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Lecture 02: Early technology

Most Stone Age societies were not literate, and the literate ones did not leave us
technical manuals, so for early technology we have to rely on archaeology. This
has a number of problems.
We talk about the “Stone Age” but of course people didn't make everything of
stone. Clothing and tents were woven from plant fibers or sewn together from
leather. Sinews were used for a strong cord. Bones or wood were used wherever
strength and stiffness were needed at a lighter weight than stone. An arrow
illustrates the typical ratio; a shaft of wood, feathers, and a stone arrowhead all
tied together with sinews. All of those components except the stone arrowhead
rot away quickly, so all that remains now is the arrowhead. We call it the Stone
Age not because stone was the principal technology but because stone artefacts
are all that remain.
Another problem is that digging up an artefact only tells us that the artefact was
in use at a certain time. It does not tell us how much earlier it was invented.
Hence the information we have is always provisional; it is constantly being
updated by new discoveries.
It is easy to over-interpret archaeological evidence. We can often see that there
was some change in how things are done but that doesn't tell us why the change
occurred. However as historians we want to understand the causes, the why-it-
happened.

Specific technologies
Technology Age
hunting and gathering 3.5 Gyear (dawn of life)
stone tools 2.5 Myear
fire > 800 Kyear < 1.5 Myear
cave dwelling > 800 Kyear
clothing > 20Kyear < 220 Kyear
farming/agriculture 10 Kyear
Hunting and gathering have been done by all forms of life since life began.
[Humans have invented particular tools for these jobs. However unless the tools
incorporated stone we have no record of them. For instance we have arrow
heads but nothing else from the bow or arrow. But you don't need a stone
arrowhead, you can use sharpened wood or bone. Hence we cannot specify a
date for bow and arrow. The same is true for other hunting and gathering tools.]
Fire is a difficult one because fires occur naturally due to lightening,
spontaneous combustion, and volcanoes. The difficult part is proving that a
particular fire was made by human beings (anthropogenic). However
occasionally we find the remains of a fire deep inside a cave. Such a fire has to
be artificial. The 800 Kyear-old fire is one such. However archaeologists suspect
that fire use is much older, perhaps 1.5 Myear. The same fire proves that humans
dwelt in caves at least 800 Kyears ago, but cave-dwelling is also probably much
older.
Farming leaves much evidence. Farming is the most ecologically destructive of
all human activities; it amounts to deliberately replacing the natural ecosystem
with a different one. In the archaeological record, besides ditches (for draining
wet fields) and other such indications of farming, we can also find pollen that
tells us which plant species were present in the vicinity. This reveals farming by
the change in species. Often crop plants are from locations far away and never
grew naturally in the area.
An important point to observe about many of these dates is that they precede our
own species. Homo sapiens is only 200 to 300 Kyears old. We did not invent
stone tools nor were we the first to domesticate fire. The story of human ancestry
changes rapidly these days due to advances in DNA sequencing. It may be we got
these technologies from Homo habilis, but even if we did they were invented by
an even earlier hominin species (australopithecus?). In any case we did not
invent stone tools or domesticate fire; due to the great age of the archaeological
remains we know that we inherited these technologies from some earlier species.

Effects on us of ancient technology

Our species did not just use technology, we have been physically and mentally
affected by it.
Hunting technology (spear, club, bow and arrow) equipped us not only to hunt
animals but to hunt each other.
Stone tools allow us to function with reduced strength compared to apes or even
nearer relatives such as Neandertals. We don't have to rip branches off of trees,
we cut them off with axes instead. Food choppers have helped to eliminate the
need for strong jaw muscles attached to a brow ridge. (This in turn makes it
possible for a baby's skull to be flexible, which makes the birth of babies with
bigger brains possible.)
Food choppers and other food-preparation tools like grinders have broadened the
range of food that we can eat.
Stones also function as weapons when thrown. This is an important advantage
when dealing with large animals like mastodons.
The use of fire allows us to cook food. This in turn means we don't have to eat as
much (cooked food has more net calories than raw food). This also contributed to
eliminating brow ridges, which are prominent in other primates.
Fire supplements our food intake. When we eat raw food we have to spend
energy breaking down large organic molecules into smaller ones. Cooking food
performs some of that breaking down using energy from the fire. It is as though
we were eating wood.
The use of fire allowed us to dispense with body hair (although this might also
have been caused by a lifestyle that involved swimming). Even as we dispersed
out of Africa to colder climates fire kept us warm.
Fire also defended us from animals at night because most animals are afraid of
fire. This is one of the reasons we don't need to be equipped with the claws and
fangs that other species have. Constant exposure to fire has also caused us to
evolve resistance to dioxins and furans which are present in wood smoke. We
have 100 to 1000 times the resistance of other species. Indeed we have become
so inured to the toxic industrial waste called wood smoke that we voluntarily
flavour some foods with it. And it preserves the food because it makes the food
poisonous to everything else but us, hence killing rot bacteria. This resistance is
a result of our ancestor species using fire – we are the result of their technology
shaping evolution.
Caves and other shelters allowed us to dispense with most of our body hair. This
has a surprising side effect: it helps us to out-walk other species. It turns out that
what feels like muscle fatigue is actually overheating. Eliminating most body hair
helps us to stay cooler when walking, so we can keep walking longer. As a result
human beings can hunt other species merely by out-walking them. Eventually the
prey cannot move any more but the human being can still walk. (This kind of
hunting is still done today.)
Another adaptation that helps us walk long distances is the way our Achilles
tendons are attached to our heels. This causes the Achilles tendon to stretch
elastically with each step, storing and releasing energy during a step. This
adaptation is unique to Homo sapiens.
Clothing allowed us to leave Africa, where we originated, and with the help of
fire move into cooler climates. The great thing about clothing is you can take it
off or put on just as much as you need, unlike fur which you are stuck with.

Stone tools
Stone tool making has been passed down to us all the way to the present. In
1911 anthropologists at Berkeley located an elderly Yana Indian named Ishi who
had learned to make stone tools from his father. Stone tools where already
obsolete when he learned to make them, but they have the advantage that in a
pinch you can always make them, so his father insisted he learn. The university
moved him into a house on campus and he taught anthropology students how to
make stone tools. So the making of stone tools is not reinvented, it has been
passed down unbroken since pre-human times, for 2.5 million years.
There are number of common ways to fabricate stone tools from hard stone.
They are listed below in order of ascending skill.

Pulverizing
When you bang on many types of rock with another rock a small area where they
contact is reduced to powder. If you keep banging them together you can
eventually remove significant amounts of rock. This a very tedious way to shape
a rock but it requires little skill. Also it works with the majority of stones.

Fire flaking
Heat up a piece of rock so it is hot througout, then use a straw to drop individual
drops of water onto it. Where the water contacts it a small “pot lid” shaped piece
breaks off. This is the lowest-skilled way to flake but it is slow. Only works with
flakeable stones (like flint).

Pressure Flaking
This method (illustrated at left) is used to shape hard but flakeable stones. Apply
pressure on a sharp point at the right angle so a controlled flake breaks off. You
have to know just where to apply pressure so some skill is needed. [The
illustration shows a wooden tool but bone was also used.]

Percussion Flaking
Hit a stone with another stone at just the right place and angle to break off a
controlled flake. This method is fast but requires a great deal of skill.
In addition one can cut a soft stone (like soapstone and chalk) with a harder
stone (like flint). However this only produces relatively soft objects so it is not
generally useful for making tools. Instead it is used to make end products like oil
lamps, cups, and bowls. Metals can be used to cut harder stone but that is
another story.
Below is a picture1 of a food chopper (probably the most common stone tool that
we find). These show how a sharp edge could be made by flaking. Like broken
glass, intercepting surfaces of flaked flint make a very sharp cutting edge.
However it is not as tough an edge as we are used to from our metal knives, so
the tool had to be replaced or resharpened frequently.

Below is a flint axe. Notice that there is no handle on it, just as there was no
handle on the chopper. In the stone age it was very difficult to attach handles to
tools. It was normal to start with or create a piece that would fit in the palm of
the hand to take the place of a handle. By the way, this is an excellent piece of
photography; it is very difficult to show the facets of shaped stone in a
photograph.2 That's why archaeological teams routinely include an artist to draw
1 Image by José-Manuel Benito Álvarez. These images are licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License. In short: you are free to share and make
derivative works of the images under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and
that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one. For more information see:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/.
2 UKRI,
pictures like the previous illustration. [Not the same image as shown in the
video.]

https://ahrc.ukri.org/research/readwatchlisten/imagegallery/2014galleries/imageobjecttext/ne
olithic-flint-axe/
Finally, a flint arrowhead3 is shown below. This one is actually from present-day
Greece but from the island of Crete. It is from a pre-Greek culture, possibly
Minoan. [Not the same image as shown in the video.]

Metals in the stone age

You mustn't think that there were no metals available during the stone age.
There were always some metals available. Unfortunately they were mostly either
unsuitable for industrial use, very rare, or both.

Gold
Under Earthly conditions gold is never an ore. It is always found as pure metal.
Unfortunately it is also very rare, and unless alloyed with another metal it is so
soft that it could only be used for jewelry.

Silver
Silver is usually an ore (sulfide or oxide) but it also occurs sometimes as nodes of
pure metal. It is neither as rare nor as soft as gold but was still soft enough and
rare enough that it was only used for jewelry. In addition an alloy of gold and
silver called “electrum” occurs naturally but it has the same problems.

3 The Metropolitan Museum of Art,

https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/254552/532567/main-image
Lead
Lead is always a compound but is easy to refine. When buried it oxidizes and
eventually disappears into the soil, so not much is known about the use of lead in
the stone age. Nevertheless every society that later used metals had a tradition
of using lead so it must have overlapped with the stone age. Lead gets less
attention than other metals just because it is not hard enough to make a good
tool or weapon.

Copper
Copper is usually a compound but it occurs sometimes as nodes of pure metal. It
is hard enough to cut stone when work-hardened (i.e. it gets harder as you
hammer it). It is much more common than silver or gold. Hence it could be used
for stone-cutting tools even by stone-age civilizations, and many did. Such a
civilization is called “chalcolithic”, which just means copper-stone. In Europe the
chalcolithic period is though to have lasted 1500 or perhaps 2000 years.

Iron
Iron sometimes falls to Earth as iron meteorites. Meteoric iron has nickel in it so
it is a nice stainless steel which is both hard and tough. However it is so rare
that it was unknown to most people. Legends of magic swords that could cut
through everything and magic armour that could protect against any sword
probably reflect folk perceptions of iron swords and iron armour.