Throughout most of Asia the men of the Old Stone Age developed a very
different core industry from that of Europe. Instead of the hand ax
(_coup-de-poing_), they made an implement now called a chopping tool.
This was a large and somewhat flat pebble with a sharpened edge made by
striking off flakes alternately from either side. They had also large,
crude scrapers, flaked on a single side, which are now called choppers.
Only in India and the Near East did the hand ax seem to flourish as in
western Europe and much of Africa. In the border area of the Upper
Punjab, Helmut de Terra found both hand axes and chopping tools in the
early Soan culture, which seems to lie in the Second Interglacial. In
upper Burma the hand ax disappears, leaving the field to the chopping
tool and the chopper. The same seems true of Java and northern
China.[14] Here there are flake artifacts, but they were not chipped by
European methods. On the whole, the tools of the Asiatic complex look
much more like the choppers and scrapers found at very early sites such
as Lake Mohave, southeastern Arizona (Cochise), Sonora, Lower
California, and the Valley of Mexico.
[Illustration: _A chopping tool of the early Soan culture, in
northwestern India. (After Paterson, 1942.)_]
Yet—another puzzle—hand axes have been found in central and southern
Texas, and in Renaud’s Black’s Fork culture of Wyoming, without traces
of Folsom or Eden. Can these hand axes, like the Aurignacian and
Magdalenian traits of which Nelson and Harrington write, represent an
earlier migration than Sandia and Folsom? This is most problematical.
Spinden’s Neolithic Blockade
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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