunt, rounded, hand-sizedstones. In fact, paleoanthropologists now tend to believe that the tool part of Oldowan rockswere the pieces flaked off these larger stones, which could then be used for cutting.
Now here』s the mystery. When early modern humans—the ones who would eventuallybee us—started to move out of Afriething over a huhousand years ago,Acheulean tools were the teology of choice. These early Homo sapiens loved theirAcheulean tools, too. They carried them vast distances. Sometimes they even took unshapedrocks with them to make into tools later on. They were, in a word, devoted to the teology.
But although Acheulean tools have been found throughout Africa, Europe, aern aral Asia, they have almost never been found in the Far East. This is deeply puzzling.
In the 1940s a Harvard paleontologist named Hallum Movius drew something called theMovius line, dividing the side with Acheulean tools from the ohout. The line runs in asoutheasterly dire across Europe and the Middle East to the viity of modern-dayCalcutta and Bangladesh. Beyond the Movius line, across the whole of southeast Asia andinto a, only the older, simpler Oldowan tools have been found. We know that Homosapie far beyond this point, so why would they carry an advanced and treasured stoeology to the edge of the Far East and then just abandon it?
「That troubled me for a long time,」 recalls Alan Thorne of the Australian NationalUy in berra. 「The whole of modern anthropology was built round the idea thathumans came out of Afri two waves—a first wave of Homo erectus, which became JavaMan and Peking Man and the like, and a later, more advanced wave of Homo sapiens, whichdisplaced the first lot. Yet to accept that you must believe thatHomo sapiens got so far withtheir