We stand of many shoulders

I was young, still in elementary school and had not a clue which direction my future would take when I was asked “What do want to be when you grow up?” Having just read a book on cultural anthropology (although I think the title was something like Recent Discoveries in Archaeology) and the chapter that grabbed my attention was a discussion on flint knapping in the Stone Age. Without a clue as to what I was doing I decided to try to make a stone spear point, just for fun.

Little did I realize that the period of time between simply knocking two stones together and deliberately pressure pointing a flake was at least 40,000 generations of slow and painful development and all I got for my battering two rocks together was an abused rock and several smashed fingers. My respect for our long lost common ancestors was one of life’s epochal events that lead to my appreciation of history and understanding that we all too often forget the powerful shoulders we today stand upon!

From the Oldwan hand axes of 2.6 million years ago to the sophisticated Achuelean axes of 500,000 years ago reflect a development of the human brain to do strategic planning. The Stone Age hand tool tells us of an ability to see the final object within the lump (or later flake) of stone in the makers hand. This ability to visualize abstract goals reflects the development of the human fore brain (prefrontal cortex) and its capacity to see what you want and the proficiency to verbalize what your mind is seeing. An ability that many anthropologists did not believe our ancestors had.

Several studies have trained students to make Achuelean tools but rarely do the students produce an object that would meet the standards of the original makers of Stone Age tools. It has been surmised that given sufficient time and experience modern man could match the casual efforts of our Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. Modern Neuropathology studies have determined that the mental effort required to visualize and make a stone tool actually alters the physical structure of the brain, which in turn made it easier to do it again and make it better this time.

We owe it to our remote ancestors who started out beating two rocks together for everything that we now know as modern society.

Maybe I shouldn’t have stopped when I smashed my fingers!