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From Flint to Steel
The text is taken from the book.
The Antique Weapons blog is a resource for collectors and enthusiasts of antique weapons. It examines the evolution of weapons, from flint to steel, and discusses their history, manufacture, and usage.
Life has been described as short, mean and brutish; and for the earliest form of man-like creature this was undoubtedly true. Man, or quasi-man, almost certainly appeared first in the southern world, and it seems most likely that Africa gave birth to the first of our ancestors. In the beginning there was little to distinguish him from the great apes apart from his method of movement, for early man moved in a more or less erect position which suggests that he lived upon the open plains rather than in the forest.
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Forest creatures made far greater use of their hands and arms to help them move along. Another and far more fundamental feature which soon distinguished man from his close relations, the primates, was his ability to make tools. Many creatures use tools, but they use what is available; man is the only creature to construct a tool for a specific task.
Very early man must undoubtedly have used whatever came to hand but he may well have made a selection and adapted the items best suited for his purpose. Man’s lack of defensive equipment in the way of claws and really sharp teeth made it essential that he should find some other means of cutting and tearing, and one of the earliest materials used was flint. A great part of his time must necessarily have been spent by the banks of rivers, where he would first have noticed the properties of flint.
Amongst the many pieces of flint that had been banged and cracked together by the movement of the water or by tumbling from overhanging crags, early man found some which had a very sharp edge; no doubt he began to seek out these pieces and when he found them, treasured them. These earliest forms of flint tools have been given the name of eoliths, literally ‘dawn stones’, and by no means all were man-made.
Certainly it has been shown that many which were originally described as man made date from a period long before the existence of any form of intelligent man. Some, however, were undoubtedly man made; and it seems reasonable, although perhaps suspect from a strictly archaeological point of view, to assume that somewhere, sometime, some early man reasoned that if these sharp and extremely useful stones could be found in nature perhaps he too could fashion them. Perhaps by accident, perhaps by design he discovered that if he banged one piece of flint with another it split and broke leaving a sharp exposed edge.
Examples of these pebble tools (for they are nothing more than half a pebble) have been found in Africa and may be dated with reasonable certainty as being about half a million years old. Slowly the idea must have germinated, and from this very crude breaking of a pebble the concept of fashioning a more satisfactory tool developed. There grew up slowly—nobody quite knows when—the type of flint known as the biface. In this style the two faces of the piece of flint were carefully hammered and knocked until the final shape was that of a rather thin pear.
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Many have a point as well as a flat, broad, sharp edge, and this form was labelled by paeleantologists as the hand axe; but it would seem certain that their use was far more extensive than mere axes. Points were no doubt used for drilling and scraping, and although we term them hand axes it is quite probable that some were secured into some form of haft to form a true axe. Another discovery made by early man was that if the flint pebbles were- struck, not only was he left with a core which could be shaped into one of the bifaced axes, but also with the pieces which cracked off; these were, in effect, ready-made bifaces with thin knifelike edges of exceptional sharpness.
Sometime around 40,000 years ago, in the land areas adjoining the Mediterranean, a new type of stone tool first appeared. This was a blade-like weapon, reasonably straight, and with a very sharp edge. Blade tools appear in a variety of forms and in many of them one edge has been blunted to give a safe back, so that it could be used without danger of cutting the hand. Some were fashioned with a rear-projecting arm—presumably a tang to be used when fitting a sharpened point of flint to a spear or arrow. These tangs either fitted into a slot on the shaft, or served as an arm which could be bound by thongs to the shaft. More sophisticated tools in the shape of a laurel leaf, beautifully worked to give a sharp all-round edge, were no doubt primitive forms of early daggers.
With the improved quality of flint tools available, early man was able to fashion other materials, and bones left over from his prey were pressed into service. Often a sharpened piece of bone had the end carefully split so that it could be fastened over the tip of a wooden shaft. Here may be seen the beginnings of a light throwing spear or javelin. Even more carefully worked were bones carved with barbed points, made, presumably, for use as harpoons when fishing for’the larger sea or river creatures.