Two quartzite hand axes

[DavidD]

Homo erectus (or late Homo Heidelbergensis)
Niger

[clovisoid]

Cool examples. It's amazing how large some of those are.

[DavidD]

Yes, and how many there are scattered around in Africa.
Apparently they were the height of technology for a million and a half years.

[clovisoid]

Yup, I went to a small museum in Kenya (near the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania) and they had piles of hand axes/cores from the surrounding area that teams found on surveys while looking for fossil remains on the deflated/eroded surfaces. There had to be thousands of them piled up.

Even if the population was very small, the number of tools that can accumulate over a million years is incredible. A stable population of 100 people using 10 tools per person per year for a million years is a billion tools. (And the population capacity of what is now Kenya had to be more than 100 people.)

[redrocks]

Cool tools

[antmike915]

Very cool 😎